Here’s Why That Study Claiming Religious Kids Are Less Altruistic Stinks. Updates

Science-y stuff aside, how do you predict change of heart? I can only speak for Christianity but the “fruit” (characteristics that might be associated with altruism which parents are responsible for modeling for their children) are a cultivation of spiritual growth. Christianity is not a guilt ( or innocence) by association model. We (Christian parents) are hoping our children become like Jesus not like us. So, the greatest flaw in the study is that they don’t understand Christianity (which means the same could likely be said for the other religions included) at its core.

This was my first response to the article:

“I have read the rapport, especially on their definition/determining of religion. The religious denomination was given by the parents who also I have read the rapport, especially on their definition/determining of religion. The religious denomination was given by the parents who also filled in a Duke religiosity test on spirituality and service attendence. The latter doesn’t say much these days, but what I really missed was if the parents were questioned on what their daily ethics, values and norms are based, and how they provide these to their children. I also missed data on specific denomination (how can you compare Catholic natural law ethics to Protestant voluntarist ethics?), social status and how many families participated. The researchers are also clearly focused on attacking what they perceive as general assumptions on religion and ethics. They had many assumptions themselves also as they clearly mistake metaphysical grounding of ethics within theologies for that these ethics are directly religious themselves (e.g. most ethics are not textually based but on some form of natural law). So from a scientist of religion point of view I still have many questions on the way they defined the involved ethical grounding.”

Well done. It is a shame that so many folks can’t nor wish to see past their personal bias. Clearly some of these commentators WANT a study that finds that religious children are meaner than their peers. Thank you for pointing out these problems with yet another “peer reviewed” study.

There are people that look for truth, even if it is unpleasant or otherwise not fitting with what they’d like to hear.

Michael

Phineas: Actuallty, you can’t measurable religiosity scientifically. As was noted, it’s a process, not an end. Also, it’s virtually impossible to define “altruism”. The study’s correct conclusion is “children whose parents self-report going to church and believing in God are less likely to give away stickers to children who have none”. That is the only thing measured here.

Ken: Actually, sweeping generations are a part of science. When someone announces a study, they mean to convince people that they are right and their theory has value. If you were just studying the mating habits of Brazilian tree frogs, no one would care. Throw in global warming affecting these, and Headline City. You need a sweeping generalization and cause to get noticed. Otherwise, as noted above, the title would have been much different.

JMJ: I find myself in agree with you. I am afraid. 😉

“First, define altruism. Go on, I’ll wait.”
And we’re off!

People’s person definitions of words aside, altruism has a formal definition.
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/altruism
The belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others. The measurement was to get a sense of the altruism of the participants, not specific aspect of what might be considered atruistic.

Science does not mean “unquestionable truth” it just means you take a systematic study of something through observation and experiment, like was done in the study.

Definition for science:
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/science
The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment

In regards to the Dictator Game and Altruism:
Yes, “Dictator game” is a study on Altruism and you agree is peer-reviewed.(http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(06)00093-6/) It is a guide to altruistic tendencies. Now, if you have a problem with peer-reviewed studies, I can’t help you. Peer-review is the best mechanism we have to review studies by having other experts in the field take a look. Who would be a better candidate in determining the validity of study methods? You diminish your credibility by repeating “science” as a way to discredit by insinuating a conspiracy that all scientists agree with other scientists.

“Religiosity” or “Religiousness” is the based on the “Duke Religiousness Questionnaire (DRQ)… which assesses the frequency of religious attendance rated on a 1–6 scale from never to several times per week (frequency of service attendance and at other religious events), and questions regarding the spirituality of the household (1–5 scale; see DRQ). Average religious frequency and religious spirituality composites were created, standardized, and combined for an average overall religiousness composite.” The study never claim this to be the religiousness of the kids. The point of that part of the study is to correlate the type of religion and intensity of the practices in the households they reside in with the kids altruistic behavior.

Then you just mention the computer types used in the moral sensitivity.
You are just pointing out the use of technology when you reference the touchscreen computers…insinuating that the use of technology is scientific when the technology is just the medium with which the study was perform on and with … rather than commenting on the validity of the study used to measure moral sensitivity. Readers can go here to make their own judgments (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21616985?dopt=Abstract). Again, a peer-reviewed, useful tool for study.

The p-value just points to the fact the results are significant and likely to be repeatable. “through the terrible abuse of regression on the pseudo-quantified answers.”, that’s just based on your opinion of the questions and studies used to measure things. You are not providing an unbiased look to the readers by saying “All those dots are the answers to the pseudo-quantifications for each kid.” and not explaining that the “dots”, the points in the scatterplot, are each of the kids results in religiosity of environment, altruism, and age. The grid is a regression plane. I admit, the picture is hard to read since it’s not interactive, but it isn’t hard to see that the data tends toward the the fact that the more the religious a household, the less likely the kids were giving up their stickers to the kids that weren’t getting any stickers by the researcher.

For this population, and likely for other populations that their findings “contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others” is exactly what is shows.. We just need more studies to confirm it.

As for the idiots writing about it:
It is a catchy study and fun to write about; Hopefully there will be more studies or different populations to help reinforce or counter these findings.

As for your links to other blog posts:
Self-referencing non-peer-reviewed data for factual evidence of your claims… *sigh* and in those, referencing blogs from universities, also not peer reviewed nor studies just more of your opinions.

In summary, the study is peer-reviewed using some of the accepted tools used to measure data of the nature they were looking at. The correlations are fairly clear look at the bar graphs on this page for a better one to one view rather then a 3d regression plane. (http://www.cell.com/action/showImagesData?pii=S0960-9822%2815%2901167-7). The author of this post has a problem with studies in general and the people performing them and that bleeds through on the attempted analysis of this particular study. The author seems to be offended by the results and should reach out for more studies to be completed to help verify the results… if the author believed in studies usefulness. I would like to know the alternative approach the author would take in place of the tools used to measure the specific data points and why they are better.

Commenter Note: You’re post was a tantrum in it’s own right. So, please don’t come whining back at me that I didn’t provide facts and proof where you are wrong and that you don’t just have an agenda against what you affectionately call “science” everywhere without better arguments and facts.

Thank you.

Social science doesn’t really count as “science” no matter how many times you use the word in your appraisal of it. It really is more of an art. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find correlations using social science like this.

What it DOES mean is that we can’t expect to find our data corresponding perfectly to some law, such as the ones we can find in the world of physics or chemistry. Of course, often times we find correlations between completely unrelated things. It is a coincidence, for example, that consumption of margarine per capita in the United States is correlated to the divorce rate in Maine with a correlation coefficient of 0.99 (more than twice the value found in this study). The reason we know this is a coincidence is because there really is no good reason to believe the two things should be related. This assessment is one you just made, subconsciously, if you laughed at the idea of the two being related. It is an accurate one: in order to ascribe meaning to a correlation, we must be able to explain why the two things being measured should be related.

We have to use common sense to interpret the numbers we find. The “r” value here is interesting. We’ve found a weak correlation between religious parents and selfish children. But can we support it with a logical explanation of why these two things would be correlated?

Yes, it seems pretty obvious that we can. In every nation this study was conducted in, the predominant religions are religions in possession of a belief that there is a place of eternal punishment where people who aren’t “as good as we are” go to be punished for their sins. It should be obvious that talking to children about this belief is a great way to cause them to feel as if they are better than other people… which may lead them to feel that other people don’t deserve the good things as much as they do. This would easily explain why kids who have religious parents (specifically, kids who have parents who talk to them about religion) would choose to keep things for themselves more often than kids who don’t.

You’re right though, they should have quantified religiosity better. The correlation would then likely have been stronger.

Confounding error, much?
.

