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Episode 20 - Weird Science with Daniel Dacombe & Dr David Speed!
88 Plays1 month ago
Join Humanist Canada's Daniel Dacombe for an enlightening conversation with social psychologist and professor Dr. David Speed about the wonderful world of social science research; specifically, the research about atheism and religious nonbelief. What do we know? How do we know it? And what misconceptions about atheism get perpetuated by research that is misguided, mistaken, or based on flawed assumptions? Dr. Speed is a skilled researcher and communicator, and as a bonus takes some time to review the methodological issues in a recent study on nonreligion and self-control so this is a conversation you won't want to miss!
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
But yeah, it was the easiest PhD ever in time I've ever had to explain it. I'd be like, hey, do you think atheists benefit from going to church? And most people were like, well, no. I'm like, congratulations, your PhD is in the mail.
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to the Voice of Canadian Humanism, the official podcast of Humanist Canada. Join us as we delve into thought-provoking discussions, explore critical issues, and celebrate the values of reason, compassion, and secularism through the humanist lens. Welcome to the conversation.
00:00:44
Speaker
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Humanist Canada podcast. My name is Daniel Dacombe, and I'm a humanist. I'm also a husband, a father, a former Christian, a PhD student, and a member of Humanist Canada. I'll be your host for this episode, and I'm very pleased to welcome our guest this week, researcher and professor, Dr. David Speed.
00:01:02
Speaker
ay
Dr. Speed's Background and Transition from Religion
00:01:03
Speaker
Dr. David Speed is an associate professor at the University of New Brunswick in the Department of Psychology. His research focuses on challenging the commonly held belief that religion and spirituality inherently lead to better health outcomes. While numerous studies suggest that religious attendance, prayer, and religiosity are correlated with improved health outcomes, there are significant gaps and inaccuracies in the existing literature. Through his research, Dr. David Speed highlights the lack of confirmatory evidence that being non-religious is detrimental to health.
00:01:32
Speaker
His work has indicated that atheists do not necessarily fare worse than believers, suggesting that health benefits attributed to religion and spirituality are overstated. Dr. Speed's research critiques the prevailing assumptions in the field and addresses the complexities of studying the growing non-religious population. And Dr. Speed is here today to talk about an area of interest to both of us, the social science research into religion and atheism. and I've been very excited about this conversation. ah Thank you for coming. I'm so delighted to be here.
00:02:02
Speaker
I'm glad this is something that you and I have been ah talking about doing for a a little while, yeah especially because you you are published in this area ah for several years now, and you've even shared some of this research through the Humanist Canada website.
00:02:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's ah this was the what I got my doctorate in was looking at the relationship between non-religion and health outcomes. And I was to my chagrin, but degree of pride, I suppose, as well, ah one of the very first people to kind of do an in-depth exploration of that.
00:02:38
Speaker
Well, that's the point of a PhD, right? To try to expand the the realm of human knowledge, even just a little bit, sometimes in a very esoteric way. ah But hey, it's a it's fun it's and for nerds like us, it's really what we're here for. So ah yeah, really excited that we can be having this conversation. um Before we dive into all of those good nerdy bits, we typically do starter interviews by asking people about the religious or non-religious landscapes that they were raised in, ah where they're from, ah how they got to where they're going, and a bit about themselves in general. Would you mind telling us a bit about where you've been?
00:03:21
Speaker
Yeah, not at all. ah So I grew up in a like fairly conservative religious household. ah My parents were divorced when I was young. My dad remarried. He and my stepmother were like very religious, very large family. And then through a series of fun tidbits that I'll skip, I ended up living with my mom afterward when I was around 12. But I grew up for, you know, during my formative years with a very strong belief in God and hell and heaven and all that jazz and all that, you know, the lovely things that come with those beliefs to a 10 year old and, you know, onward.
00:04:08
Speaker
And now now that's not that's very much what I think of the past. I am non-religious, but i you know because I'm a researcher, classification can happen on myriad dimensions. I would also identify as an atheist or an agnostic, depending on the specifics of the question. And I've had many nuanced and loud conversations in bars over the years about the differences and why those differences matter between those and identifiers.
Online Debates and Humor in Skepticism
00:04:36
Speaker
Right. ah Were those conversations in bars loud because the environment was loud or because the subject matter got loud? um In my experience, everywhere I go it gets loud because of me. um But, you know, there's probably a mixture of both. It was probably loud to be begin with, but once I start getting impassioned about something and I think the person's not listening, I get more impassioned.
