Over at Psychology Today, Tyler VanderWeele reports on the case of a paper that earned significant headlines — and has now been retracted:
In 2015, a paper by Jean Decety and co-authors reported that children who were brought up religiously were less generous. The paper received a great deal of attention, and was covered by over 80 media outlets including The Economist, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and Scientific American. As it turned out, however, the paper by Decety was wrong.
VanderWeele notes that Azim Shariff, of the University of California, Irvine, asked Decety for the data, and
discovered that the results were due to a coding error. The data had been collected across numerous countries, e.g. United States, Canada, Turkey, etc. and the country information had been coded as “1, 2, 3…” Although Decety’s paper had reported that they had controlled for country, they had accidentally not controlled for each country, but just treated it as a single continuous variable so that, for example “Canada” (coded as 2) was twice the “United States” (coded as 1). Regardless of what one might think about the relative merits and rankings of countries, this is obviously not the right way to analyze data.
Shariff and colleagues published a re-analysis in Current Biology — where the Decety paper was published — in 2016. But they were not the only ones who had questioned the work. So did Michael Blume, in a November 8, 2015 post at Spectrum.de, and William Briggs, in a post a day later. PubPeer commenters picked up on those posts, and added their own comments.
The paper has been cited 23 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. Then, on August 5 of this year, it was retracted:
This article has been retracted at the request of the authors.
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.2016.06.031). 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.
Retraction Watch asked Decety, of the University of Chicago, how countries came to be coded as a continuous variable:
Stupid mistake on our part! Not intentional for sure.
An earlier retraction
Decety was second author of a 2018 paper that was retracted in February of this year. According to the notice, in Psychological Medicine:
The authors have requested the retraction of this article as upon re-examination of the correct volume measures, the reported effects do not hold, negating the interpretation and conclusions presented in the article.
Decety referred us to the corresponding author of that paper when we asked him for comment.
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