andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-715 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Mark Chaves sent me this great article on religion and religious practice: After reading a book or article in the scientific study of religion, I [Chaves] wonder if you ever find yourself thinking, “I just don’t believe it.” I have this experience uncomfortably often, and I think it’s because of a pervasive problem in the scientific study of religion. I want to describe that problem and how to overcome it. The problem is illustrated in a story told by Meyer Fortes. He once asked a rainmaker in a native culture he was studying to perform the rainmaking ceremony for him. The rainmaker refused, replying: “Don’t be a fool, whoever makes a rain-making ceremony in the dry season?” The problem is illustrated in a different way in a story told by Jay Demerath. He was in Israel, visiting friends for a Sabbath dinner. The man of the house, a conservative rabbi, stopped in the middle of chanting the prayers to say cheerfully: “You know, we don’t believe in any of this. But then in Judai
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1 Mark Chaves sent me this great article on religion and religious practice: After reading a book or article in the scientific study of religion, I [Chaves] wonder if you ever find yourself thinking, “I just don’t believe it. [sent-1, score-0.529]
2 The problem is illustrated in a story told by Meyer Fortes. [sent-4, score-0.317]
3 He once asked a rainmaker in a native culture he was studying to perform the rainmaking ceremony for him. [sent-5, score-0.278]
4 The rainmaker refused, replying: “Don’t be a fool, whoever makes a rain-making ceremony in the dry season? [sent-6, score-0.178]
5 ” The problem is illustrated in a different way in a story told by Jay Demerath. [sent-7, score-0.317]
6 ” And the problem is illustrated in yet another way by the Divinity School student who told me not long ago that she was having second thoughts about becoming an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ because she didn’t believe in God. [sent-12, score-0.358]
7 ” Also, on a more serious note, I had a friend of a friend who joined a Roman Catholic religious order–she became a nun–because, according to my friend, this person was “looking for Sister Right. [sent-16, score-0.583]
8 Decades of anthropological, sociological, and psychological research establish that religious congruence is rare, but much thinking about religion presumes that it is common. [sent-23, score-0.638]
9 The religious congruence fallacy [emphasis added] occurs when interpretations or explanations unjustifiably presume religious congruence. [sent-24, score-0.976]
10 This reminds me of a corresponding political congruence fallacy . [sent-25, score-0.312]
11 My impression is that many people have a personal feeling of political congruence–they feel that all their political views form a coherent structure–even though the perceived-congruent views of person X will only partially overlap the perceived-congruent views of person Y. [sent-26, score-0.475]
12 For example, X can be a Democrat and support legalized gambling, while Y is a Republican who supports legalized gambling, while persons A and B are a Democrat and a Republican who oppose gambling. [sent-27, score-0.311]
13 (For example, X supports gambling as a way of raising tax money, Y supports gambling because he opposes the nanny state, A opposes gambling as a tax on the poor, and B opposes gambling as immoral. [sent-29, score-1.64]
14 On another point, Chaves’s discussion of placebo effects reminded me of my irritation of the research on the medical effects of so-called intercessory prayer (person A prays for person B, with B being unaware of the prayer). [sent-32, score-0.767]
15 What irritates me about these intercessory prayer studies is not that I care so much about prayer but because such studies seem to me to be a pseudo-scientific effort to remove the part of prayer that can actually work. [sent-34, score-1.406]
16 I doubt it could fix a broken heart valve but perhaps it could be calming enough that a certain heart attack might never happen. [sent-38, score-0.174]
17 This makes sense and is, to my mind, perfectly consistent with a religious interpretation–why couldn’t God work through the mechanism of friendship and caring? [sent-39, score-0.332]
18 To me, the studies on intercessory prayer, by trying to isolate the supernatural aspect, end up removing the most interesting part of the story. [sent-40, score-0.313]
19 In the language of Chaves’s article, I’d call this an example of the coherence fallacy, the idea that the way to prove the effectiveness of prayer is to treat it as some sort of button-pushing. [sent-41, score-0.348]
20 Finally, regarding the WWJD bracelet etc (no, that’s not the same WWJD as our motto here in the Applied Statistics Center! [sent-48, score-0.159]
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Introduction: Mark Chaves sent me this great article on religion and religious practice: After reading a book or article in the scientific study of religion, I [Chaves] wonder if you ever find yourself thinking, “I just don’t believe it.” I have this experience uncomfortably often, and I think it’s because of a pervasive problem in the scientific study of religion. I want to describe that problem and how to overcome it. The problem is illustrated in a story told by Meyer Fortes. He once asked a rainmaker in a native culture he was studying to perform the rainmaking ceremony for him. The rainmaker refused, replying: “Don’t be a fool, whoever makes a rain-making ceremony in the dry season?” The problem is illustrated in a different way in a story told by Jay Demerath. He was in Israel, visiting friends for a Sabbath dinner. The man of the house, a conservative rabbi, stopped in the middle of chanting the prayers to say cheerfully: “You know, we don’t believe in any of this. But then in Judai
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Introduction: Don’t trust anyone who refers to gambling as “gaming.”
Introduction: Dan Kahan writes: We all know it’s ridiculous to be able to go on an fMRI fishing trip & resort to post hoc story-telling to explain the “significant” correlations one (inevitably) observes (good fMRI studies *don’t* do this; only bad ones do– to the injury of the reputation of all the scholars doing good studies of this kind). But now one doesn’t even need correlations that support the post-hoc inferences one is drawing. This one’s good. Kahan continues: Headline: Religious Experiences Shrink Part of the Brain text: ” … The study, published March 30 [2011] in PLoS One, showed greater atrophy in the hippocampus in individuals who identify with specific religious groups as well as those with no religious affiliation … The results showed significantly greater hippocampal atrophy in individuals reporting a life-changing religious experience. In addition, they found significantly greater hippocampal atrophy among born-again Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religiou
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