Quote:
Originally Posted by carlo
Thirty(30) stickers ??? c'mon boys ; do you really think that this study is saying anything? The only mean spirited individuals in this study are the academic ogres who have no shame and should be subject to the same test.
I have a bridge I'd like to sell to each and every one of you who somehow justify this as a proper study (statically speaking notwithstanding.
Funded by John Tempelton, too, amazing; isn't he dead ?
These guys (academics) are nothing more than a group of fifth columnists or saboteurs acting under the guise of "academic whatever".
How about it, real scientists on this forum, disavow this group of malicious malcontents who claim "science" ; the downward spiral of the "social scientist"; a contradiction in terms.
End of rant.
It's funded by the Templeton Foundation, not by the ghost of John Templeton. The study is also fine and I'll explain why.
We know from descriptive statistics that current secular cultures tend to be more civil and less brutal (which is the trend, not an absolute) than their religious counterparts, but it's very hard (if not impossible) to use inference on those data because the societies often differ in far more ways than religiosity. It's therefore very healthy that this study use experiment and observation as method. It gives us a better basis for potential insight.
"Meaner" and "less kind" (the words used in the press interviews) are obviously sensationalist terms, but they are not completely unwarranted. What is perhaps questionable is that it isn't explicitly stated that this doesn't translate to "less moral", which is pretty much the basis for the criticism I have voiced in this thread. Accepting harsher punishments is meaner and being less inclusive towards strangers is less kind, but neither translates to "less moral". A more reasonable conclusion is that those behaviors are a result of moral values, not the lack of them.
The study's most interesting finding is the conflict between the parents' view of their children and the children's actual behavior, which is a very interesting finding. It also mimics a discourse we often see in everyday life, the claim that loss of religion leads to loss of morals. That is a very important thing to question, because it's not a claim that seems warranted. What we instead see in studies like this is that a better phrasing would be that loss of religion leads to different morals, and perhaps even (as this study finds) that those moral values might be more accepting and inclusive in nature.
Now whether you think one of these moral values is preferable is a moral debate and not a scientific one, which my main beef with the term "pro-social behavior". It by its very name seems to indicate that one type of behavior is best, but that is actually not a part of its definition.
Last edited by tame_deuces; 05-22-2017 at 04:34 AM.