Risk-Taking and Religion Part 1

Posted on by cgill1138

Or, Business majors find people willing to risk retinal damage for a fucking quarter

He said to them, “Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in, because of the quantity of fish.-John 21:6, ESV

In Sunday school, I learned that with God, all things are possible. Failure is necessarily temporary if we fix our eyes on He who will make all things new. So I had no trouble whatsoever accepting the revelation I came across in this article that “thinking about religion makes people take risks. The same faith that inspired the disciples to acquire an oddly specific number of fish is sure still empowering America’s venture capitalists and so forth to live life on the edge.

“In a new study in Psychological Science, Stanford University researchers found that a belief in God[/]Faith in a higher power can encourage people to take greater risks than they would normally.” Is the takeaway from Slate. And not to worry, there is a practical applicaiton! “Understanding how the idea of God can impact people differently depending on the type of risk at hand could also have implications for developing treatment programs.” It’s a damn shame Christopher Hitchens isn’t alive anymore to chime in in the goings-on of his stomping grounds…. The author was kind enough to give us a link, so let’s follow this to the source.

It’s basically a reiteration of the Slate article (or rather, the Slate article is a reiteration of this one). That in and of itself is an interesting/annoying commentary on mankind. We’d rather rehash the same information and sell it as a new creation than just share something that already exists. What both articles have is a picture of a skydiver. You know what the study didn’t have? Any skydivers. What they had was a couple people who clicked a constructed ad for skydiving instead of one on video games or that purported to teach bribery. But desperate people filling out an online survey for pocket change isn’t fun, and the graphics people aren’t being paid to make things look mundane! The articles aren’t necessarily misrepresentations of the research. But they aren’t analyses or criticisms, either. It’s a shame; there doesn’t appear to be any real scrutiny or criticism, and that’s something essential part of not just science, but also the larger ballet of how we understand and relate to the world.

So let’s follow the source further–again, they were kind enough to provide one. Now, why Slate didn’t bother to click this link and do an original commentary is beyond me…. Here it is in its entirety if you don’t want to open a new tab:

“Religiosity and participation in religious activities have been linked with decreased risky behavior. In the current research, we hypothesized that exposure to the concept of God can actually increase people’s willingness to engage in certain types of risks. Across seven studies, reminders of God increased risk taking in nonmoral domains. This effect was mediated by the perceived danger of a risky option and emerged more strongly among individuals who perceive God as a reliable source of safety and protection than among those who do not. Moreover, in an eighth study, when participants were first reminded of God and then took a risk that produced negative consequences (i.e., when divine protection failed to materialize), participants reported feeling more negatively toward God than did participants in the same situation who were not first reminded of God. This research contributes to an understanding of the divergent effects that distinct components of religion can exert on behavior.”

So how did they prove this? You can read the rest for $35 bucks. The assertions are free, but the evidence isn’t. Yes, the system is designed that way. It’s a scam. It’s reprehensible. Fortunately, a delightful Khazakstani woman agrees with my sentiment, and is way more technologically savvy than me, and not a coward, and so we can read it all for free. Even before we read a single word, Let’s take a look at our authors. What do they want to be true? If this study were done by clergymen and published by the Vatican, wouldn’t it get some decent scrutiny from skeptics? Why would we give people with different vocations a pass? Let’s see, “Stanford Graduate School of Business”. So we have business majors publishing with the Association to for Psychological Science. Hey, it’s 2016; if business majors want to do psych research, you know, that’s cool. But it’s not a meaningless observation. That is, unless we believe business and psychology are essentially indistinguishable? So they’re coming into this from a business perspective. “Risk” is an insanely nebulous term. In the business world, risk tends to have financial connotations. You talk to a doctor about risk, and it’s a very different scenario. If God makes people take risks, doesn’t the kind of risk matter?

So let’s see what the study has to say.

The first three paragraphs are all fluff. It’s following the standard formula for the business: make a brief reference to research that has been done before, and show how your research will add to missing knowledge. While seemingly reasonable enough a thing to do, what this actually ends up doing is manipulating the reader into agreeing that preexisting research is all valid, even though it is not proved here. If you say it enough, people will think it’s true. Or, as the admin of a delightful series of Facebook groups (now defunct) put it: “repetition is the key to success”. Damn near nobody, including the people who write these papers, read the cited content thoroughly. An example from my own work experience: my bosses have a phrase that said our discipline is an X billion dollar a year industry, and the citations eventually linked to an internal search engine. It took me literally a minute to find out that we had been publishing a baseless figure for a decade. Peer review never caught it. Only people who have a sense of integrity check that kind of shit, which I am sad to keep learning means basically no one. I could spend another 3 hours going over the cited research (and if I follow the research they cite…), but that’s just the filler. I’ll never finish this damn essay at that rate.