Wow.
Besides the poor writing here, I want to make very clear nobody suggested these are black and white in terms of the results and, the researcher plans to expand the study soon as to improve upon it.
The results are enough though to warrant deeper investigation and a broader study, that’s it.
Watching people like this squirm over these kind of studies always make me smile.

Thank you for doing your review of the study. I saw links to it on my Facebook feed and figured that there had to be more to the story and this was the only link that came up in the “contrary” column. A quick read-through showed that my suspicions were correct. I can’t speak for the statistics part, but the definitions themselves call into question the value of any statistics on this, even if they showed religious people to be more altruistic.

Altruism is defined (by Google at least) as “the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others.” Does giving stickers indicate altruism? Whether that is measurable is irrelevant unless altruism can be defined by giving stickers to someone who doesn’t have them.

The second part, as has been noted here several times, is that the religiousness of the parents, not the children, is what is measured. And so we have a proxy measurement of religion. That COULD be an accurate proxy. However, as Barna has noted, 65% of children brought up in the (American) church will leave the church within 5 years of leaving home. So is the parent’s religiousness a strong indicator of a child’s? Only if a 65% failure rate is considered a success.

So, we have a non-consequential definition of altruism (an altruism that doesn’t really cost the child anything) and an inaccurate proxy of the child’s religiousness. It seems to me that the only conclusion that can be drawn here is that children of non-religious parents value stickers less than those with religious parents.

But as with so much of science today what is missing is “why”. Why do children of non-religious parents value stickers less than those with religious parents? What if the answer is because religious parents use stickers to reward children’s memorization of Bible verses? **Then not only should you count the number of stickers given, but also the value that the sticker has to the individual child as part of the scoring.**

Geez, the more I think of this study the more amazed I am the grownups will actually take it seriously.

tfnw: Why would academics bash peer review? Maybe because they re the ones who reconize the flaws in the system. Until global warming, peer-review was irrelevent to most of society. Then the global warming crowd elevated peer review to make it equal “truth” so they could squash all disagreement with that which was becoming more and more obviously false in their science. Until it was used as a weapon against those who disagreed with a theory, most of society didn’t even know it existed.

No, framing a question as an hypothesis and then testing it is not real science. My hypothesis can be that children forced to eat kale turn into mass murderers. I can test it and find out how many come out mass murderers compared to the non-kale eaters, but that does not “prove” anything. I ignored all the other factors in the formation of a serial killer. It has to be a hypothesis with all the parameters correct and the logic correct and the testing must be done over and over to show there is a relationship. One poorly worded study means nothing.

“Science is questioning. If you can’t ask a question about the results, it isn’t science.” Tell that to the LA Times, the University of Missouri and most any other news media or college.

“But they have to publish these studies. It’s a very additive process. Every year they learn a little something new.” You’re arguing that addictive processes are desirable?

Hint: There is no “one” definition of altrusim. It depends on the speaker and the situation. It’s part of ethics, where hard definitions rarely exists.

If there is no scientifically valid way to rate religiousity, you cannot use the idea in scientific studies. I would assum that was not your point, but thank you for conceding this.

“While the models might be flawed and the results weak, we have to build our studies on something” That is not what we see. We see science using models and computers AS reality. You are also arguing that a bad result is better than no result. Please defend that idea.

AND THERE IT IS–the coup de grace: You work for Heartland. Troll City!!!!!

Anon: You were okay till that “greedy people exist because heaven does”. Your argument could apply to why rich children wouldn’t share just as easily. They came from entitled rich homes. You could also argue the opposite–they share because the have no reason not too. They have all they need. Poor people share in the hopes of getting more. Poor people don’t share because they have so little. The argument doesn’t work. It’s interesting that so many people think Christians believe they are better than everyone else. Why would you think that? Because you believe they’re right? Please explain.

Brandon: So you’d be happy with studies that proved atheism leads to murders and dictatorships? Atheists are unwilling to share and hate everyone? Interesting. Maybe you can find one and report back?
Yes, the authors say more study is needed, but wrote the study up so it sounds definitive and the title implies more than the study shows. I have problem with that. It’s also interesting that this study made the news—there are hundreds of similar studies out there reaching various conclusions. Why is this one reported?

I’m not a statistician, so I’m glad that some qualified members of our rational community have refuted your haphazard half-baked attempt to dismiss the study with what I can see as a writer to be uneducated nonsense.

My expertise is in words and definitions and no, your suggestions for the definition of “altruism” are not anyone’s definition of the word. “No-greater-love, supreme sacrifice, kindness, patience, love, and so on…” Sound like you base your definitions of words on a certain book of nonsense, which may be where you also get your science.

Altruism: “the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others.” You should use a dictionary and I’m not being snarky.

Your definition of “science” is also wrong, and the only “unquestionable truth” in that regard is your incorrect definition of science.

Science: “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.”

Again…dictionary.

Not that definitions don’t vary slightly, but your definitions are not extreme, but inaccurate.

I’m glad your artice has been thoroughly refuted, but we all know that whatever fan base you are trying to please will probably not hear rationality or see reality.

I am a big fan of criticism of studies, which is what science is for, but you sound like an angry Catholic (I’m not accusing you of being one, I’m just saying you sound like one).

Take care.

Altruism: “the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others. You should use a dictionary and I’m not being snarky.”This does not mention acting upon that belief. For all we know, the children did believe in “selfless concern for others” but did not view sharing stickers as a way to show that. The study did not address working at food banks, reading to children in a library, visiting a nursing home, etc. The definition used in the study didn’t study a lot of things most people would consider altruistic. Again, your definition also does not include acting upon the beliefs.

“systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.” How are ethics part of the physical and natural world?

It’s interesting that those who say the critique here is “debunked” have done little to debunk it. I have to wonder what the response to this study would have been had the writer been an atheist. Mostly people seem to think that the writer’s religion is the problem. That’s not science—listing why this is valid is science.

Sheri: You wrote:
The study’s correct conclusion is “children whose parents self-report going to church and believing in God are less likely to give away stickers to children who have none”. That is the only thing measured here.

You some off: “children whose parents self-report going to church and believing in God are less likely to give away stickers to anonymous children without any stickers and said to be from the same school and similar ethnic group as the child with the stickers.”

Social interactions are complicated. That’s why they had to include “same school and similar ethnic group” within the study. Sadly, they don’t really allow for religious children possibly having different social circles (maybe church emphasis?) than secular children (maybe school/race emphasis?).

I won’t say the study is bad, but the conclusions are terrible. Correlation does not mean causation.

“the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others.”
This would put everyone who opposes a safety net by the government for the poor, since the money is taken from people against their will. True altruism would only exists where money and time are freely given.

So… I understand where you are coming from. I get your point and am not refuting your conclusion (though if you shored up your writing maybe you wouldn’t have so many people writing you off). My problem is this (and I am going to assume for the moment that you are a Christian): as people of faith we are asked to be understanding, forgiving, and caring; we are supposed to look at how we can be better people before we point our fingers at others. Even writing this makes me think I am calling you out on things while I should be looking at myself instead but I thought this was important enough.

In your article you are exceedingly rude to people who may disagree with your opinion. When Jesus was presented with immoral, deceitful, callous, hateful people he did not spit on them. He washed their feet, asked them how he could help them and gave them advice to make their lives better (and yes, I included his own disciples in there on purpose). He loses his cool only once, and that was over a lot more than a study saying religious people are not as nice as other people.

