Notebook per
SSC Journal Club: Analytical Thinking Style And Religion
Citation (APA): alexander, s. (2017). SSC Journal Club: Analytical Thinking Style And Religion [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Parte introduttiva
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 2
SSC Journal Club: Analytical Thinking Style And Religion By scott alexander
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 9
Gervais and Norenzayan
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Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 11
They make some people take the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), a set of questions designed so that intuition gives the wrong answer and careful thought gives the right one. Then they ask those people a couple of questions about their religious beliefs (most simply, “do you believe in God?”). They find that people who do better on the CRT (ie people more prone to logical rather than intuitive thinking styles) are slightly less likely to be religious.
Nota - Posizione 14
x ESPERIMENTO CLASSICO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 14
religion is associated with intuitive thinking styles, atheism with logical thinking styles.
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they go on to do a couple of interventions
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priming logical thought moves people away from religion.
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If this seems fishy to you, it seemed fishy to the Reproducibility Project too.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 20
Let’s all join together in the Failed Replication Song:
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 23
“primed” people (n = 57) by making them look at one of two sculptures; either Rodin’s The Thinker,
Nota - Posizione 23
PRIMED
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replication of Study
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...
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It was essentially negative;
Nota - Posizione 41
c
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two out of their three measures of religion, there was no significant rationality/ atheism correlation,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 42
on the third it was much smaller than the original study, so small it might as well not exist.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 44
“subsequent direct replications of this correlation have pretty conclusively shown that a weak negative correlation does exist between these two constructs”.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 49
Then they move on to their replication of Study 2,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 49
This is the one with Rodin’s The Thinker.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 51
They found no effect of sculpture-viewing
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 55
studies 3, 4, or 5. But Studies 3 and 4 have been investigated by a different group in a slightly different context (CRT on liberal/ conservative) and they find that the prime doesn’t even work;
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 60
Seven bajillion vaguely similar priming-related studies have failed replication before. Now it’s seven bajillion and one.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 63
when I see studies that I think shouldn’t go wrong, go wrong, I like to take a moment to be suitably worried.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 64
My usual understanding of why these sorts of studies go wrong is a combination of overly complicated statistical analysis with too many degrees of freedom, unblinded experimenters subtly influencing people, and publication bias.
Nota - Posizione 66
x STUDIO NN REPLICABILE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 66
These studies don’t have overly complicated statistical analysis. They’re really simple.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 67
Do a randomized experiment, check your one variable of interest, do a t-test, done.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 69
That leaves publication bias.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 70
the original paper contained five different studies,
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So how do you get publication bias on seven different but related experiments performed in the same lab?
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 84
A commenter brings up that they used different measures of religious belief in each study,
Nota - Posizione 85
PROXY
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“subsequent direct replications
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Pennycook et al (2016) does a meta-analysis of all the work in this area. He finds thirty-five different studies totaling over 15,000 subjects comparing CRT scores and religious beliefs. Thirty-one are positive. Two of the remaining four detected an effect of the same magnitude as everyone else, but didn’t have enough power to prove it significant. The remaining two negative studies are delightful and deserve to be looked at separately.
Nota - Posizione 100
X LETTERATURA
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McCutcheon et al’s is titled Is Analytic Thinking Related To Celebrity Worship And Disbelief In Religion?.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 107
The other one was Finley et al’s Revisiting the Relationship between Individual Differences in Analytic Thinking and Religious Belief: Evidence That Measurement Order Moderates Their Inverse Correlation.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 109
if you measure rationality first and then ask about religion, more rational people are less religious,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 110
But if you measure religion first and then ask about rationality, there’s no link.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 114
Pennycook responds by pointing out seven other studies in his meta-analysis that ask for religion before
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 119
31 good studies finding an effect and 2 good studies not finding it.
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publication bias,
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Is this effect true only in college students
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No. Browne et al look at 1053 elderly people’s CRT scores and religiosity, and find the effect at the same level
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 128
Is this effect simply an artifact of IQ?
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 129
there’s some evidence that IQ increases irreligion, and CRT score correlates heavily with IQ
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 131
This is the claim of Razmar & Reeve,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 132
it’s not that more rational people are less religious, it’s that smarter people are both more rational and less religious.
Nota - Posizione 133
TESI RAZMAR
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Pennycook responds
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both IQ and CRT are independently correlated with irreligion,
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religious people take less time to solve problems, even when both sets of people get the right answer.
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the idea that people naturally gravitate toward ideologies that match their level of cognitive complexity. Thus, according to this position, religious ideologies are less complex than secular ones, and, as a consequence, more likely to be held by less cognitively complex individuals.
Nota - Posizione 144
X L IDEOLOGIA PREFERITA
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t
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takeaway
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probably increases likelihood of being an atheist and decrease the likelihood of being religious,
Nota - Posizione 150
RAZIONALITÀ
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The effect size seems pretty small.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 151
IQ probably also increases likelihood being an atheist
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 153
Openness To Experience
Nota - Posizione 153
...
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make people less fundamentalist
Nota - Posizione 153
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 154
There’s no good evidence that “priming” analytical thinking style can make you more or less religious