Anyway, here is there actual hypothesis:

“We predicted that the association between the concept
of God and feelings of security would lead people who
are reminded of God to view risky behavior as less dan-
gerous than they otherwise would, which in turn would
increase their willingness to take risks.”
That is what they are seeking to prove, and it is under this lens we must hold their results. Again, the rest of their intro is filler.
There are several experiments within this paper, broken down into 7 studies (which are further broken down into sub-experiments). So put the kettle on now.
Study one drew its subjects from Amazon’s online fill-out-surveys-for-nickles system, which is a common way of setting up these types of experiments (read glorified surveys).
“Participants in Studies 1a through 1c
completed a scrambled-sentence priming task in which
they constructed 10 four-word sentences using 10 sets of
five words each. We randomly assigned participants to
two conditions: In the God condition, half of the word
sets included a word conceptually related to God (e.g.,
‘spirit,’ ‘divine’); in the control condition, all of the words
were neutral.”

Priming is an interesting topic, and that’s ultimately what all these experiments are based on. Nota bene that they didn’t invoke God Himself, but words “related to God”. Maybe it’s my upbringing, but I find that distinction rather salient. Perhaps the servants of Mammon do not, but there is plenty of theological tradition backing me up when I say there is a meaningful distinction between God and “spiritual” or “divine”. And my personal piety aside, when these God-like terms are equivocated (like, oh, say, in the title and all the media outlets), that lumps in this research with other research on God and psychology, etc., like say, the God part of the brain. These three experiments literally say nothing about God, but they are rhetorically lending credibility to a thesis that argues that “the concept of God and feelings of security would lead people who are reminded of God to view risky behavior as less dangerous than they otherwise would”. Intentional or not, this is wrong.

“In Study 1d… [p]articipants in the God condition read a short paragraph
about God; participants in the control condition read a
short paragraph about a non-God-related topic (both
paragraphs taken from Wikipedia”.

Yeah, but were those paragraphs reliable? Inquisitive English teachers want to know….
“Study 1a. Our dependent measure in Study 1a was the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking scale, a self-report measure assessing the likelihood that participants would engage in each of 40 risky behaviors across multiple domains”

That is, the DOSPERT–not to be confused with Dogbert from Dilbert (who himself should not be confused with the Frankish Dagobert kings of 7th century). The scale is basically useless for this, at the very least. I invite you to look through the whole thing, which puts a series of questions that range from “Admitting that your tastes are different from those of a friend” to “Piloting a small plane” to “Downloading proprietary software from the Internet” to “Engaging in unprotected sex”, which are all given the exact same weight on a scale from 1-5. You wouldn’t download a Cessna….

Results: “participants in the ‘God’ condition reported a higher propensity to take risks (M [mean]= 2.61,
SD [standard deviation] = 0.53) compared with participants in the control condition (M= 2.32, SD= 0.48)”
That is, the average score of all the various risky behaviors people merely said they were likely or unlikely to do on a scale of 1-5 was 2.6 for the primed group and 2.3 for the unprimed. Oh, and the standard deviation (a measure of how much variation there is in the answers) was .5 for each, which is greater than the difference between the two groups. The difference is statistically significant, but statistical significance does not equate to meaningful. If you round to the nearest half-point, both groups are the same. The results are slight, and the authors did not appear to analyze where the prime grouped differed in risk-taking responses. Did they want to start going bareback? Or Just want to tell their friends they actually would prefer staying in instead of going to the bar tonight? This proves nothing about actual risk-taking in real life, only how people report they are likely to do 40 random things on a scale of 1-5.

“In Study 1b… participants first described a recreational risk that they had been considering taking; following the scrambled-sentence manipulation, participants returned to their own description of the recreational risk and answered the question, “What is the likelihood that you will take this risk in the next month?” (1 = extremely unlikely).
Participants in the God condition reported a greater likelihood that they would take the recreational risk (M = 3.38, SD= 1.90) than did participants in the control condition (M = 2.77, SD = 1.88)”

So rounding to the nearest whole, we have identical answers of “somewhat unlikely”. Rounding to the nearest half-point, we’re still between “somewhat unlikely” and “neither likely nor unlikely”. Also, you have fairly substantial deviation, and from an absolute perspective, this shows that people who say they are likely or very likely to take a risk they generate for a survey are in the statistical minority. Frankly, that itself I think is a more interesting result. And then they don’t even follow up on this. People can talk a big game, but if people say they’re going to take a risk and then don’t, isn’t that worth knowing? Maybe certain kinds of people are more boastful than others. Maybe religious priming boosts how much you say you’re going to do without actually influencing what you end up doing. Not even a follow-up email, let alone independent corroboration.

“In Study 1c… we gave participants the opportunity to read about skydiving, a high-stakes risk.”