00:04:59
Speaker
Well, we probably have that in common, although I tend to take the the lower road and have those conversations on social media. I'm trying to quit that habit. um Yeah, that took me several years to break. My life got demonstrably better, but once in a while I'll um'll be like, oh, you know what, maybe I should talk to someone about this. And then I'll start typing a response. I'm like, I i just don't have the time to do this.
00:05:21
Speaker
Yeah, COVID taught me that it is not a good use of my time, ah that if I really do have a limited number of heartbeats on this planet, then perhaps I shouldn't increase my heart rate by yes yes doing those conversations online. I think it was said once that ah you don't have to attend every argument you're invited to.
00:05:42
Speaker
Oh yeah, i that's ah that's a good one. I also saw one person respond when they were, it was probably in the context of an anti-vax debate because that was what we were all doing for a few years. ah they ah They posted something in favor of vaccination and then a stranger, something they hadn't met.
00:06:01
Speaker
ah posted a response demanding all kinds of proofs from them. And their response was simply, I've known you for 10 seconds and I've enjoyed none of them. I'm not going to accept home book assignments from you.
00:06:13
Speaker
So, yeah, no, that that's a very valid way of responding. Um, I think I had a similar conversation. It might've even been pre-COVID. It might've had something do with vaccines and autism. And in excruciating detail by the person who's wrong and linked them to information. And their reply was, well, can you reveal whether or not you're being paid by the pharmaceutical industry? to I mean, I was a very, at that point, poor PhD student. I was like, Oh man, I wish I was a shell. I'd be making bank.
00:06:44
Speaker
Oh yeah, i've i've had that I've heard that before about the pharmaceutical industry. I've also heard since, because I used to be in in ministry, professional ministry and seminary. I heard that I was um was, was I bribed, I think the comment was, or that I was ah a paid atheist agent. and i you know, asking for a proof. I'll just send them a photo of my car. Like, honestly, if people are out there paying these atheist agents, call now. We're like, we're open. We have no ego. We have no morals, clearly. but Yeah, no, I'm fully without scruples. So absolutely, if I can upgrade my vehicle, let's go. ah Yes. One of the things we were talking about today is how atheists don't have any scruples whatsoever.
Dr. Speed's Academic Journey and PhD Topic
00:07:30
Speaker
Yes. Do we?
00:07:31
Speaker
um So before we get completely ah completely off track, I did want to ask, how did you even get into this field? I mean, psychology is a broad field. There's lots of different kinds of researchers in it. And you arrived at a very, very specific area, which we're gonna get into ah in this episode, but how did you even go down this road? Were you intending on, like did you grow up telling your parents to be a social psychologist? oh Oh, no, no, no. Oh oh my God, no. i I have consistently failed upward my entire life from what I can tell. I wanted to be a police officer when I started university.
00:08:11
Speaker
And then around third year, I was like, I don't want to be a police officer anymore i think for a variety of reasons that are even more tangential. And I realized I was okay at school. um I had an epiphany sometime in third year that, oh, you don't have to be super boring and not at all fun to continue with school. So maybe I can continue with school. I was a terrible applicant for grad school the very first time I applied because I didn't really know what I was doing. Kind of got lucky with my second year, second time I applied.
00:08:40
Speaker
And then through a series of coincidences that worked out in my favor, I was accepted to a PhD program at Memorial University in Newfoundland. And my advisor, Dr. Ken Fowler, he was in health research. And so the only thing, the only real restriction I had on on what I could do as a topic is it had to be health related. So just to kind of set the stage, i was in the PhD program, which was great, because I didn't know what I was going to do for real life after I had to leave school. So another few years in a PhD program were fine with me. But I had no research ambitions. Really, I had a ton of curiosity about the world. I read about a bunch of different stuff. um I'm you know fun at trivia and fun at parties. But when it comes to actually buckling down and studying one very specific thing, I am ah i was someone at a loss. And throughout my doctoral program, it was kind of rough, kind of rocky.
00:09:36
Speaker
And I kind of sat down and I realized I had about two and a half years left to write an entire thesis, which was, or dissertation, it was going to be a lot of work. And I was like, I was like, pep talking to myself. I was like, look in the mirror. I'm like, man, you got to figure this out. You just pick something, go with it. Doesn't matter if you hate it, like just do it. and So I'm, I'm having that back and forth with myself and I kind of had an epiphany. I'm like, okay, if I could study anything I wanted at all, what would it be?