Now lets look at your article. I grabbed a few quotes but I am sure there are other applicable ones to be found. “Asinine studies” – rude and demeaning attack. “…throw a temper tantrum and (for you men) cry like a little girl…” – again rude and demeaning but now you are also being sexist in more ways than one.
“keep your mouth shut” – rude, aggressive and boarder line threatening; readers are supposed to keep their mouth shut or what? “I mean, it stinks to high heaven” – this one makes me cringe as you use religious imagery to dismissively condescend to people about how religious people are just as kind and caring. “I’m too tired to make a joke about science” – why are we making jokes about science? You would not be on the internet, much less have a computer or even electricity if it were not for science. Obviously you have nothing against science and are more frustrated with the scientists – flawed humans like you and me. “means this study is crap” – no description needed. “My goodness! How scientific!” – again with science bashing. Also the sarcasm is uncalled for, it sounds petty. And finally the best of them all:
“I am too tired and too surly this morning to put this more politely.” So does that mean we can all be rude, short, and condescending when we get tired?

I think my point is clear. More importantly if you had cut out many many of these hurtful comments your article would actually have the effect you surely intended – for people to understand that the experiment was flawed and we should not simply say something is true because one scientific study says so. We should question, read, and study to come to a better understanding – something both science and religion preach.

So instead your article had the exact opposite effect – it showed people a presumed religious person not only being rude, disrespectful, not understanding but also being a hypocrite. Instead why not try to be understanding, accepting, open to others and their (perhaps misguided) understanding and help them become the best version of themselves. If you act like this in your everyday life you will only promote a poor image of religious people; and this will only continue as children use your behavior as a model for themselves. Honestly, as a christian I was more appalled by your response than by their blunder.

<irony> Briggs, include more of these. It may help.

Sheri: First I would hope we all understand that correlation is not causation. But that does not mean you cannot prove causation. Most of your disagreements with the other commenters hinges on this factor.

Second you cannot isolate one factor in any population so instead researchers are supposed to pull from a wide range of types of people so to counterbalance those influences. There is literally no other way to work around this problem aside from raising cloned children in controlled environments.

Third I am surprised you are still disputing global warming, because even if it were a hoax we should learn to treat the earth with more respect so why even argue the point?

Fourth you cannot prove religiousness but you can prove other factors such as amount of time spent in religious activities, amount of time spent reading religious texts, amount of time listening to religious music. From the sounds of it you are trying to destroy the entire science of psychology – because religion is definitely part of each persons psychological makeup and you can have experiments to understand the human mind.

Fifth science does not work against the idea of God – it simply examines his work more closely and less biasly. We can learn from science when reading the Bible so to not read only what we want to but to ready earnestly so to understand earnestly. So why should science not be able to shed some light on religion? You seem to look for fundamental issues with science and its ability to even in a perfect scenario explain the impact of religion on young minds.

Instead of dismissing all opposed why dont we work with science to raise our children better? What if some shred of truth exists in the study, what if on all levels, what if God himself would say that religious parents are raising their children to be less understanding than nonreligious parents? Why do we automatically become defensive? Instead we should look to become better not matter what faces us. Because how sad would it be that we become worse parents simply because we were more focused on how science was wrong about us and less on actually practicing what we preach?

Briggs: Why are you so bent on being hateful? I ask you to be a little kinder and you throw this back? You are only proving me (and sadly enough the experiment you detest so much) right.

If you hate science so much at least practice what you preach and go live in the wilderness or with the Amish and experience it for once. Until then the sarcasm is just a front you’re using to avoid giving any real answers.

I called you sexist because you were being sexist. So what am I going to do because I hurt your feelings? Tell you again to stop being sexist. It doesn’t look good on you.

(Also sarcasm doesnt make you right, start using facts or start losing the respect of anyone listening.)

I give up. If anyone else wants to try be my guess. Briggs – I was actually on your side, don’t know what must have possessed me. Maybe it was science, or sexism. Not probably the racism. Im sure you will have some fun responding – have a nice life. I hope it proves to be educational.

Paul: You’re right. The title you give is much more accurate.

Whomever it concerns: People most certainly do say science is the unquestionable truth. Check out global warming sites if you doubt this. Science is so unquestionable that no dissenting views are allowed. None–disagree and you’re toast.

Just another: Really–the WWJD? In reality, we have a few speeches that were made by Christ. We don’t know if he was always PC or not. I’m sure he would have been PC, however, because reality is just too harsh on people. Perhaps you’re right. No, not really. (This reminds me of the person who went onto a blog, took the writer to task for his profanity, put 30 links to her own writing, informed him she reproduced his posts on her blog, minus the profanity and figured he would be estatic that she “shared” his writings and cleaned them up to her standard. He was not and was very clear in letting her know.)

It is this PC behaviour that just resulted in the University of Missouri president resigning because a few students were angry that they were not being treating right. It’s why Yale students are afraid of Halloween costumes and demand they be protected. Nicey-nicey is why this is happening and you are certainly aiding and abbetiing the PC crowd.

How do you prove causation? In social science, the only measure is the wee P-value. Wee P-values show correlation. How do you prove causality in human behaviours? If you know the answer, you will win a nobel prize and be called blessed, by both dictators and idealists. No one can prove causality in human behaviour. There are too many factors. In fact, that is actually the reason religion exists–God explains this as original sin and our nature. Science cannot provide the answer.

Why argue global warming? Because it’s not about treating the earth well–it’s about income distribution. If what I do causes extreme hardship but I meant well and the earth was treated well, that’s all that counts?
Yes, you can have experiments to understand parts of human behaviour. However, they must be set up carefully and the conclusions will always be very limited in scope. If you cant prove religiousness, then the studies should not use the word. Yet they do.

Science can shed some understanding on religion but the Bible clearly says belief is a matter of faith. God gave no scientific proof of his evidence and it seems that was on purpose.

I am all for raising our children better–starting with understanding the truth, propaganda, how science works, how morals work, etc. Again, you’re okay with a shred of truth amoung thousands of lies? How does that work?? Where did God say “Go ahead support a lie if it helps” “Go ahead and preach lies if people feel better?” I am appalled that a Christian is in favor of lying to children. Obviously, you do believe the idea that it is more important to be liked than right. That is NOT what God said. Anywhere.

Since Just gave up, I’m posting this for anyone who might be interested.

Its authors certainly are doing science,

I thought they were doing psychology or perhaps sociology.

The results are enough though to warrant deeper investigation and a broader study, that’s it.

This is the Universal Conclusion of all funded studies. More funding is needed.

saying [that] any study that uses p-values to assess significance allows you to refute any study you dislike the conclusions of.

It would be well to understand the nature of the criticism. Examine again the graph reproduced at the top. My first thought on seeing it was: “Nothing to see here; move along.” That is, the model is not skillful. Look at the spread of data points around the regression plane! There is no tendency of the points to cluster around the plane. This is like the notion that the average human being has slightly less than one testicle. It’s a numerical average, but has no physical meaning.

The wee p-value referred only to the hypothesis that the slope of the regression plane is 0. The slopes of regression lines are seldom zero, so a significance test is hauled in to ask whether the observed slope(s) could be found in a random sample if the actual slope of the model is zero. The answer seems to be “no.” But what is the physical meaning of this? (Here is where the voodoo sciences part company from the hard sciences like physics, chemistry, and even biology.) One conclusion might be that the samples were not random (and therefore the significance level is compromised). Another might be that children who don’t share stickers feel guilty and turn to religiosity. Or perhaps there is a lurking variable Z which is causitive to both X and Y. Or, like the % imported cars in the USA vs. % women in the workforce, there is no causal link at all, only coincidence.

Even in the hard sciences, engineering, and the like, we often had to resort to surrogate measures: hardness of steel instead of tensile strength, viscosity instead of degree of polymerization, radiation backscatter instead of density of coal, etc. However, both the desired measure and the surrogate were well defined and a solid correlation and causation were known. Hence, you could measure the backscatter on a bunker of coal at a power plant and estimate the density of the coal in the bunker — and propagate the variance through the transfer functions! (Folks often forget to include the variance on these correlations.)

