Monday, December 17, 2018

Data: Cleanliness is next to godliness, or the irreligious are slobs

In the last post, I accidentally discovered that people with no religion have the dirtiest homes of all religious statuses.  Let's look at this a little more. Below you will see mean dirtiness scores by church attendance. I'll limit the analysis to whites -- blacks show no trend:

Mean dirtiness score

Never attends  2.11
< one per year  2.04
Once per year  1.87
Several times per year  1.85
Once a month  1.91
2-3 times a month  1.85
Nearly every week  1.77
Every week  1.64
More than weekly 1.72

You can see here a tendency for more religious people to keep a cleaner home. This is consistent with my earlier point that religious individuals tend to be more conscientious or self-disciplined.  Lazy people, even if they believers, may want to stay in bed on a cold Sunday morning. Keep in mind that the gaps are not big here: If we focus on the largest difference, never attenders vs. weeklies, the gap is close to one-half of a standard deviation --  a moderate difference.

UPDATE: I just a quick look at dirtiness scores by political orientation. The pattern is very similar to that for religiosity: extremely conservative people are about half a standard deviation cleaner than extreme liberals.

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