Does religion make kids less altruistic?

I don't know if religion makes kids less altruistic. But I do know that this study doesn't do much to answer the question, and The Guardian needs better science reporting.

I’d like to get a little wonky, in my reflections on this paper. But here’s the TL;DR: the conclusions drawn by the study and the media's representation of those conclusions are way broader than the research warrants. A better summary of this paper's core finding would be, "Don't stereotype kids and their likelihood to share stickers with unknown children based on their family's religiosity."

Here’s what this study actually found: kids from non-religious households within a non-random and non-representative sample shared about 4 stickers with an unknown stranger, while kids from religious households from the same non-random and non-representative sample shared about 3 stickers with an unknown stranger. (The gap is actually a bit smaller than that.) The standard deviations were about 2.5 for all groups...which means that within each of these groups, variation between individual kids was a lot wider than the gap between the groups. There were lots of kids from religious households who were a lot more likely to give stickers to random schoolmates than the average. There were also lots of non-religious kids who were more likely to do the same. And the same holds for those who didn't give as many stickers. In other words, the study isn’t actually telling us about “religious” or “non-religious” kids more broadly.

Given that, is the paper actually telling us how altruistic these particular kids were? I don’t think so. For example, we don't know what the kids planned to do with their stickers later. Did they plan to keep them, or maybe share them with siblings or parents? Also, we don’t know how much these stickers were of value to the various children. For kids in lower-income countries (such as the Islamic countries in the study), were these stickers more appealing to them because stickers and toys are harder to come by? So I don’t think this is really a study of “altruism” either.

What's more, the amount of this correspondence that a regression analysis attributes to "religion" is pretty small (r=-.15) and is about equal to differences based on "nationality." (r=.1). (That means that religion and/or nationality correlate with about 15% or 10% of the variation in the data...in other words, the data fits very loosely.) It's possible that the "religion" variable is explained away by the "nationality" variable, and I'd bet that these two variables are highly correlated to each other. These r-values mean you should definitely not be confident in a prediction of “altruism” for any particular kid, based on the religion of their household. What you’ve got is a very fuzzy cloud of data points, with a very small tilt.

Also I put "nationality" in quotes, because the "countries" studied are Chicago (USA), Toronto (Canada), Amman (Jordan), Izmir and Istanbul (Turkey), Cape Town (South Africa), and Guangzhou (China). Obviously, you can't generalize to these nations based on samples from some cities in those nations. And this raises the further question: where did the researchers sample within those cities? They can't even generalize to the populations of the cities, since the experiments took place within particular schools. Would I understand people in Chicago if I picked a school and talked to 100 kids from that school? Even worse, depending on their sampling methods and sizes these results might not even generalize to the _schools_ in which they occurred...let alone the cities or nations! (The methodology section of the paper doesn’t tell us much about their sampling methods, so I’d assume that they weren’t random.) The generalization to "religion" is also extremely broad, in a similar way. Were the South African Christian kids from churches that traditionally embraced apartheid, for example? In Chicago, did they hit a patch of Jehova's Witnesses, or nominal Catholics, or devout Catholics, or kids from JPUSA? These are all very different groups! The upshot is that this study isn't actually designed to draw inferences about "altruism," "nationality" or "religion." It is designed to statistically characterize a non-random, non-represenative sample of kids, based on their likelihood to share stickers with strangers from their schools. When the researchers did that, they found extremely small correlations, and tons of variation.

I think this nicely illustrates some of the weaknesses of this kind of experimental design for social psychology research. It's easy in these cases to operationalize variables in ways that make findings seem far more sweeping than they are. (This also relates to the fact that tons of psychology research doesn't yield replicable results. I think you can see a lot of ways that efforts to replicate this study with different sampling methods could easily yield very different results and interpretations.) In its very limited ‘literature reivew’, the study links to a critique of survey research, which makes sense. There is quite a bit of survey research that has found that religion and giving correspond well to each other. Still, the critiques of this survey research have some merit: surveys of self-reported giving probably are subject to self-reporting effects, and studies that include documentation of actual giving are clearly stronger than studies that only rely on self-reporting. However, experimental designs of the sort in this study have a lot of shortcomings as well, including weird variable operationalization (“altruism”) and overgeneralization. This is why scientists routinely complain about the way individual research studies are sensationalized in the media. Thinking scientifically, this study very clearly falls in the "needs more research" column before I would even consider its findings on "altruism," "religion," and "nationality" in children to be corroborated. The word "experiment" often sounds impressive, and more reliable than things like survey research. But it is really easy for experiments, especially in fields like social psychology, to be wildly misleading. This is a nice example of how that happens.

Having said that, I do think a more basic inference from the paper is probably true: I don’t think religiosity has a terribly strong relationship with sharing among children. At the very least, the relationship is probably a lot weaker than we tend to think. People are naturally moral, and we find that people share and are hospitable all around the world, regardless of religious background or lack thereof. Also, individual variation is often greater than group variation, although human moral psychology and other cognitive biases can easily blind us to this fact. Unfortunately, the way this study was written and has been reported, it is likely to contribute to predictably irrational stereotypes. That’s really too bad, because if the exact same research had been written up and reported differently, it could have helped counter those kinds of stereotypes. In that case, the inferences would have been more warranted by the evidence in the study.