00:10:01
Speaker
Okay. And I, and I was like, okay, well, I had a preexisting interest in religion. I ran an atheism kiosk at MUN, which was, in my opinion, wildly successful. Although, you know, we'll have, there might reasonable people might disagree. And so I was like, okay, I wonder if anyone has ever looked at religion and health before.
00:10:23
Speaker
And so I kind of you know do a quick and dirty search into PubMed or psych info or whatever. And I get like a million hits between religion and health. I was like, all right, well, the dream is dead. there's there This has been fully fleshed out. there's no There's nothing left to explore. There are no more worlds to conquer. So I was like, all right, I wonder if anyone's looked at atheism and health before, just as a quick, you know you know while I'm here in psych info, I might as well check.
00:10:50
Speaker
there's like 80 hits, which is a really, really low number. Cause the way I searched it basically, if the word atheism came up at all, it would pop as a hit. So I was like, Oh, that's that shockingly low. Cause the other one was like a million hits. So, you know, I pick around a bit more and I pick around a bit more and I pick around a bit more. And I was like, Oh my God, nobody studied this before. So I think there's like two or three studies, which is like nothing in this massive field. And then I started like, okay. So I started like, i you know, I started going into the more just religious focused research and it was like, Oh, going your church is good
00:11:22
Speaker
your church is good going to church prayer is good really jossy iss good. And I'm like like, okay, fine. But like, obviously not for everyone. None of them had tried that made that caveat. It was just like, Oh, religion is broadly helpful for everyone. I was like, Okay, well, obviously, if you're not religious, going to church isn't gonna make you healthier. Right? Obviously. So I'm looking for studies that basically say that because that's obviously what everyone the first thing they say, you know, obviously, this is a true one. No one had looked at that before.
00:11:52
Speaker
No one had ever in the entire existence of the field for the past 35 years at that point, how is like, Oh, maybe, maybe atheists don't benefit from religion. So I had within a week, I had a very well researched, very focused proposal, my committee was formed and they're like, oh yeah, this will definitely work. I'm like, perfect. And then I was off to the races. I finished early because I used pre-existing stat can data and like publicly available data. And my huge finding was religion is helpful if you're religious and then there's a bunch of asterisks and other foot note markings. But yeah, it was the easiest PhD ever in time I've ever had to explain it. I'd be like, hey, do you think atheists benefit from going to church? And most people were like, well, no, I'm like, congratulations, your PhD is in the mail. ah guess that's always well It was the easiest PhD anyone's ever gotten. So I'm still convinced they'll come and get it back for me because obviously it was too easy to get.
00:12:58
Speaker
Well, i ah I'm hoping I can try to do something similar. My dissertation is still a little bit out, ah but I've also ah known for a little while, it's also going to be on something related with ah religion, atheism, especially religious disaffiliation. I don't know if I'll be able to go the Stats Canada route, ah but hey, there's there's always hope and maybe they won't come and get it again.
Parenting Challenges and Social Science Basics
00:13:23
Speaker
Maybe you get to keep it now. Yeah, yeah, that that might be a thing.
00:13:27
Speaker
So oh we had been talking about doing this conversation for a few weeks and we'd scheduled and rescheduled due to, I think your kids were sick and then my kids were sick and I can't remember how it went down, but we both have children who are in school, which means we are like Ebola factories. Yeah, basically. My children, I am convinced, go to school in a Petri dish of sorts.
00:13:51
Speaker
um and we get the byproducts of those biological experimentations every few weeks or so. Yes. And there's no like there's no social distancing at home. This is a creature that is going to sneeze directly into your eyeballs ah without any warning. So yeah, you're you're getting all those germs. Yeah, absolutely. think too In any case, as we were preparing for this conversation,
00:14:17
Speaker
and talking about what we were gonna discuss, um I had the idea that we would talk about ah what research is getting wrong about atheism because you're one of the people that is currently doing work in this area. And there there are others, but your research has been often Canada focused, which has been nice. yeah And then a funny thing happened.
00:14:41
Speaker
a few days ago where, as we were going back and forth the about dates, I got a Google Scholar alert in my inbox about a brand new study and I read the abstract and ah after I picked myself back up off the floor I thought, I think that David and I should talk about this article.
