Religious children arent less generous after all

[rug]

01/18/2017 12:40 pm ET
ResearchGate

A study finding that children with a Christian or Muslim upbringing were less altruistic than their non-religious counterparts made waves in 2015. However, new analysis of the data reveals that this is not actually the case. In the study, developmental psychologists looked at five- to twelve-year-olds in Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey, South Africa, and the United States. The children were given stickers and provided the opportunity to share them with peers who were not present. The number of stickers shared provided a quantifiable indicator of each child’s altruism.

After interpreting the resulting data, the study’s authors concluded that children from religious families were less generous. However, new analysis shows that the original study failed to adequately control for the children’s nationality. After correcting this error, the authors of a newly published paper found no relationship between religiosity and generosity. We speak with first author Azim Shariff to learn more.

ResearchGate: What first led you to reexamine this data?

Azim Shariff: I had received several inquiries from journalists asking me to comment on the study since I’ve also done quite a bit of research on the topic of religion and prosocial behavior. After a couple of these inquiries, my colleagues and I started looking more closely at the original paper’s analysis section and noticed some oddities and omissions. So I asked the original author about it. He eventually sent me the original dataset so that we could run our reanalysis.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/researchgate/religious-children-arent_b_14248680.html

This reminds me of the back and forth over eggs.

[guillaumeb]

1. Eggs taste good, and they are good for you. And duck eggs are the best.

There is no debate in our house.

[rug]

2. I should have been more clear.

I meant the revolving studies on the health benefits of eggs versus the health detriment of cholesterol.

Throughout, I defended eggs. Call me an egg apologist.

[guillaumeb]

3. Then we are united in our defense of eggs. eom

[rug]

4. Comrade!

[tonedevil]

5. It would be...

shocking if it were true. My experience is that being religious isn't much of a predictive value regarding how one might act. Even within a single congregation there is a lot of variation between individuals.

[rug]

6. At the moment, it looks like religion is not a factor at all.

However, new analysis shows that the original study failed to adequately control for the children’s nationality. After correcting this error, the authors of a newly published paper found no relationship between religiosity and generosity.

[tonedevil]

7. I vaguely remember...

the study and thinking it didn't make much sense at the time. Your egg comparison is pretty solid.

[Jim__]

8. From the study by Shariff et al:

( Source )

Decety et al. <1> examined the relationships between household
religiosity and sociality in children sampled from six countries. We were
keenly interested in Decety et al. <1>’s conclusions about a negative
relationship between religiosity and generosity — measured with
the Dictator Game — as our team has investigated related questions,
often with potentially contrasting findings <2–5>. We argue here that,
after addressing peculiarities in their analyses, Decety et al. <1>’s
data are consistent with a different interpretation.

Given that previous studies (for example <6–8> ) have shown cross-
national variation in Dictator Game behavior, Decety et al. <1>’s approach
of aiming to include country-level fixed effects in their analysis, to
account for mean differences among countries, is sensible. But when they
included their categorically-coded country (1 = US, 2 = Canada, and so
on) in their models, it was entered not as fixed effects, with dummy variables
for all of the countries except one, but as a continuous measure. This treats
the variable as a measure of ‘country-ness’ (for example, Canada is twice
as much a country as the US) instead of providing the fixed effects they
explicitly intended. We have repeated Decety et al. <1>’s intended analysis by
using actual fixed effects, along with their model specifications, and then
explored other plausible specifications and modelling approaches. Our
analyses reveal meaningfully different results from those originally reported.

…

That sounds like a hell of a mistake. Good catch by the reviewers.

[SwissTony]

9. Was this in a refereed journal?

I wouldn't let the authors near data again and I'd have strong concerns about the original referees. The new results aren't "meaningfully different" from the old results because the old results don't have any meaning.

[Jim__]

10. Current Biology.

Reference 1 from the Shariff study:

1. Decety, J., Cowell, J. M., Lee, K., Mahasneh, R., Malcolm-Smith, S., Selcuk, B.,
and Zhou, X. (2015). The negative association between religiousness and children’s altruism
across the world. Curr. Biol. 25, 2951–2955.

The original report is available here.