In other words, the study helps us see the point of "The Good Samaritan" more clearly: don't focus on peoples' group membership. Remember that even your enemies (meaning people from groups that are engaged in violent conflict with your group) can be generous. In that, you should let them present a challenging moral example to you, when you encounter opportunities to help strangers in need.

Red Cups: Recent Trends in Historical Perspective

Abstract: After Toby Keith's seminal work on red cups in
2011, all subsequent discourse has merely been footnotes. This includes the recent micromicromicrotrend of red cup opposition, and the micromicrotrend of red cup opposition opposition, as well as the micromicromicro trends of red cup (opposition opposition) opposition and red cup opposition opposition opposition.

Thanks, Google Trends.

The Pope and the Hypocrisy of War (Part 3)

Last month on the Supper Table: war is a hypocritical hellhole, and it is probably impossible to figure out if a war was a "good thing" in any particular way. You're probably fooling yourself if you've got a confident historical answer to questions like this one: "Did the American Revolution help or hinder the cause of universal human rights?" It's a good question. It's also good to recognize that we can't answer it very well.

Still, there are some things that we can say with more confidence. For example, war itself is always an enormous catastrophe. And where war itself is made materially impossible (or nearly impossible), it doesn't happen (or almost never happens). Making war materially impossible isn't a pipe dream. It's been done, at least among certain nations.

Following World War II there was a widespread sense of the inevitability of ongoing war in Europe. Then, the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (in spite of opposition from French and German coal and steel interests) made war logistically impossible. As intended, this agreement kicked off the ongoing economic and political integration of Europe. This approach involved a dramatic shift for France away from the traditional response of conquering a nation and subjecting it to economic exploitation and humiliation as "payment" for the moral debt of war.

Of course, since the Great Recession, the European project has shown some of its own dark side in the economic devastation of Spain, Portugal and Greece. This dark side relates largely to the incompleteness of the economic union ... ie, sharing a currency and monetary policy without actually sharing money or forgiving debt has caused catastrophic unemployment, suffering and wasted human potential in the more peripheral countries.

It is in the gap between the ECSC and Europe today that I think we can most clearly see the roots of actual peace in history: forgiveness (even for enormous failures), sharing (to a degree that is uncomfortable) and the integration that they make possible. Where debts of both the moral and financial sort are forgiven, a way can be made for peace and human flourishing.

Unfortunately, nations are usually moved to the point of asking forgiveness, or granting it, by the threat of death on an enormous scale. And even then, only rarely.

Still, I find hope in the simple core of what actually works. The problem isn't that it is difficult to understand, or even that difficult to do when compared to the alternatives. We just don't tend to do it as a first resort, as individuals or nations. But we can. And we ought to.

This way is the only real alternative to the hypocrisy of war.

The Pope and the Hypocrisy of War (Part 2)

Happy Fourth of July!

What a strange thing to say. Today, we're celebrating a Declaration of Independence which was, effectively, also a declaration of war. It's fitting that we blow lots of stuff up. The main, immediate, effect of this declaration was that a lot of human beings maimed and killed each other.

Longer-term, it's basically impossible to say whether the war contributed to the recognition of human dignity and human rights, or detracted from it. Maybe it made life far worse for Native Americans and slaves in North America, and we would've just ended up like Canada without the war. But for all we know, slavery might have spread throughout a far more powerful British Empire, France would still be an oppressive monarchy and Canada wouldn't be Canada at all. Speculative fiction is a far smarter reaction to these questions than earnest attempts to answer them. Our answers tell us something about ourselves, and nothing about history. To answer the instrumental question, in this case, is to spin mythic stories.

So what can be said, if we don't want to be entangled in myth? I think we can say this: the Revolutionary War was a catastrophe, which is implicated in a chain of other catastrophes. Or maybe it is just part of the broader catastrophe that is the history of war. More bodies added to the piles of human wreckage. If you want to debate the merits of the Revolution, this is a better discussion question: Is it best understood as a distinct catastrophe in a wider chain of events, or is it really just a part of a far wider-ranging historical catastrophe? At least this question produces its strange, inedible little fruits within reasonable parameters.

So how does this relate to the Pope and the hypocrisy of war? I've already suggested that I think Sherman's total war tactics were defensible. But what do I mean by that? I just mean that a person can have good reasons for supporting them. While that's a lot more than people are often willing to grant in discussions like these, it isn't much. Defensible doesn't mean right, or ideal, or actually the least bad option. I'd like to know if Sherman's tactics were all of those things, too ... but unfortunately, I don't see how anyone could go about finding it out, with any real confidence. Here, too, our answers probably say more about us than they do about history.

But there are some things we can say with confidence. Here, too, we know that it was a catastrophe. I'm more than happy to say that the catastrophe was one that the South largely brought on itself, and that I can only celebrate the fact that the profound sin of slavery was ended...but that's only because I think slavery is so completely execrable that we should heap every ounce of blame on it that we can.