And we will not even speak of the distinction between testing the parameters of a model and the actual real world measurements. The wee p-value refers only to the former.

children forced to eat kale turn into mass murderers. … ignored all the other factors in the formation of a serial killer.

Sheri! This conflates mass murderers with serial killers! The former would more accurately be “parallel killers.” (Just noting how important definitions can be.)

Of course, Sheri’s main point is the doozy. Between any two groups of human beings there will be differences and there is no reason to suppose that the label used for the two groups is the only or even the most important one. For example, in troubleshooting a problem involving battery life, the late, great Ellis Ott found a statistically significant difference between the batteries processed on a station using fresh hydroxide and those processed on a station using recycled hydroxide. Ott pointed out that there was no reason to suppose that it was the nature of the hydroxide that accounted for the difference, only that there was probably something different between the two stations. (It might for example have been operator skill.)

Another, more public example, found a correlation between the time women spent working in front of CRT screens (remember them?) — i.e., at computer terminals — and cancer. Much hoo-hoo was made; but it turned out that the women who did such work (“pink-collar” workers) also smoked more, ate fattier diets, exercised less, etc. compared to the women who did not (lawyers, managers, doctors). That is, the difference in effect was not demonstrably due to the label used to form the categories.

the definition of “altruism”

I must be getting old. I can remember when the evolutionary biologists claimed there was no such thing.

you sound like an angry Catholic

You say that like it’s a bad thing. Probably blowback from a Guardian reader.

Matt,

I’m hurt that you’re SO mean !!!!

Plus!! you were not respectful of REAL scientists who are just trying to find out THE TRUTH !!!!

Plus where do you get off MAKING FUN OF genuine science things like p-values and Likert Scales ?!!! EVERYBODY uses these !!!!! For EVERYTHING !!!!!!

PLUS !!! “Everybody” “knows” that “religious” 5 year olds are WAY more altruistic than sensible 5 year olds — EXCEPT — IT’S NOT TRUE !!!! Ha Ha about that !!! This is why we NEED SCIENCE !!!!! And you are AGAINST Science !!!!!!! Because you LIKE the WRONG ANSWER !!!!!

I’m feeling really, really triggered right now. I really want you to realize this !!!!!!!

PLUS !!! you said NOTHING about Standard Quantized Singing Units !!!!

And you SHOULD !!!!!!

Since EVERYTHING can be measured by Standard Quantized Singing Units !!!!!!!!!!

Your affiliation with the Heartland Institute makes you an inherently biased source to be commenting on this. Your personal beliefs, and perhaps the source of your paychecks, are dependent on this study being false. You wouldn’t be qualified to sit on a jury for a case like this because you couldn’t be fair. Your condescension ruins anything that made this article viable.

“These are the best insults you can come up with? 900 words and not one laugh line. Do you work for NPR?”

This is why I keep coming back here.

Sheri: I hadn’t given up on you but I guess I will. No where did I say to give into lies, my problem was entirely on how we react to things that we assume to be lies just because we dont agree with them. If we cannot prove religiousness we can certainly not disprove such a causation either (and please tear up my proving a negative point, I know you want to). Because at the end of the day, yes God can understand all of this and yes religious (or more specifically Christian parents) could be raising their children in worse ways. We will only know once we die. But when I go I would much rather be asked why I gave heed to such scientific trash and in doing so attempted to raise my children to be more kind and understanding than to be found guilty of willful ignorance and blind disagreement and in doing so continued raising my children to be less like Christ. Choose your poison, I certainly chose mine.

The technical scientific issue here is the distinction between reliability and validity. Briggs and others are pointedly questioning the VALIDITY: that is to say, there is an argument to be made that what these numbers are measuring is NOT what the study’s authors claim to be measured. This is an essential and reasonable argument to make about any study. Most likely, even the study’s authors would admit the difficulties of, for example, labeling giving away stickers as “altruism”, that it is at best an approximation of altruism. (This is the case with most papers/presentations in the scientific community. Part of the discussion is “how strong” is the case being made, where are the weak points of the study.)

Another technical question is what is the RELIABILITY of the methodology of the study. A single paper is unable to determine whether a study is reliable. A study’s methodology is reliable if it is repeatable, if you get the same numerical results with different authors, different children, different families. The reliability of this study has not been determined, because no one has attempted to repeat it, yet.

It is possible for a study to be reliable, but not valid: whatever is being measured can be measured consistently under varying conditions, but it isn’t really measuring what is claimed to be measured. It is possible for a study to be valid, but not reliable: it is measuring what it is claiming to measure, but the measurement is so difficult to do correctly, that one cannot glean meaningful results. A good metaphor is the old joke about the drunk who lost his keys in the dark corner of an alley (looking there would be “valid”), but instead is looking for them under the street light because it’s easier to see (looking there is “reliable”).

My personal opinion is that this study is invalid on epistemiological grounds: mapping “giving away stickers” to an overall moral attribute of “altruism” is a highly questionable assertion. It would be better to have multiple measures of altruism, or at least have a separate study to confirm the validity of the “giving away stickers = altruism” assertion. The “religiosity” measure would appear to be somewhat more valid – it’s fairly easy to measure attending worship services, etc., that would at least intuitively correspond to what most people mean by being religious.

I would ask readers to look at that graph at the top of the page. That graph is the entirety of the results. Look at those points: they’re all over the place. When you have points like this that are necessarily in a box, and they’re all over the place, you’re not measuring lines or trends. You’re measuring which parts of the box don’t have quite so many points as other parts. You need to be very careful before assigning MEANING to that absence of points.

In this case, the sparse areas are the upper right and upper rear areas. It’s that absence of “10s” that give the -.173 correlation trend “line”. The corollary of this is that older, less religious students are more likely to just give away all of the stickers. By what reasoning is “give away all the stickers” more “altruistic” than “give away half the stickers”? How do we know that the reasoning isn’t “I don’t care about stickers?” Might a better hypothesis be that the 10-12 yr old students think that stickers are for 1st graders and kindergarteners? (The age trend is larger than the religious trend, which is very slight.) Another hypothesis is that religious kids are more likely to “follow directions”, and keep some and give away some.

See where I’m going with this? If we take away the assumption of “altruism”, and just talk about stickers, we can come up with a dozen different hypotheses for the observed pattern. The p-value only says, “There is a pattern here.” It doesn’t say what the pattern is beyond mathematically quantifying it.

Briggs: Yes, but it was fun while it lasted. (Just for you 😉 I figured I couldn’t go without leaving a little bit of sarcasm. It’s the new rage, everyone is doing it.)

Regarding altruism, there are a couple of scientific theories defining and explaining it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism#Scientific_viewpoints.

So, instead of looking at a dictionary, a scientific paper has to state which scientific theories of altruism they are using and testing against.

I am sorry, I didn’t read your post in detail. There were way too many errors at the top that jumped out. First is your assumption that behavior can not be part of science. There is a scientific field devoted to behavior. It may not look exactly like physics or exactly like chemistry but it does use the principles of science and applies it with success to the field of behavior.

In this case their measures of altruism and religiosity are clearly defined and measure what they seek to measure. The study shows that, using these measurements, kids raised by religious parents are less altruistic. It’s pretty clearly stated. It just sounds like you don’t like what this paper says so you’re going to randomly yell the word science a lot. You never actually bring up proper arguments for why the game doesn’t measure altruism or why the interview doesn’t measure religiosity.

I’m sorry, but science isn’t about making sure your feelings aren’t hurt. If you can’t handle things like this another field of study might be better suited for you.

Forget how about how it was defined; “Altruism was calculated as the number of stickers shared out of 10.” Is there not a problem with that?

