Post by ignorantianescia on Dec 6, 2015 14:28:00 GMT
(Apologies to Dawkins and fans for the terribly offensive thread headline.)
Anyway, you may recall the media buzz recently generated by a study that concluded religious children were less altruistic than non-religious children. And of course the self-congratulatory comments were right on cue, without a second thought about possible compounding issues and the likelihood of these results.
Religion Dispatches got to the meat of the study and made mincemeat of it.
Are kids from more religious families more or less altruistic than their peers from less-religious families?
That’s what a high-profile new study from University of Chicago neuroscientist Jean Decety and a global crew of collaborators sought to determine. In the course of the study, published in the journal of Current Biology, the researchers use something called the “children’s dictator game,” a.k.a. stickerpalooza. Here’s how it worked:
Step one. Go to an elementary school. Find a child. Place a set of 30 stickers in front of the child. Tell the child to pick her favorite ten.
Step two. Introduce a plot twist. Tell the kid that not everyone in school could participate in the sticker bonanza. Fortunately, there is a chance to share: the kid can pick between zero and 10 of her favorite, cream-of-the-crop stickers, and set them aside in an envelope. That envelope will go to another person in the school. Afterward, the kid will walk out with whatever stickers she chose to keep.
In order to keep things nice and relaxed, this sharing stage is anonymous. Nobody watches the kid set her stickers aside. She doesn’t know which classmate receives them, and the classmate doesn’t find out who donated them. But, later, the researcher can count the shared stickers, and have some approximation of the child’s moral fiber.
In their study, Decety and his colleagues gave the sticker test to 1,170 kids at schools in six cities—Amman, Cape Town, Chicago, Guangzhou, Istanbul, and Toronto. “Altruism was calculated as the number of stickers shared out of 10,” they write. The researchers also gave the kids another test, in which they watched videos of people hurting other people, and then judged (a) how mean the bullies were, and (b) how much punishment the bullies deserved.
Then Decety and his collaborators went to the kids’ parents and asked them questions about the religious identity and practices of the family, and about how moral they thought their kids were.
Here’s the zinger: according to Decety and his colleagues, kids from more religious households are less altruistic, and more apt to deal out punishment, than kids from non-religious households. Corollary zinger: on the punishment front, Muslim kids are even more vindictive than Christians.
[...]
The Cubit is all for science—and Darwin! In fact, that’s why we feel obligated to point out that Decety’s paper is deaf to interdisciplinary critiques, premised on an obsolete and misleading view of the world, fundamentally unable to acknowledge its own hubristic assumptions, and, consequently, unlikely to produce meaningful insights into reality and the human condition.
religiondispatches.org/religious-kids-are-more-selfish-the-stickers-dont-lie/
Bon appétit!
I must say it really shows that not one of the study's authors had any grounding in religious studies (symptomatic of American social science about religion, where relatively few have training in religious studies or theology - unlike American humanities disciplines on religion which produce a lot of excellent output). As The Cubit's author says the definition of religion matters, not for its 'final answer' but for the reflection it causes about method.
Another discouraging note is how gullible the press still is about a single study. One paper means nothing in social science, so the intelligent tactic to resort to (and report on) meta-analyses. But business as usual dictates that journos must jump on one catchy conclusion.
Anyway, you may recall the media buzz recently generated by a study that concluded religious children were less altruistic than non-religious children. And of course the self-congratulatory comments were right on cue, without a second thought about possible compounding issues and the likelihood of these results.
Religion Dispatches got to the meat of the study and made mincemeat of it.
Are kids from more religious families more or less altruistic than their peers from less-religious families?
That’s what a high-profile new study from University of Chicago neuroscientist Jean Decety and a global crew of collaborators sought to determine. In the course of the study, published in the journal of Current Biology, the researchers use something called the “children’s dictator game,” a.k.a. stickerpalooza. Here’s how it worked:
Step one. Go to an elementary school. Find a child. Place a set of 30 stickers in front of the child. Tell the child to pick her favorite ten.
Step two. Introduce a plot twist. Tell the kid that not everyone in school could participate in the sticker bonanza. Fortunately, there is a chance to share: the kid can pick between zero and 10 of her favorite, cream-of-the-crop stickers, and set them aside in an envelope. That envelope will go to another person in the school. Afterward, the kid will walk out with whatever stickers she chose to keep.
In order to keep things nice and relaxed, this sharing stage is anonymous. Nobody watches the kid set her stickers aside. She doesn’t know which classmate receives them, and the classmate doesn’t find out who donated them. But, later, the researcher can count the shared stickers, and have some approximation of the child’s moral fiber.
In their study, Decety and his colleagues gave the sticker test to 1,170 kids at schools in six cities—Amman, Cape Town, Chicago, Guangzhou, Istanbul, and Toronto. “Altruism was calculated as the number of stickers shared out of 10,” they write. The researchers also gave the kids another test, in which they watched videos of people hurting other people, and then judged (a) how mean the bullies were, and (b) how much punishment the bullies deserved.
Then Decety and his collaborators went to the kids’ parents and asked them questions about the religious identity and practices of the family, and about how moral they thought their kids were.
Here’s the zinger: according to Decety and his colleagues, kids from more religious households are less altruistic, and more apt to deal out punishment, than kids from non-religious households. Corollary zinger: on the punishment front, Muslim kids are even more vindictive than Christians.
[...]
The Cubit is all for science—and Darwin! In fact, that’s why we feel obligated to point out that Decety’s paper is deaf to interdisciplinary critiques, premised on an obsolete and misleading view of the world, fundamentally unable to acknowledge its own hubristic assumptions, and, consequently, unlikely to produce meaningful insights into reality and the human condition.
religiondispatches.org/religious-kids-are-more-selfish-the-stickers-dont-lie/
Bon appétit!
I must say it really shows that not one of the study's authors had any grounding in religious studies (symptomatic of American social science about religion, where relatively few have training in religious studies or theology - unlike American humanities disciplines on religion which produce a lot of excellent output). As The Cubit's author says the definition of religion matters, not for its 'final answer' but for the reflection it causes about method.
Another discouraging note is how gullible the press still is about a single study. One paper means nothing in social science, so the intelligent tactic to resort to (and report on) meta-analyses. But business as usual dictates that journos must jump on one catchy conclusion.
