Inductivist

 
*significantly more than fundamentalists
 
White Add Health respondents (sample size = 3,489) were asked, "Do you agree or disagree that the sacred scriptures of your religion are the word of God and are completely without any mistakes?"  The above table shows the percentages who have committed a specific crime at least once in the past 12 months. "Fund" is short for fundamentalist.
 
You can see a tendency of fundamentalist teenagers to be more law-abiding than youths who don't believe scripture is inerrant.  Keep in mind that fundamentalists have the disadvantages of lower average IQs and socioeconomic status. They are not less violent, just less prone to commit property crime. Perhaps conservative religious people are the same as others on attitudes toward violence, but are more respectful of property.

 
 
These numbers, based on Add Health data, show that Mormons tend to be less delinquent than teens with no religion. Most differences are not statistically significant because the sample includes only 79 Mormons.

Using the more appropriate Gamma statistic, I recalculated the relationships displayed in the last post between IQ and 15 types of delinquency. Gamma is similar to Pearson--it ranges from -1.00 to +1.00.

Gamma measure of association

Graffiti -.02
Vandalism .10
Lied to parents .08
Shoplift .03
Serious fight -.14
Seriously injured someone -.10
Ran away from home -.07
Stole a car -.01
Stole something > $50 -.01
Burglarized a building -.04
Used or threatened with weapon -.10
Sold drugs .10
Stole something < $50 .08
Group fight -.16
Rowdy in public .08

The associations are perhaps a bit sharper, but the only consistent negative relationship is between IQ and types of violence. The link is weak, however.

In this new study in the journal Intelligence, the authors find that low-IQ U.S. counties have higher crime rates. Macrolevel studies evidently show stronger correlations than microlevel studies. Maybe this is due to reduced measurement error. Also--official statistics capture much more serious behavior. Self-report data is swamped with minor misbehaviors, which smart kids are frequently guilty of. Keep in mind, too, that my analysis is of whites only. Including all races might strengthen the correlations.

To HBD folks, the idea that low IQ explains criminality is attractive since intelligence is important in many areas of life, and racial rankings on IQ match those of crime involvement. 

Using Add Health data, I calculated the Pearson correlation coefficients between a measure of IQ (a vocabulary test) and frequency of 15 different delinquent behaviors. Here are the results (sample size = 4,082, whites only):

Correlations

Graffiti -.01
Vandalism .06
Lied to parents .09
Shoplift .04
Serious fight -.11
Seriously injured someone -.06
Ran away from home -.03
Stole a car -.01
Stole something > $50 -.01 
Burglarized a building -.01
Used or threatened with weapon -.03
Sold drugs .04
Stole something < $50 .07
Group fight -.10
Rowdy in public .08

These correlations offer little support for the view that low intelligence is a major cause of crime.  Most of the measures of delinquency are very skewed (which is a problem I will try to look at later) but the correlations aren't consistently negative, and even the less skewed behaviors like being rowdy in public are not negatively related to IQ in a consistent way.