A new survey has demonstrated yet again that church-goers lie about how often they go to church, massively over reporting their attendance.
Ask Americans whether they attend church weekly and about 20% say they do. But new research comparing self-reporting with mobile phone tracking data suggests that only 5% actually do attend weekly.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32334/w32334.pdfThe research addresses the issue that some people don't take their phone to church (or don't have one at all), but that that doesn't shift the massive over-reporting much. Indeed the researchers cross referenced with other attendance events where real attendance is tracked and found exceptionally good correlation with phone data.
