[dragonwriter]

> Not sure if it's an artifact of the kind of people who have taken the survey so far, a statement about how people want to be perceived in our culture, or a bit of both.

It could also be that the (loose, intuitively approximated) mode on some level of granularity (the individual category perceived as most commonly seen) rather than the median is going to frequently be the intuitive yardstick for “average”, rather than median (mean of a ordinal categorical trait with no unique obvious reduction to an interval-level measure has no coherent definition, so its not really a candidate average.)

[amalcon]

Yeah, this one is pretty easily explained as a statistical artifact in this way. The more religious someone is, the more time they are likely to spend around other religious people (at church, with friends met via church, various knock on effects of these things). As you become more religious, this effect will tend to increase your estimate of the population's average religiosity.

This also explains a number of political effects, especially once you start looking for it in other high time commitment social activities.