This review is spot on. Did anyone one mention that at least 2 of the authors of this study are atheists? One only need to look up their Twitter feed, if they haven’t taken down their Twitter feed out of shameful bias yet. Also, 33 kids from Chicago represents the USA? Was it the part of Chicago where the stickers resemble US FOOD STAMPS? Were the stickers ‘My little Pony” themed and offered to atheist boys- in which case, give them to the girls. Gender, Socio-economic status and paltry sample across ‘the world’ all are contributing factors of this ‘study’ being crap. Also, it helps if you have children, to understand children.

Gabriela: So no one is qualified to sit a jury because everyone has prejudiced beliefs. I’m good with that. Did I mention the new IPCC chairman once worked for Exxon?

Just: This was not disagreement because we “don’t agree”. It was bad science. No need to address your negativity–oops, your proving a negative point. You know the problems with that. You have every right to choose whatever poison you want. Go for it.

Daniel: There are many comments here explaining why the paper is not valid. You seem to ignore all of them. Psychology is questionable as a science. It’s certainly not “hard” science with yes/no answers. I will grant you that the psychology of marketing is very good, though it’s based on much criteria that are easier to define and measure. Does commercial A lead to more buying or not? Beyond that, it’s really more of an art than a science. (How does psychology explain only reading part of an article and then commenting on it?)

Katie: Apparently not to the study’s author, but to the rest of us, yeah.

Keeping this short. If you’re just going to throw out accepted methods of studying populations because you feel its wrong without any real evidence and no alternatives, there is no point in a discussion. Your comments illuminate the fact you are more interested in trolling commenters. The responses to your comments are in my original statement and like the study, you can go back and read more carefully and critically. Good luck and I hope you someday understand where you went wrong. Good day.

C’mon! We can do it!
Break number of comments on a Briggs post record!

What is it about this sort of thing that draws so many comments (including mine) when the more interesting Summa Contra Moderna series does not?

Elostirion: My guess is this is far easier to understand and relate to (said by one who is not a fan of Thomas)

Just for Fun since we’re in deep there, I looked up headlines on this study:

CHILDREN who are raised in religious families turn out to be meaner than their parents, a new international study has claimed. (news.com.au)

How religion makes us meaner
(adelaidenow.com.au)

Does growing up in a religious family make you MEAN? Christian and Muslim children found to be less altruistic than the offspring of atheists
(dailymail.co.uk)

Religious Children Not as Kind as Their Secular Peers, Study Shows
(jakartaglobe)

Study: Religious Children Meaner, More Punitive
(opednew.com–liberal site)

and my personal favorite:
Study: Religious Kids Are Jerks
(thedailybeast)

there is an argument to be made that what these numbers are measuring is NOT what the study’s authors claim to be measured.

Heh. My old boss, Ed Schrock, used to call measuring the wrong thing “errors of the third kind.”

A study’s methodology is reliable if it is repeatable

And so few of them are that those who try are called “replication bullies.” Apparently, it hurts people’s feelings to learn that their “significant results” can’t be replicated!
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/07/replication_controversy_in_psychology_bullying_file_drawer_effect_blog_posts.html
Even in relatively hard areas like medical research, we find replication failure in as many as 80% of the papers. However, these failures seldom make the evening news and the public is left only with the impression made by the original announcement.
++++

It may not look exactly like physics or exactly like chemistry

Got that right.

The Scientific Revolution was developed in response to problems in the physics of local motion. The further we get from that situation — inanimate objects, identical and identically disposed, subject only to outside forces — the less well the methods apply. Even physics has no analytical solution to the Moon’s orbit, the original three-body problem. When the number of bodies is greater, the scientific method founders, loses its mathematical rudder, and must fall back on statistics. But statistics is useful only when the many bodies are essentially uniform, as in thermodynamics or quantum theory (“disorganized complexity”). When the bodies are not uniform or when they are related to one another in various ways (“organized complexity”), you cannot replace the individual units with an average unit and get useful results. The manner in which the units are interconnected must be taken into account.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html

Funny how this is the “go-to” study, when every other study showing charitable giving shows just the opposite.
Here’s just one: https://philanthropy.com/article/Religious-Americans-Give-More/153973

So, did the other kids actually get those stickers after the researchers counted how many had been put in the envelope?

John M. Christensen: Good question! Would that then measure the researcher’s altruism?

Jessie Hudson bleats:

“This review is spot on. Did anyone one mention that at least 2 of the authors of this study are atheists?”

Uh oh. Here comes Dr. Briggs to ask you if you know the name of the fallacy you just committed. Or, maybe not.

Re: Spurious correlations

What is spurious about correlating Arcade Revenues with Computer Science degrees – MY GOD! – how is that spurious????

(did they correlate comic sales as well?)

Why did the researchers limit the range of altruistic behavior practiced to sharing stickers? I’m not certain about Islam, but Christianity largely teaches people to be charitable when a stranger needs food, clothing, shelter, the sorts of things that can mean life or death, sickness or health, not superfluous fluff. They are also encouraged to provide spiritual support for the lost, and time and compassion for the unfortunate, ill and dying. How does the sharing of stickers correlate to the actual practice of more meaningful forms of charity, those actually encouraged by Christianity? Why did they not collect data on time volunteered helping an elderly neighbor, sharing food with a hungry schoolmate, or standing up to a bully? These would be more meaningful measure of how much Christian values might impact a child’s social behavior.

James said: Might a better hypothesis be that the 10-12 yr old students think that stickers are for 1st graders and kindergarteners? (The age trend is larger than the religious trend, which is very slight.)

Agreed, I made the same point above anecdotally using my twelve year old son and my six year neighbour as an example.

JohnK, I’m sending you my cleaning bill. I spilled red wine allover the sofa.

“Might a better hypothesis be that the 10-12 yr old students think that stickers are for 1st graders and kindergarteners? (The age trend is larger than the religious trend, which is very slight.)”

Which suggests that the obvious follow-up study is to create an equation mapping lack of religious upbringing to dismissiveness towards stickers.

Top stuff, Briggs; if you’d used a more emollient tone you’d never have drawn all these atheist fundamentalists out of the woodwork. And I’m an atheist, who happens to value christian morality almost as much as intellectual honesty.

This study is reminiscent of those studies that discovered that Democrat voters have a higher IQ. They both demonstrate that some adults should never be let loose near a bunch of numbers.

I am commenting on two fundamental flaws that the “experiment” has. I think Briggs says some of these things in a roundabout way.

1) The definitions of altruistic and religiosity are suspect. Because they do not us previously defined method of measurement of these two attributes (Ray has it right), the study seems to make up its own. This makes for difficulty in quantifying altruism and religiosity between different studies, or even difficulty of the reader understanding what the study means by these two terms, and maybe the researchers don’t know, either. Indeed, they seem to consider only attendance of organized congregational meetings, but atheists can be very religious. Atheists have a deep belief that there is no god(s), and they often worship this belief – sometimes to the point of insisting that others should share their belief (if you believe in God, you are evil, but if you don’t then you aren’t). This makes them likewise religious. Yet the measurement of religiosity would miss these believers, as they do not have an organized method of worship, but they can, do, and will reinforce their beliefs among themselves, sometimes, as they interact with other atheists.

2) How their definitions were created is in doubt. It is unclear whether they measure what they intend to measure. There is an assumption that all people want the same things, so if one kid wants a certain set of 10 stickers, then the assumption is that all kids would want the same set, thus the only altruistic option is to give up the stickers the kid has chosen. My experience, though, is that kids by themselves select different toys than other kids who are by themselves; different people have different desires, so keeping the desirable stickers can be just as altruistic, because the kid would not be imposing his own desires and beliefs upon someone else. However, most people assume that because they want something themselves then everyone else wants the same thing, and the researchers seem to be relying upon that assumption as the only determination of altruism.