00:15:02
Speaker
Yeah. And before we jump into it, um I wanted to do a little something for our listeners, which we talked about beforehand. But if people are listening to this, I'm going to make the assumption most of them ah do not have graduate degrees. And that's OK, because ah most of the best people I know don't. ah But it also does mean that some of the language we throw out there is going to possibly use ah words or phrases that might not ah make as much sense if you haven't been and immersed in it for a little while. Sure, yeah.
00:15:43
Speaker
So what I thought I'd do for a couple of minutes to get us ready to go ah in this conversation is just give a bit of a primer on social science research, sure what which is what you you do. ah So I'm not a professor, I'm not a statistician.
00:15:59
Speaker
ah But I am a student, i I have a master's degree in psychology and I can explain some of the basics so I thought I'd spend a couple minutes doing that. And then we build to turn it over to you and properly understand and appreciate some of the things that you're going to get into because this is for our listeners benefit, this is ah This is like a real time conversation about research. This is the but one of my favorite things to do ah is look at new research that comes out and talk about it with people. So ah so yeah, I'll just jump right in. I'll give people a a bit of an overview.
00:16:32
Speaker
So social science research ah might happen in different overlapping fields ah of psychology or sociology or anthropology or interdisciplinary studies. And what it all boils down to is essentially the study of human behavior and relationships going from very small scales of individuals or small groups of individuals all the way up to huge social groups like societies and cultures and countries.
00:17:01
Speaker
ah This research can get really complicated but it essentially boils down to two main types. The first is quantitative research, ah which focuses on numerical data and mathematical analysis of statistical relationships between different things.
00:17:17
Speaker
So like crime statistics or the rates of depression in a city or things like that. And the second kind of research is qualitative research, which focuses on data that you can't easily express in numbers. And it's usually gathered through interviews or observing people in different social contexts.
00:17:35
Speaker
um In social science research, we also talk a lot about variables. ah Variables are the different pieces of information that we're interested in studying when we're doing an experiment or doing a research study. So variables we usually talk about as ah dependent variables or independent variables. The dependent variables are the ones that we're interested in observing for changes and independent variables are the ones we think might be influencing or even causing those changes.
00:18:05
Speaker
ah So for example, ah David, if you and I wanted to conduct a study on how much sleep somebody got the night before an exam, and if that affected their exam mark, we would be doing a quantitative study, and hours of sleep might be our independent variable, and the exam score might be the dependent variable. Yeah. That makes sense? Yeah. Awesome. So we conduct our study, we run some tests, we discover that people who get less sleep tend to do worse on their exams. That's it. We just did social science.
00:18:34
Speaker
Yeah, in a nutshell. Yeah. And there's lots of different ways to analyze those kinds of studies and they get very complicated very quickly and I'm not good at ah most of them. There's too many for any one person to be good at all of them, but there's a lot of different methods. um I'm not a statistician. I'm not even primarily a quantitative researcher. I'm mostly doing qualitative work myself, but there are a few more concepts that are especially important, not just for doing research, but also for reading and understanding research, which anybody can do.
00:19:08
Speaker
ah The first concept is validity. So that's how accurate the research is, or if the research is actually finding the things that the authors are claiming that it finds. So in that sleep study we talked about before, maybe the sleep isn't actually causing the low exam marks, maybe something else is. So if if something else is causing it, then the study would might not have good validity.
00:19:30
Speaker
ah The second is reliability. That's how consistent the research is. Like if we did it over and over again, if we did the same study under the same conditions and we got the same results, then it's a reliable study. So if we run our sleep study again at other universities but get very inconsistent results, it's probably not a very reliable study.
00:19:48
Speaker
The third is generalizability. That's the extent to which the findings from a study on a small group could apply to a large group. So if our sleep study finds that low sleep and low exam scores aren't related, that doesn't matter how much sleep you get your exam scores are going to be fine.
00:20:05
Speaker
But we do that study at a fancy private school where no other students are working extra jobs and they don't have anything to worry about in terms of money. Well, maybe those results aren't as applicable to the rest of society. And then the the last issue I wanted to bring up was correlation versus causation. This is just basically a reminder that Just because do two variables seem to be related doesn't mean that a change in one actually causes a change in the other. The changes might be unrelated or they might both be being caused by a different variable that we haven't thought of.
