Excluding expats from voting process is wrong. We’re global citizens: Loat and McArthur

I still don’t see how long-term expatriates, whatever their substantial contribution to Canada, are connected enough to the day-to-day issues that our elections are about. Self-interest – nothing wrong with that – leads them to pursue opportunities abroad.

Here’s Why Some People Are More Religious Than Others

Interesting insights on thinking types in general (intuitive vs deliberative) and religious tendencies:

David Rand, who leads Yale University’s Human Cooperation Laboratory and studies decision-making, was one of the first to suggest that intuition and deliberation were key to a person’s religiosity in a paper he co-wrote in 2011.

In the paper, Rand and his colleagues used the Cognitive Reflection Test, which measured a person’s levels of intuition or deliberation by how they answered questions. Intuitive answers were compelling but often not correct. (For example, in the riddle of whether a pound of feathers or a pound of bricks is heavier, the intuitive person might see the weight disconnect between bricks and feathers, hone in on it immediately and answer that the bricks are heavier. The deliberative person might step back, consider the question, notice that both options are measured at a pound and deliver the correct answer: neither.)

People who gave more intuitive answer were found to have a stronger belief in God.

“Certain intuitive processes tend to lead one to believe in God,” Rand says. “Some people have an intuitive tendency to attribute intention to the world around them: that somebody intended something to happen to you.” A deliberative person, on the other hand, might interpret something that has happened to them as a result of a series of events, or they may simply believe that there is no explanation.

He wasn’t alone in his findings. Gordon Pennycook, who is completing his PhD at the University of Waterloo, also co-wrote a paper that came to the same conclusion. Pennycook found that while being more educated was correlated to being more atheistic, more important was whether they thought deliberatively or intuitively.

“Education can play a role in that education can train you to think more analytically,” Pennycook says. “But it’s not about knowledge per se. It’s more about what type of critical thinking you’re prone to do.”

Measuring religiosity, however, can be problematic. Both Rand’s and Pennycook’s experiments relied on simple yes or no answers to the question “Are you religious?”—making it nearly impossible for agnostics or culturally religious people to accurately answer that question. And it’s still unclear what makes a person more intuitive or deliberative. Religious upbringing may not tell the entire story, Rand’s findings suggest. “We found that being raised a believer is not correlated with how religious your family was growing up,” he says.

Regardless of the mechanism behind how we make decisions, we likely use both tactics, Rand says. “People exist on a spectrum,” he says. “There’s no optimum place, per se, on that spectrum, but being on the extremes might not be good. If you’re too intuitive, you get things wrong a lot. If you’re too deliberative, you’re not efficient in using your rules of thumb.”

Source: Here’s Why Some People Are More Religious Than Others | TIME