If I were a journalist, here’s where I’d put my nice stock photo of a skydiver. “I’d never do skydiving; it looks so dangerous!” -most peoples’ mothers. Skydiving is something that seems risky, but… is it actually dangerous? Not really, no. A gal my buddy had drinks with the other day explains it in journalistic prose. “In 2013, there were 3.2 million jumps out of airplanes in the United States, and only 24 people were killed in the process. That’s a death likelihood of about 8 in a million jumps.” Not risk free, but driving kills tens of thousands of people in the US every year (granted, something done more often, and you can’t compare the two apples to apples, but still). What skydiving is is something that signifies risk, but is itself not necessarily objectively risky.
What they are assuming the whole time is that everybody thinks skydiving is risky. Humans by and large completely suck at analyzing risk dispassionately and objectively. And we probably don’t all suck the same way. What they don’t get is a baseline of how risky people think something is going in; they’re relying on the sample size being large enough to iron out any aberrations, and based on the marginality of all their results, that’s not something they should be able to do without discussing that (place your bets now as to whether or not that will come up in the discussion section of the paper). Continuing on:
“Participants saw a list of six topics about
going skydiving and could choose to read about as many
topics as they wanted. (See the Supplemental Material
for the full list of topics, as well as for the results of a
pilot test confirming that the number of topics selected
reflects greater interest in skydiving, not greater anxiety
about the prospect of skydiving.)”
Well let’s go scroll down and find their link for the supplemental materials, check on that. Here we are. Click on it, see where it takes you. It links to an internal search engine, not the actual material (again, going to be behind a paywall). And peer review didn’t bother to flag that. That kind of crap might be excusable in elementary school. But for all the auspices peer-reviewed science publishing likes to dress itself with, there’s no excuse for that kind of crap. It is at absolute best lazy incompetence. And I can tell you from firsthand experience there’s a good chance it was a pernicious effort to obscure their methodology. So now we have to take their word on it–which I don’t.

“At the end of the survey, participants reported whether they had skydived before.”

…And!? Did that make a difference or not? Either way, why not tell us?

“Participants in the God condition chose a greater number of topics (M= 1.56, SD= 1.97) than participants in the control condition (M = 0.84, SD = 1.17).”
Yeah, people who think of God, who lives in the heavens (literally skies in many languages, including Biblical Hebrew, etc.) click on more things about diving from the heavens? Using one of those there airplanes to slip the surly bonds of Earth and touch the face of God? There can’t be any other psychological association but risk-taking? And the difference here is the widest so far, but it’s not even a whole “topic” extra. Almost (about seven tenths of one), but not even. Actually, the difference in deviation is more significant, by about eight tenths. But there’s no way it couldn’t just be priming people to think about the divine realm and looking at something that people might be afraid would kill them makes them more likely to look into it. They proved it unequivocally in supplemental material that’s buried somewhere. Just trust them.

They saved the best of these for last, though.

“Following the God manipulation, participants chose between two options for their final task. Option 1—the risky option—involved looking at extremely bright colors; we warned participants that this carried the risk of damage to their eyes, and in extreme cases could cause macular degeneration. Selecting this option required participants to sign a virtual waiver indicating that they were over 18 years old and aware of its risks.

Option 2 involved looking at darker colors that posed no risk; however, participants were told that this task was 2 min longer. Finally, they were told that if they selected Option1, they would receive a 25¢ bonus (see Fig. 1). In reality, both options were safe. Participants selected and completed the task of their choice.”

That’s absolutely fantastic. This alone is worth publishing. Business majors find people willing to risk retinal damage for a fucking quarter. Like, that’s what I would be selling to the media. Are people just blase? Skeptical of authority? Desperate for money in this still languorous post-recession economy? Is government intervention in safety regulations necessary to protect people from themselves? Come on, that’s were you actually have some room to speculate.

Although, back to the elementary stuff, they changed two variables here. The second experiment being long adds time as a variable? Why bother? Now you don’t know if that’s a factor or not.

“Participants in the God condition chose the risky task more often (95.5%) than did participants in the control condition (84.3%)”.

So if you’re a shitty boss, read that again carefully. 84% of people in low-earning situations will risk severe health damage for pocket change.

From the standpoint about God and risk, that is a substantial difference in percentage. But in a sample size of 68 people each, the difference in people is 8. So it’s slight, albeit statistically extant. This is really the closest thing they have to demonstrating their hypothesis. But they literally only picked to subjects, God and “a non-God-related topic”. Why is God so great? Maybe other topics would have an even more salient effect. Shotgun a bunch of topics, cram it in an ANOVA, and see what comes out. Because if you’re dealing with groups of a few dozen people, you’re bound to get fluctuations, and that perspective is helpful for understanding the salience of any given pick. Randal Munroe illustrates it wonderfully.

The discussion on the Study 1 experiments in its entirety:

“Studies 1a through 1d provided consistent evidence that
reminders of God increase individuals’ intended and
actual risk taking. We designed Study 2 to reconcile our
findings with the existing literature on religion and
immoral risk taking.”

Res ipse loquitur, amirite?

Study 2 analysis coming soon. To be continued…

Leave a Reply