Subject i.e. test subjects i.e. the people the scientists were testing were all individual subjects. Sorry for the confusion

And yeah, that baffles me as well. People just really really wanna feel special. However, I think one reason for this may be that those people didn't have to 'learn the hard way'. IOW, critical thinking and success in academia always came easy to them, so they never really had to question things and figure them out for themselves. I know that I'm pretty much the opposite of this; every ounce of critical thinking I may possess came from a long and hard journey of discovery.

One example can be found in the youtube channel, donexodus2. If you're at all interested in the evolution vs creation 'debate', his channel is one of the best. There are a ton of good channels though because youtube, interestingly, is a hub for evolution vs creation issues.

Anyways, this guy is REALLY smart, thoughtful, and educated on evolution/biology, but he's also a christian, and he discusses this a bit on his channel. He's essentially regressed his religion as far as he can into it's own kind of god of the gaps fallacy. Even though he understands logic quite well, he just doesn't extend it to his most cherished of faiths.

He's a good kind of christian though. The kind who thinks that it's purely a personal thing, and should not be imposed upon any other aspect of anybody's life. But really, his logic, even though it's as 'sound' as it could get, still doesn't stand up. He doesn't realize that he's essentially fabricating his own deity, based in his own brain, and providing no testable reasoning for it. Actually, he DOES realize that because he sees other people do it with similar issues, but doesn't put it all together and contrast it with this one belief

I'm truly baffled by it, really. The guy's super cool and super smart, but jesus, even the best of us cant handle the truth I guess