The researchers may be tempted to adjust their definitions of altruism and religiosity while working with their data in order to find results that produce wee p-values — thus are publishable — and this risks inserting an unintentional bias that could affect their results. When searching for a wee p-value, they may settle upon the first conclusion that gives them such a value, and their search will drift in the direction of any pre-conceived notions that they have. The researchers may have asked questions about charitable deeds, but found that they did not produce the needed p-values for publication. We do not know.

Having worked in test engineering for a couple of decades, I know the importance of designing an experiment that is not only able to collect data that proves the question (e.g. the unit under test works; even the definition of “works” has to be clear) but also to disprove it (e.g. it does not work), but if experimenters are allowed to massage their data or definitions in order to find publishable results, then it is difficult to know whether they have actually proved anything, including what they say they proved.

Unfortunately, the researchers’ “experiment” does not have sufficient definition to mean much of anything. It is like the classic IQ test: it measures whatever it is that the IQ test measures. This experiment measures something about sharing stickers, but what it measures is unclear. Perhaps it measures the researchers’ haplessness to choose 30 stickers that kids do not like enough to want to keep, or (altruistically) don’t want to even inflict upon some poor unknown other kid and would rather take home to throw away. We really do not know. Nor do we know whether any of the kids is an atheist who is forced, kicking and screaming, to go to temple every week or whether he is very pious but cannot convince his parents to take him to temple at all. This meaningless “experiment” is poorly designed, but the peer reviewers failed to notice — perhaps because they also do not know how to design a meaningful experiment. There is a reason that psychology is considered a “soft” science — the conclusions are so rarely conclusive (because different people behave so differently, as demonstrated by reading these comments).

Finally, I would like to emphasize that, misused, statistics can be deceiving. For instance, the “average American” is a hermaphrodite, but very few actually are. As with modeling an “average” American, the plot from the “experiment” is a poor predictor of any individual, and no “law” of nature has been found. Indeed, the researchers drew a conclusion from “shotgun” data that actually demonstrates that there is no real relationship between the three plotted attributes (once again, the peer reviewers failed to point out this problem prior to publication). It seems that many commenters to this posting do not realize that it is all too easy to lie with statistics, even unintentionally, and especially when assigning causation from an assumed correlation (no correlation can really be seen in the data, demonstrating that the published 0.408 value is worth very little if we are to predict any individual; the researchers seem to be only interested in the statistical numbers and have ignored the actual data — remember: the data is the data, the statistics is not the data; at best the statistics can tell us something about the uncertainty concerning the data). Remember, statistics does not show cause. One commenter’s definition of science would have made Aristotle seem scientific, yet several of his deductions, several of his methods, and his hubris set back science and human advancement a couple of millenniums. Another commenter’s definition was that because there was observation and experimentation it must be scientific, but a poorly designed experiment is not science. It appears that people who know little about science and have forgotten much of what they learned in high school are trying to tell the rest of us what science is.

This caught my eye “Science means unquestionable truth.” This actually makes more sense to me when applied to some organized religions. But the point of science is to change, to always be questioned. As our understanding changes, so too does science. We test it again and again, with the intention of altering our previously perceived observations.

It sounds like the author is saying this study was 100% false. It was A study that shed light on SOMETHING. Statistics are convenient, but they never show us the whole picture. I think that’s what people forget. There’s always the exception, and those individuals shouldn’t be ignored. So it isn’t right, it isn’t wrong, it’s a study that gave us some collection of results and that was outlined so that someone else later (several people for that matter) could come along and duplicate it but with altered methods. It’s also not a simple 1+1 thing, so as far as I can say, it likely will never be completely right or wrong.

Elostirion,
OK. I’ll add to the hit count.

Some one up above.
Best point yet. If you cannot give me measurement units for altruism, you are not doing science.

Someone else up above.
Yeah. I am just repeating what you said about what is the altruism scaling factor. 5 stickers might be better than 2 stickers but 10 stickers translates to “I don’t give a shit about what this adult is doing”

All of you progressive weenies.
Adding “ology” to “Social” does not make it a science.

Many of the comments here are cracking me up. How can anyone take this seriously — even before the dubious science???
The authors of this “study” are taking a complicated exercise involving keeping or not keeping a kid’s favorite stickers — extending it to a variety of kids of a variety of ages from a variety of cultures — and saying it measures “altruism.” Without any control for culture, age, intellectual ability, maturity, temperament or anything else. How can anyone possibly think it measures ANYTHING? At the very least, the kids should all have been the same age or developmental age.

This is then “correlated” with the “religiosity” of their homes as defined by how their parents answered questions about their own abstract experience and frequency of religious services. Is a Pentecostal church service equivalent in any way to a Muslim prayer service? Do all “religious” families have the same sort of home life? Do the children have religious instruction? If they are not similar in some specific way, then that’s equally useless.

Put the whole thing together and you get… NOTHING.

Briggs,

As Feser would state, this just reeks of amateur philosophy.

To be honest, the only only takeaway from this study confirms is that the researchers believe atheism is false?

I guess they can believe what they want, but well you veer into morality, that’s a big no-no for atheism, regardless what you believe or not.

It never ceases to amaze me just how far some will go to put a nasty label on being religious! Don’t they have anything better to do?

Could you explain the religiosity scale to me? Is it really a – 1, 0, and a 1? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a graph so confusing.

I don’t know anything about the SCIENCE of such sociological studies, but I had a good time demolishing this study based on first-hand observation of kids. As follows: “Seriously? A sticker exercise administered to a couple of dozen selected children from each of these countries, with vastly different cultural, social, educational, and governmental norms, is supposed to demonstrate valid conclusions about morality? The subject sample is so small it could not possibly maintain the most basic standards or controls of a scientific study to allow for significant variables such as differences in children’s living conditions, family circumstances, nutrition, I.Q., etc., even within a single country, not to mention across the world. And how does one derive comparisons about punishments for bad behavior from a sticker exercise? Did they have to fight each other off to acquire the available stickers? — in which case, did the study allow for valid comparisons between children from large families vs. those with few or no siblings? Were the children all exactly the same size and weight? Did some or all play sports? Team competition (soccer) or individual (track and field)? Were some musicians, careful of their hands? And what about that well-documented behavioral determinative, birth order? — aggressive oldest, put-upon youngest, or classic peace-making middle child? What were the controls to measure differences in behavior and attitude towards regulation and authority based on whether they lived in a police-state or a snitch culture?! Having a foot in both countries, I feel safe in saying that a sampling of two dozen kids from just Canada and the U.S. — culturally similar as they are — would collapse under scrutiny on the basis of relative populations alone. On its face this study is a joke — I would suggest that it was devised to demonstrate prior conclusions. It may have brought a smile of satisfaction to the faces of Beast readers, but that should be followed by a blush of embarrassment at having fallen for such snake-oil nonsense.”

There were two measures of “altruism” in the study. The first was sharing stickers. The second was how severely the children judged depictions of interpersonal harm. Children from religious families were more likely to be more severe in their judgments. But how is the latter a depiction of “altruism” or “meanness”? Don’t we want our children to stand up to bullies? Is it altruistic to be unconcerned about the misbehavior of others?

I would also note that there is no information presented about any comparison within individual countries. There may be differences in societal attitudes between the US and China, for instance, which are coming into play here.

Praise the heavens there are still some intelligent people left in the world. I thoroughly enjoyed/appreciated your review, and your witty sarcasm made it that much more entertaining. Keep it up. You’re one hell of a smart dude.