00:20:41
Speaker
And that's the most condensed overview of social science research that I've ever given on a podcast or the only condensed Oh, thank you very much that was informative. That was like the best version of c cliffs notes I've ever heard. Oh, thank you. Um, it actually was me. It wasn't chat GPT. It wasn't anything like that. Um, is my PhD in the mail now? Is that how this, yeah. Well, I mean, they give you PhDs for everything from my experience. So yeah, you'll definitely get one for that. Well, uh,
00:21:10
Speaker
i'll I'll eagerly watch the porch.
Exploring Research on Religion and Well-being
00:21:13
Speaker
So that's that's the that's the setup. That's how ah people can hopefully understand this conversation. For those of you who are still awake, ah we're hoping that we'll let um let you kind of comprehend some of the the rest of what we're going on. So you had mentioned already how you've been doing research on um on, uh, religion and health and atheism and health. And I know that one of the things that popped up in your dissertation was babe, which is yeah an acronym babe, not like the pig, but could you tell us a bit about babe? So babe is an acronym, uh, uh, coined by, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing his name correctly. It's like, uh, Sherman's stucco bones. Uh, I think they are, I would guess Dutch.
00:21:59
Speaker
but it isn't an acronym for belief as benefit effect. It is an umbrella term. to describe the global benefits of religion on wellbeing. So just an example, religious attendance is negatively associated with the person, that's babe. Finding that people who pray more often are happier, that would be babe. Finding that people who are more religious are less likely to die of a very specific form of diabetes, that's also babe. So babe is just religion causes health and a kind of a simplified stripped down version.
00:22:36
Speaker
And it's one of those really ah easily understandable and seemingly intuitive ah bits of information. Like everybody knows it's good for you to go to church. Everybody knows it's good for you to do these things. We just all know that. And that's where I think social science research can do its best work is those things that everybody knows. ah We all know these things are true. Well, what if we look at it like a little bit closer?
00:23:04
Speaker
Yeah, this is this is absolutely a thing with babe. It's interesting just as a point of historical minutia up until about the 1980s religion was seen as this and wrongly in my opinion like as this pathology like you know someone's like intellectually immature if they're religious which is not an accurate way of looking at the world and in the 1980s they found some like you know correlations between religion and health. And the there's an explosion of research now driving the argument that religion is this net positive for wellness and health.
00:23:38
Speaker
And wouldn't it be nice if some of those research dollars could pay for some new cars for a couple of poor Canadians? Well, I mean, I'm not poor. I'm going to show for the pharmaceutical industry as we discussed earlier. Oh, right. I forgot you had that. I'm still waiting to get paid for that because of my promotion of vaccines. Well, any day now, I'm sure. We should just reach out to uh visor and say hey we uh you know we had some arguments on facebook could you could you kick us a few bucks yes that is that is my that's my retirement plan as it stands okay well hey we're it sounds like we're on the same retirement plan that's wonderful
00:24:16
Speaker
ah moving Moving along to some of your other research, because you didn't just stay in the health area. You also looked at a couple of other things. ah the The two papers that I was thinking about the most this week, as we were getting ready for this, was your one on atheism and volunteering, and then your one on atheism and in-group favoritism. I was wondering if you could just give us a a high level kind of snapshot of each of those, what you were interested in finding, and what you actually managed to find.
00:24:44
Speaker
Sure. So I did a paper with Dr. Penny Edgill. She's from the University of Minnesota. She's absolutely rad and amazing to work with. um And the gist was is there is a literature suggesting that people who are religious are more likely to be pro-social. And one of the ways this pro-sociality is measured is through volunteerism. So if you look at two groups of people, one volunteers more than the other, you might say, ah, they're a pro-social group. So There are two kind of explanations to account for this. And one is that religious people by their very nature are more pro-social. And I don't really find this to be a compelling statement. um Some of the most compassionate people I know, they are very not religious. They are very concerned about the wellness of everyone around them. ah And also, again, still very not religious. But you know, maybe there is a pattern there.
00:25:40
Speaker
ah The second explanation is that people who are religious are more likely to have opportunities to volunteer. So what Penny and I did is we kind of teased apart ah people based on their intrinsic religious behavior versus their kind of more extrinsic or outward facing religious behavior. And we found that if you kind of just look at a raw model without fiddling with a lot of religious covariates,
00:26:08
Speaker
Atheists will generally out volunteer most groups. um So if you don't believe in God and you identify as, or if I guess if you've just identified as an atheist, you're statistically more likely to volunteer. um the The kind of the caveat to that is if you start adjusting for volunteerism across varying degrees of religious attendance, um atheists will get out volunteered by people who go to church every week.
