Paper claiming kids’ religiosity decreased altruism retracted

RETRACTION| VOLUME 29, ISSUE 15, P2595, AUGUST 05, 2019 Retraction Notice to: The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World Jean Decety, Jason M. Cowell, Kang Lee, Susan Malcolm-Smith, Bilge Selcuk, Xinyue Zhou, … DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.07...

(Current Biology 25, 2951–2955; November 16, 2015) In our paper, we reported cross-cultural differences in how the religious environment of a child negatively impacted their sharing, their judgments of the actions of others, and how their parents evaluated them. An error in this article, our incorrect inclusion of country of origin as a covariate in many analyses, was pointed out in a correspondence from Shariff, Willard, Muthukrishna, Kramer, and Henrich

(https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.06...). When we reanalyzed these data to correct this error, we found that country of origin, rather than religious affiliation, is the primary predictor of several of the outcomes. While our title finding that increased household religiousness predicts less sharing in children remains significant, we feel it necessary to explicitly correct the scientific record, and we are therefore retracting the article. We apologize to the scientific community for any inconvenience caused.More.

But what was the paper doing in a biology journal anyway? Maybe the underlying assumptions should be unpacked.

Then there’s the whole question of whether “altruism” is a bogus concept, developed for just these purposes.

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