Daniel: The dictator game was originally used by Kahneman to “offer evidence against the rationally self-interested individual (sometimes called the homo economicus) concept of economic behavior” (Wikipedia). Let’s try this:

“Religious children are more rational than their secular counterparts, study finds: Religious belief appears to have positive influence on children’s rational economic behavior…”

Actually, Wiki continues to state that “precisely what to conclude from the evidence is controversial.” Some think it’s altruism, some think it is socially acceptable signalling to the researcher because
greed is frowned upon.

“Religious children are less driven to impress strangers than their secular counterparts, study finds: Religious belief appears to have negative influence on children’s need to impress strangers…”

You give a child a windfall of stickers. You start talking about sharing those stickers. Is the child immediately triggered to see, in the mind’s eye, all the children it would like to share stickers with? The child shares them out evenly: Two for Daniel. Two for Janet. Two for Briggs. Two for researcher’s pick. Keep two for me. That makes eight in my envelope, two in researcher’s.

“Religious children are have more friends than their secular counterparts, study finds…”

Very clever Eric. You almost had me. Imagine! A Grauniad reader offended by snark and petulant whining. How would they ever get through a single edition? But really, you must start using sarcasm tags.

/sarc

Nice post, bro.
I have zero knowledge about statistics or how you should conduct a study like the one you’re talking about.
You give us sources to support what you are saying. BUT, your source is your own blog. I would suggest to change your sources.

“Why I am Right Update P-values are rotten evidence for anything (click here to learn), (2) Regression is deeply flawed and not what you think (click here, here, or here to learn), (3) Probability models do not prove cause (click here, (4) Asinine studies like this are common (click here) or here). ”

only one link of the above part is not taking us to your site.

L
Nice extension of the discussion. A quick look indicates hat the first author, Jean Decety, has published in the same journal a number of times. Somebody has to have the first article in a journal but why would it be this article in a journal titled Current Biology. Am I being too cynical?

The study’s correct conclusion is “children whose parents self-report going to church and believing in God are less likely to give away stickers to children who have none”.
I think even that conclusion may be off. A more precise one might be,
“children whose parents self-report going to church and believing in God are less likely to give away stickers to scientists who claimed they were to busy to visit other children and who claimed stickers returned to the overly-busy scientists might somehow be given to those other anonymous children in some unspecified way”.

Some children may not have given the stickers back to the scientists because they didn’t trust the scientists to give them to other kids. For all we know, the kids figured if they kept the stickers, they could give them to unlucky kids themselves rather than leaving that job to the supposedly too-busy to play scientists. The fact is: we don’t know the kids motives for keeping of giving away stickers.

It might be interesting to learn whether the stickers placed in the envelopes ever were given to other children in the school. They may have merely been counted and then tossed away. Call me a cynic, but if I were a betting gal, I’d bet the children who did not get to play were not given stickers from the “give away” pile.

Lucia:
As you probably realize, you raise an issue that is part ethical and part epistemological. I recently plowed my way through Dan Ariely’s The Honest Truth about Dishonesty, which is full of similarly designed experiments. The irony of an experimental design that requires dishonesty seemed to have escaped Ariely as much as it escaped Decety. The absence of any inquiry as to how the 5 year olds thought about the exercise compounds the irony even further.
The late Herb Kelman famously raised these issues about the Milgram coercion experiments. A great deal of self-examination followed but psychological/social psychological experiments involving human subjects continued more or less unchanged. One has to wonder at how academic boards responsible of experiments with human subjects would have allowed Decety to use children as young as 5 and 6. The mind boggles.

@Lucia
It might be interesting to learn whether the stickers placed in the envelopes ever were given to other children in the school. They may have merely been counted and then tossed away.

Lucia, If you are correct and I would bet that you are, then a follow-up paper entitled “The Negative Association Between Lying to Children About Distributing Stickers to Less Fortunate Children and Children’s Altruism Around the World” would be in order. In fact, such a study should be carried out across the child’s lifetime and regressed against all future potentially negative behaviours e.g. criminality, cruelty to animals, sour dispositions, bet welching, dyspepsia, cheering for the Cubs, etc. 😉

I don’t understand why using the DRQ religiousness scale with regression is a bad idea. Can you explain this please?

C ,
even if one was to be ok with quantifying the unquantifiable (which begs the question, is a “religiosity” of 0.8 really the double of 0,4 and the opposite of a -0.8?), let’s take a look at the very paper on the DRQ, cited by the authors:

The DUREL [what the authors call DRQ] measures each of these dimensions by a separate “subscale”, and correlations with health outcomes should be analyzed by subscale in separate models.

What the authors do instead is defining “religiosity” as a normalized numerical scale combining arbitrarily TWO DIFFERENT questionnaires (“frequency” vs “strength”) and only THEN arranged in a LINEAR analysis.

Goddammit, it makes me sick

Link:
http://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/1/1/78

Another thought: the researchers made up a rather contrived story about why they had to ask to the children to SECRETLY share some stickers, and then promptly went to count how many any specific kid had shared. It is well attested that kids, like people, share more if they know they are watched: couldn’t it be that some suspected what sort of lying f*cks the researches were, further confounding the results?

Brignell argues that sarcasm tags shouldn’t be necessary. My apologies to Dr Brignell, chains like this make me think they are all the more important. Not only do we need sarcasm tags, we need escalated sarcasm tags. We also need “Yes I am seriously taking this side” tags. Then there needs to be the moderators of the tags to assess whether people are using the tags to troll with.

Epidemiology doesn’t work very well. They are still trying to isolate the Chipolte e-coli initiation point. I want the Chipolte opening up in my area to actually open up. I haven’t found out why they are the bees knees yet. Epidemiology is failing yet again at finding the source. The “usual” suspects didn’t pan out.

I am biased when I read Briggs work. He always seems to be pointing the same way I am pointing. I haven’t quite figured out if I am just pointing the the same way he is pointing. I do know that I am not pointing the same way that pretty much an study that has a p-value in it is pointing. I laugh at wee p-values because people get excited about them. I just keep looking at the data that contradicts the p-value (or the Big RR, OR, HR) and wonder at how they can ignore the uncertainty.

bernie1815: Perhaps they did have parental permission for the “game”. Lewendoski did the same with his global warming “studies”, including minors in the data. Even after complaints, the data does not appear to have been removed and I suspect he could do it again and if no one closely read the data, he’d get away with it. It’s a serious problem–scientists can no longer be trusted.

I agree with Steve E–a follow-up study should have been done here to see what the kids actually did with the stickers. That would have been more interesting and telling.

I took psychology 101,102,103, 201 in college. I got extra credit if I participated in the psychological studies. I didn’t really care what the results were. The one thing that all the studies had in common is that the statement of what they were studying provided to us was always a lie. I understood the necessity of the lie. It has always bothered me though. The lie always twisted the results a little. Unraveling the twist never quite seemed possible.

The dance never ends.

brad.tittle: I did studies as part of consumer psych in college. It is possible to set up experiments that tell the participant what is being tested–especially when comparing products such as taste of brand name versus generic. It’s tougher when looking at behaviours, since observation changes behaviour, so there are some “lies”. Those can be held to a minimum by not telling the participant what the study is about or what is being studied. A double-blind experiment helps. It could be considered a lie of omission, I guess, but I never really thought of it that way.

@Sheri
The whole experimental design for social psychology is a** backwards. If we break this one down, we have to ask why are they talking to children as opposed to other “religious” or “non-religious” populations. You presumably could get to the same findings simply by asking a random sample of people to show their tax returns and talk through their charitable donations. You don’t have to use subterfuge or lies. Simply ask individuals to explain their donations.

As for Lewandowsky, please do not get me started.

bernie1815: I agree this study is totally messed up. It did not have to be that way. There are much better ways to measure generosity and religiosity, assuming we can define them in an acceptable way. (I’m not sure that telling the kids this was a “game” is a lie—it was a game. What the kids were not told was that it was also part of an experiment. One really cannot tell the kids this or it skews the results. What do you consider a lie here?)

The study I linked to here covers some of the problems of self-reporting on generosity:
https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/17238/#comment-145732

@Sheri:
This can take us far afield. For me, whenever the experimenter does not disclose the purpose of the experiment in ways that the participant can understand then he or she is deceiving (i.e., lying to) the participant. The earlier issue of where the stickers went after the experiment strikes me as potentially an explicit lie but it is part and parcel of the larger deception. It also strikes me that the experiment and its results are far more potent when the participants understand its purpose and can essentially knowingly cooperate with the researcher. Imagine the potency of the Milgram experiment if the participants were in fact informed as to the purpose of the experiment – just like the concentration camp guards were.
As I mentioned, Herb Kelman triggered a big debate on these issues when he challenged the ethical standing of the Milgram experiments. (I took courses with Herb as a graduate student in 1974-5.) I also worked with Chris Argyris. His book “Inner Contradictions of Rigorous Research” has played a huge role in how I view these types of experiments. Chris would view the current study as having limited explanatory or practical value. He would likely argue that Decety would have done better to ask questions such as how do individuals decide how many stickers to share, what are the differences among those who share few stickers and those who share a lot and what do the experimental participants say would increase their willingness to share. Such a reframing of the research does not exclude the possibility of differences by religiosity. It offers an opportunity, in fact, to see the extent to which religious affiliations get manifested in both the actions and thought processes of research participants. It also makes it almost impossible to treat the participants as pawns (subjects) to be manipulated by the experimenter. It forces the experimenter to come to terms with the fact that human participants approach such experiments with theories of what the event (experiment) is about and to address any “demand characteristics” that might be perceived and that might impact individual decisions and behaviors.

bernie1815: I understand your objections to some research. Your examples are of bad experiments. There are ways around that—without explicitly lying. However, there are times when one cannot tell the participants the reason for the study. Humans tend to want to please and if they know what you are looking for, they tend to deliver just that, or deliberately avoid delivering what you want. Again, there are ways to avoid this. Experiments involving people in rooms doing things that are not part of life are not a good design. As noted, we could go way off the subject here, though experimental design is still on topic, I think. Perhaps I can find a study done properly and submit it to Briggs later on. For now, I’m out of time so I have to sign off. This is a most interesting discussion and I’ve enjoyed the exchanges.

@Sheri:
Likewise. 😀

I stopped reading this when it stated “human race”. Humanity is NOT a race, nor are their any races of humanity, we are a species. How hard can it be…

There goes Seamus MacManus’ “The Story of the Irish Race.”

Unless a race is a group showing common features within a species, pretty much the same as “breed” or “strain.”

Politically, of course, no such thing can be allowed, since knuckleheads have often tried to tie essential characteristics to them, such as parsimony to the Scots or stolidness to the Germans.

Again someone says indignantly “I stopped reading this…” and jumps right in to comment on why they did not bother to read the article. Is this a short cut to commenting or what? At least read the whole article and then enumerate your objections.
( Maybe we do need trigger warnings so people don’t start reading and then waste the two minutes it took before they quit and commented. Perhaps a quiz before people can comment so everyone actually reads the article?)

> I stopped reading this when it stated “human race”. Humanity is NOT a race, nor are their any races of humanity, we are a species. How hard can it be… <

This kind of pseudo-precision makes it hard to have a reasonable conversation. But, of course, if you stopped reading, you're apparently not interested in a reasonable conversation. "Human race" is a phrase with a long and distinguished pedigree. (A primary definition of "race" in the OED is "a group of persons … connected by common descent or origin." What's your definition of a race?) Have you expunged "sunrise" from your vocabulary because it's anti-scientific?

Neophyte question: the paper doesn’t define its terms (which, I understand is normal in this kind of paper). We are just supposed to know what is meant by “r” and “Msharing” and “?standardized”, etc.

So I am reading up to figure out what I am supposed to think these terms mean. I think I understand that when a paper speaks about “r”, then it is talking about a correlation coefficient. So saying that r=-0.173 for the relationship between parent religiosity and sticker count means than there is not a particularly strong correlation. Am I reading this correctly?

r is the correlation coefficient. The closer to one or negative one the value is, the stronger the correlation. (r ranges from -1 to 1). So -.173 is not a strong correlation.

I tried scanning through Briggs’ classic posts for standardized, but didn’t see anything right off hand. This is from a UCLA page on statistics:
“A standardized variable (sometimes called a z-score or a standard score) is a variable that has been rescaled to have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. For a standardized variable, each case’s value on the standardized variable indicates its difference from the mean of the original variable in number of standard deviations (of the original variable). For example, a value of 0.5 indicates that the value for that case is half a standard deviation above the mean, while a value of -2 indicates that a case has a value two standard deviations lower than the mean.”

M(subscript)sharing is the mean value for sharing. It’s followed by the SD, or standard deviation.

I have an alternate interpretation of the results from the Dictator Game: “religious” kids are less likely to be manipulated by lies told to them.”

After all, I’d be willing to bet that the perfectly-adjusted-moral-compass “researchers” didn’t actually give any of those “taxed” stickers to children who did not participate in the study. Further, I’d also bet that the of-course-we-don’t-have-an-axe-to-grind “researchers” knew which of their subjects were “religious” as they “leaned on them” to be generous.

Here’s another reason why the study is flawed. The kids weren’t asked to give their stickers to an actual living breathing child. They were asked to give it to an envelope. How many 5 or 6 yr olds would understand that? If they were asked to share it with another child standing right in front of him, I’m guessing the outcome would be much different.

I saw the study and scoffed, but good to see it disassembled by a statistical marksman. Briggs, you truly are the right’s official statistician.

This authors attitude seems to support the article he is mocking. It is not very altruistic to call someone else’s hard work ‘crap’ so dismissively. Perhaps if he shared his points with (what seems like) more of an open mind I’d be more inclined to have more faith in his opinion

Mr Briggs, your responses were MOST entertaining. You clearly know your stuff. The screeching of atheists was so satisfying to listen to. It’s clear from the get-go the authors of this study had a stick up their asses about religion and wanted to produce something to ruffle feathers. Upon its release atheists smelt the study, their pupils dilated, their fangs emerged and frenzy fed upon its sustaining gooey goodness. “Take that, Christians!”, they thought but didn’t say aloud to feign impartiality.

Enter one William M. Briggs and his demolishing critique. You Van-Helsinged this study. Straight up John-Wicked this thing.

Watching atheists sieve through the ashes on their knees for a morsel of sweet science is elicits no empathy from me. But how could it… my household is so religious right naw. Just ask me about my sticker collection.

The paper was recently retracted: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)30875-9

That’s right. All those sanctimonious self righteous little bible thumping prigs and gits who I knew in my youth who used to tell us we were going to hell and they were going to heaven were just unsupported anecdotal occurrences who grew up to develop stigmata and look skyward at regular intervals, moaning “forgive them, father, for they know not what they do”. You yourselves are incredibly altruistic…. Oh, wait, that guy who told my father that was an adult, and then the news broke that he was arrested on a morals charge with his own 14 year old daughter and adopted daughter of the same age….

One thing bothers me in this article:

“Science means unquestionable truth.”

This isn’t true at all.

An unquestionable truth is an absolute.

Scientists don’t deal in absolutes.

Scientists question everything.

@Simon B

In context, the OP was questioning the operationalization of ‘altruism’ via the ‘dictator game’. If you look at how the Decety et al 2015 was taken up by [primarily atheist?] blogs, you will see a lot of uncritical acceptance of that operationalization. So perhaps True Scientists™ question everything (I’m married to a scientist who knows that this doesn’t happen aplenty), but we’re talking a combination of actual scientists and those influenced by their research.