…paper with a lot to be desired
Or, little kids are sociopathic little shits, confirms science
So articles like this one in the Economist have been making the rounds amongst my atheist friends. If they’re sharing from an atheist social group, it usually comes with a tagline to the effect “atheists more generous than religious groups”. Here’s the original study (kudos to the Economist for linking to it).
The first flaw with the atheists’ assertion as that this tests for atheism. It doesn’t necessarily, it samples people who are “non-religious”. I know, we could spend three hours on the semantics of it, but as far as how people choose to label themselves, of the non-religious segment in America, less than a third of that group would describe themselves as atheist or agnostic. I hope it’s not too much to take on faith, but consider that there may be a difference in the kind of person who grows up in a family that’s just “unaffiliated” with religion or believes in “nothing in particular” than a family that is involved in religious discussion and debate to the point of choosing to label themselves as an atheist or agnostic. (Source).
But anyway, this study examines children, technically, a single child in a household, from various countries and coming from families of differing religious backgrounds. They had the kids play a common game used in psych experiments to quantify altruism, because if you have numbers anything you say is therefore scientific fact. In this game, kids are allowed to pick 10 stickers to keep from a selection of 30 stickers. They are then told that the researchers won’t have time to get to all the kids and let them pick out stickers, so they ask if the kids would be willing to share any of the ones they just picked out. The number of stickers these kids choose to give is used as a measure of their altruism. The kids were also shown a video (I think–the procedure just refers to an existing setup, and it doesn’t seem worth the effort to dig that up) about people having an altercation, and then asked follow-up questions. Their answers to the questions are used to quantify their empathy.
What they found is that across the board, kids in religious homes were less altruistic than the kids in non-religious homes. And by religious, they mean Christian and Muslim, because they didn’t have large enough sample sizes of other religions to work with (to be fair, it’s good that they didn’t try to analyze religion as a factor with only 5 Hindus). The Christian children, on average, gave out 3.3 stickers, the Muslims 3.2, and the non-religious 4.1, for a total average difference of a bit under 1 whole sticker. Those are the data that show that atheists > Christians. If you look at the regression analysis of religious background and altruism, you get a correlation (r^2) of .184 (the closer that number is to 1.0, the stronger your argument that two things are correlated). That’s not exactly a strong correlation. It’s an “ehhhh, yeah, there’s a bit of a realtionship, I suppose”, not a “oh, yeah, for sure”. It’s hardly damning.
They also determined that “children in Muslim households judged interpersonal harm as more mean than children from Christian and non-religious households, and children from Christian households judged interpersonal harm as more mean than children from non-religious households”. And by “mean”, they mean cruel, not mean as in a statistical average…. Based on the scores from the vaguely described test, data for which are not given numerically, but graphically, it looks like the non-religious kids judged “meanness” as 5.1, Christians as 5.3, and Muslims as 5.6. Yeah, so, those numbers don’t mean anything to me either.
You’ll recall I said these were kids coming from different countries. Their samples are specifically from “Chicago (USA), Toronto (Canada), Amman (Jordan), Izmir and Istanbul (Turkey), Cape Town (South Africa), and Guangzhou (China)”. I hope that your reaction to that is something to the effect of “Wait, maybe there are some other variables at play here. Aside from the massive cultural differences, there’s stuff like economic background to look into, right?” This was the single biggest flaw in the paper, in my opinion. There are an absolute shit-ton of variables involved in having an international sample (these are called “confounding” variables). They got about a thousand people overall, which is probably decent enough for a survey in one country, but for 6? There’s way too much to consider, and their considerations leave a lot to be desired. For example, socioeconomic differences were decided based on the mother’s level of education. That’s it. Relative affluence and poverty are probably going to have a meaningful effect on how much your kid is willing to give away, but that’s examined through the lens of maternal formal education. The notion that female education is a solid measure of that kind of immensely complex situation is an incredibly lazy supposition, and I’m extremely skeptical of its efficacy as a marker.
Moreover, the analysis of the influence of multiple variables is not even mentioned in the altruism part of the study. I assume that means they didn’t find anything when they ran an ANOVA/ANCOVA (statistics tests used to compare multiple variables), but they don’t mention it. I’d be curious to have that confirmation, because maybe they didn’t bother. Or worse, they did, it destroyed the religious angle in that context, and they left it out so their data would look more interesting than it is in fuller context.
However, they made a graph showing religious affiliation and age as variables, and interestingly, the correlation (r^2) between age and altruism is .408! That’s way stronger (although still not spectacular by any stretch of the imagination) than religious affiliation. The strongest indicator they found is that older kids are more willing to share stickers. But they aren’t running that as the headline, because everyone who’s ever worked with kids over differing ages (which includes, you know, parents of kids at least in their teens) already knew that, and you can’t rile people up with that like you can with religion.
Share your stickers, and don’t be a judgmental asshole because some half-baked study gives you ammo.