About two weeks ago I wrote about the negative correlation among countries between religiosity and happiness: the happiest countries in the world are the least religious, and the unhappiest the most religious. I needn’t discuss this further now, but wanted to put up a new plot made by reader “Gluon Spring” to demonstrate this relationship. Taking data from the UN’s 2013 World Happiness Report and the 2013 Pew Survey of Religious Importance, Gluon made this plot, this time naming the countries as well as giving the 95% confidence interval for the regression line.

When I posted this here and elsewhere, some people argued that a correlation of -0.52 wasn’t impressive. They’re wrong. With the 52 countries plotted here, the probability that this correlation would arise by chance is less than 0.0001. In other words, it’s highly significant. Note as well the narrow confidence interval for the regression line.

We can debate the meaning of this relationship in the comments below, but I wanted to show a plot that other people can use. At the very least it demonstrates that the most religious countries don’t contain the happiest people. Click to embiggen: