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An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

psychologytoday.com

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Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#71
Conclusion of the new analysis:

In sum, Decety et al. [1] have amassed a large and valuable dataset, but our reanalyses provide different interpretations of the authors’ initial conclusions. Most of the associations they observed with religious affiliation appear to be artifacts of between-country differences, driven primarily by low levels of generosity in Turkey and South Africa. However, children from highly religious households do appear slightly less generous than those from moderately religious ones.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#72
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really sad to see and feels like it's becoming more common (maybe just because I'm paying closer attention). If it fits the narrative, accept first, retract later. It would be interesting to see view statistics on the original article vs the retraction.

It's not just narrative fitting. There is also a strong bias towards publishing results that seem surprising because that gets more readers. Of course, that also biases toward wrong results because wrong results are likely to be surprising.

Narrative fitting and surprise bias are largely orthogonal biases. Both are at work in this case. In the western press it is trendy to paint religion in a negative light, which is the narrative the paper reinforces. Imagine a bogus paper painting in an unfavorable light one of the western virtuous identities: not white, not religious, not male, not hetero. For example, "The Negative Association between Atheism and Children’s Altruism across the World". Or "The Negative Association between Homosexual Parents and Children’s Altruism across the World". Such papers will never be covered by over 80 media outlets without questioning, in spite of being surprising with respect of the narrative.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#73
post #13
post #2

"The paper received a great deal of attention, and was covered by over 80 media outlets including The Economist, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and Scientific American." And how many of these will cover the retraction? A dozen at most? And all those articles will be sitting out there, getting cited and read on occasion.

I think there is no need to be concerned that the retraction won't be widely covered in the long run in this particular case though -- all the religious interest groups will make a big fuss about this...

A good religious institution should rise above the fray and not even bother fussing about something like this. No-one who would otherwise have accepted Christ would have rejected him based on that study. It's the religious equivalent of a political cartoon--it changes no one's mind, it just fills up space and generates clicks/citations.

"Then Abraham said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.'" (Luke 16:31)

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#74
post #42

I think it's situations like this that result in society having such a hard time with 'science'. The term has been so heavily co-opted by fields that just don't have sufficient rigger for the term to hold weight. Yet, on various topics, we have this publicized attack of "your a science denier!". At the end of the day, there are two 'types' of science, one where I can take the results and make accurate predictions, an…

That's not the problem here. A statistical error was made, published, and then corrected. That's possible in physics, chemistry, or biology just as well.

> That's possible in physics, chemistry, or biology just as well.

Yet it seems to happen far less often, or at the very least, in less publicly impacting ways. Part of this is the media, but part of it is the participants themselves. If you discover something new in physics for example, either the public doesn't care, or they don't really know, they just get a faster iPhone processor a couple years down the line when the predictions hold. The folks in your field are even skeptical at first glance, "do you have a 6 sigma result?". "Ok, well, lets talk then, but I still wanna see it reproduced". Psychology on the other hand, some person does a half assed 'study' and uses it to claim knowledge of some important aspect of humanity.

I'd really encourage looking at the Higgs discovery press conference as a perfect example. To my recollection, there was little to no mentioned of the Higgs, just cold hard facts, perhaps at the end there was a 'this is consistent with the Higgs'. Only months later were many of those involved even comfortable enough with their level of certainty to really say 'this is the Higgs'. They are searching out knowledge, and don't want to declare having found it unless they are certain. This is _good_, it's what we want science to be, the summation of our current, highly confident, view of the world. We don't want 'science' to encompass all untested and unproven hypothesis about the world.

The difficult point which I have to concede is that terminology is important. Certainly many folks in physics that maybe haven't hit on a predictive result would like to be recognized as scientists, and rightly so if they are on the path toward this endeavor. But the populous is simple, they want clearly defined words, they want 'science' to be known fact. Outside introducing new words, I don't know how to resolve this. If we don't define 'science' as denoting that which is rigorous, then we can't use "science denier" as a term, regardless of the topic.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#75
post #42

I think it's situations like this that result in society having such a hard time with 'science'. The term has been so heavily co-opted by fields that just don't have sufficient rigger for the term to hold weight. Yet, on various topics, we have this publicized attack of "your a science denier!". At the end of the day, there are two 'types' of science, one where I can take the results and make accurate predictions, an…

How does your criticism apply to this scenario? The conclusion of the study (if correct) would in fact provide some predictive power: one would be able to make some predictions about a random child's generosity given their religious upbringing. It should also be repeatable, assuming the methodology for gathering and analyzing the data was published.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#76

Releasing your data should be a requirement for publication. If the original author had wanted to keep this a secret he could've withheld his data and nobody would've been able to correct him, there simply would've been discrepant studies.

I see where you're coming from, but would the subjects be comfortable with all their data becoming public?

I think you could, and should anyways, make the data anonymous. Just give every participant a GUID for a participant ID and add a step to purge personally identifiable information. Then you can share records without identity.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm an atheist and agree with you in part, I don't see how that's related to this story.

There aren't many discussions about religion on HN but a topic related to it should prompt some, and I have no other outlet. Reddit isn't a very good place for it either.

You pretty much torpedoed any chance of a productive discussion on the subject when you opened with "religion should be classified as a mental disorder." That comment is weapons-grade flamebait on a discussion board and probably not something you'd say in mixed company in real life either.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see where you're coming from, but would the subjects be comfortable with all their data becoming public?

I think you could, and should anyways, make the data anonymous. Just give every participant a GUID for a participant ID and add a step to purge personally identifiable information. Then you can share records without identity.

That didn’t work for the AOL research several years ago. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/09/your-secrets-liv...

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#79
post #64
post #42

I think it's situations like this that result in society having such a hard time with 'science'. The term has been so heavily co-opted by fields that just don't have sufficient rigger for the term to hold weight. Yet, on various topics, we have this publicized attack of "your a science denier!". At the end of the day, there are two 'types' of science, one where I can take the results and make accurate predictions, an…

Scientists usually try to distance themselves by saying those are soft science or even pseudo-science. This leads to the embarrassment of the demarcation problem[1] which is that no one can give a bright-line rule[2] to distinguish between the "real" science and pseudo-science. All of the demarcation criteria that have been proposed (such as Popper's falsifiability[3]) are inadequate in one way or another. In particu…

I think a lot of what you are talking about is due to a huge amount of 'papers' being nothing but coloration tests. Again, I think terminology is of utmost importance when discussing public perception so I would rather not talk about this as 'science'. It's 'research'.

I don't see a "No True Scotsman fallacy" here because I think I define it quite clearly: Can you provide accurate predictions? I'll concede that there exists a bit of grey area in that question, but the answer is heavily bi-modal.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#80
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the problem here. A statistical error was made, published, and then corrected. That's possible in physics, chemistry, or biology just as well.

> That's possible in physics, chemistry, or biology just as well. Yet it seems to happen far less often, or at the very least, in less publicly impacting ways. Part of this is the media, but part of it is the participants themselves. If you discover something new in physics for example, either the public doesn't care, or they don't really know, they just get a faster iPhone processor a couple years down the line when…

> Yet it seems to happen far less often, or at the very least, in less publicly impacting ways.

Does it? Do you have any data to indicate that, or even a good way to define your terms?

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