Here as we talk about the curse of slavery, worthy of all blame, I think we might begin to come around the corner and see what Pope Francis was suggesting, when he said that Christians can't manufacture arms without hypocrisy. If Christians are committed to anything at all, it is the continued Lordship of a Galilean peasant who was killed by the Roman Empire while saying, "Forgive them, Father, because they don't know what they're doing." Death is the heart of this discussion, and Christians believe that he defeated death and torture by passing through them, and emerging victorious.

If that's who you really think is in charge, then the hypocrisy of war can hardly find any place to grip your soul. Of course Christians aren't manufacturing bombs to destroy the tracks. They're too busy smuggling people out, as well as they can, as the wreckage of history piles up.

In the last post in this series, I'll talk about things that really do seem to work, to mitigate the catastrophes of history. (Hint: war isn't really one of them.)

Negation and pluralism

The New York Times has a nice piece about pattern recognition and confirmation bias here. And it includes a very simple puzzle / trick!

They draw a good lesson from their devious little exercise: you should try to find things that show you how you're wrong, not just things that show you how you're right. Our tendency to avoid seeing how we're wrong causes quite a few silly mistakes, including at high levels in the government and corporate worlds.

There are other lessons here, too...about how and why to treat people decently when you disagree. Fair warning: puzzle spoilers.

******

In this puzzle, we're basically asked to find the pattern in these numbers: 2,4,8. For a lot of people, the most obvious pattern is that the numbers double as you move from one to the next. But what other rules could describe this pattern? The New York Times had chosen the rule, "The numbers increase each time." But what other rules could there be? Tons! They're all single digits. They're all separated by commas. They're all numbers. They're all alphanumeric symbols. They can all be generated on a standard American keyboard without pressing "Shift." They're all derived from Arabic numerals, but don't closely resemble their Arabic equivalents (by my judgment)...unlike 1 or 9. And so on. We could probably sit around identifying patterns, or underlying rules, for the rest of our lives. Just imagine the possibilities once you consider how the pattern here relates to important years in history...

If you're a certain kind of oddball, that might even sound fun.

 But there's something more important in this exercise as well. Because we're human, our brains tend to assume that there is "an" answer to a question, even when there are a lot. We can only recognize the possible validity of other answers when we take the hard step of saying, "I might be wrong." And actually meaning it. Negation!  However, the really good stuff happens after we've done that. We can start considering all of the other things that might be right. Then, we can start to value the perspectives of other people who might just be right. Pluralism!

But obviously, I'm right about this particular pattern: pluralism needs negation.

The Pope and the Hypocrisy of War (Part 1)

The Pope said that if you manufacture weapons, and call yourself a Christian, then you're a hypocrite. In the same speech, he asked why the Great Powers didn't bomb the railway lines used to perpetrate the Holocaust.

A lot of the headlines presented the Pope's message like this: "The Pope Says Weapon Manufacturers Can't Call Themselves Christians." If you look at the headline, rather than the actual statement, this raises a perfectly good question: "How were the Christians supposed to bomb the railway without weapons manufacturers?" It looks like the Pope is contradicting himself, in a loose sense. At least, he seems to be condemning people for failing to engage in the hypocrisy of war. That's an odd thing to do.

I have no idea what the Pope was actually thinking, but I do think there's something there. First, notice what he actually said. He didn't forbid Catholics from manufacturing arms. (That would be something completely different...and a very big deal.) He just said that if you do that, and call yourself a Christian, then you're a hypocrite. True. War, and the industries that support it, are a filthy business. They always, always, always result in the death of innocents and innocence. The military people I most admire are the ones who frankly admit that they are doing evil, so that good might come...and they don't see any other way. (This is certainly not an argument for committing atrocities or doing evil so that good might come!)

For example, William Tecumseh Sherman was a relatively humane general who made extensive use of property destruction to end the Civil War more quickly, and in the service of a just cause, if ever there was one. (Ending legalized North American slavery.) At the same time, he was also a monster, and he realized this. I admire his cause and his relative freedom from illusion...and I think that his tactical judgments were smart, and morally defensible.

If you want to participate in war because you think its evils are the least bad option available, I'm sympathetic to that. What else can you do? But don't expect to avoid hypocrisy, in the process.
 
I think that the Pope's actual words challenge the notion of "purity of arms," the idea that there can be a morally righteous military. That is different than forbidding something. It takes away the romance of war and the illusion of moral purity and superiority. By all means, war and its industries should be deprived of any claim to righteousness. I don't think Sherman would be too upset if you called him a hypocrite. I imagine he'd say, "Yep. War is hell. I did what needed to be done. Hypocrite is one of the better things you might call me."

Alienation and Critical Thinking

Sometimes, I get the idea in my head that alienating audiences encourages critical thinking. Thanks, Brecht and David Lynch.

But in reality, I think that people are most able to think deeply, and critically, when they feel secure and comfortable. We need a secure base from which to explore. Even grown-ups.