00:26:37
Speaker
So if they, someone's like, Oh, you know, I, you know, every Sunday I go to church and like, uh, this is just what I do as part of my family. They're on average more likely to volunteer than a person who simply identifies. an atheist So this is in part because church has, you know, volunteering opportunities. go Do you want to work in the suit kitchen? Do you want to be an elder? Do you want to be an usher? Uh, do you want to play in the band? Like there are many ways in which you could volunteer.
00:27:03
Speaker
And what Penny introduced to the paper, which is really cool, was the difference between bridging social capital and bonding social capital. Bridging is where you go from your in-group to other groups in the community. And she commented that if you're volunteering only in the context of ah your religious organization, yeah, you're volunteering, but like the impact of that volunteering is extremely narrow and it's only really impacting your in-group as opposed to um ah bonding, which is that you're only volunteering within your group. And that's the the antithesis of that. So we basically tease it apart and atheist
00:27:41
Speaker
generally volunteer much more than what they're giving credit for. Atheists tend to have a pro-social tendency and it is much more parsimonious to explain the discrepancies in their volunteerism based on, you know, atheists just have fewer opportunities to volunteer. That was kind of the take-home message of it. And the subtext of that is,
00:28:03
Speaker
there's nothing wrong with atheists and like they're not trying to destroy the world and they don't hate everyone and that's that's the subtext of every paper I write. Um, yeah, we don't, we don't hate everybody. We just hate some people. And at least we're honest about it. I mean, I don't even know, like, oh, there's some people I definitely just do not care for, but by and large, like, yeah, this is a thing. It's a very short list. People who talk in the theater, top of the list, right? I mean, yeah, obviously you, like those are, you can't, that doesn't even count. That's a gig. People who don't use their blinkers when they're driving is, is just, oh, straight to jail.
00:28:41
Speaker
I'm so over that. Yeah. And the other paper you had mentioned was looking at in-group favoritism. Yes. And so what myself and a few others did is ah my colleague was Melanie Brewster. She's a professor at Columbia. What we looked at was whether or not atheists had a positive viewpoint of atheists as a group.
00:29:10
Speaker
and whether or not there was like a dislike of religious groups like Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews. And what we found is that by and large, Christians show this, Christians specifically showing massive degree of in-group favoritism. Well, atheists tend to basically like every religious group, including atheists, at about the same level. So there is like an irony in this, like ah religion didn't really factor much into how atheists evaluated other religious groups. There was a slight, there was a small effect for atheists who were slightly more likely to dislike Muslims relative to atheists, but whether or not this is like you know indicative of xenophobia or just a statistical artifact, we weren't sure, but by and large, atheists showed like the most even-handed approach to evaluating out groups relative to their in group.
00:30:04
Speaker
That's an interesting one for me because I've seen some of the research coming out of places like, well, ah like University of British Columbia, or um I think Brunel University in the United Kingdom, ah where folks like Aaron Arendzian and Will Gervais are doing some work. And we actually had Will Gervais on the podcast recently, too, talking about some of the some of the ways people view atheists and how if religion truly is like a norms accelerator, something that helps to ah have he tub's cultures to bring people together and bind them together and have social norms advance quicker and collaborate better as in far as like an evolutionary artifact of our culture. It makes sense why people would trust atheists less because, well, we have no you know there's no there's no reason for us to do good things if there's not a big God watching over us. and that's the
00:30:58
Speaker
That's been some of the the conversations that have ah driven some research out of UBC and other places, which I think is is interesting. It's a little bit validating probably for some of our listeners to hear that, hey, you're not a bad person just because you're an atheist. oh No. And it's also interesting to see, you mentioned too with the volunteering one, how people who are in a religious context and they're going there every week, they have a lot more opportunities to do those volunteering activities. and it ah It reminds me of how I live in South Manitoba, which is famously the part of Canada that donates the most money per capita to charity every year. now ill no yeah that's It's a very interesting ah artifact of this area, but the corollary to that is it is an area with a lot of churches.
00:31:51
Speaker
It is an area with a lot of relatively wealthy churches. The Mennonite culture is alive and well here. And a lot of those donations are going into those churches, which still count as donations to nonprofits. The question I have often wondered is how much of that money actually makes it out of the parking lot. You've got a lot of churches here with big screen TVs in every room and all kinds of things like that. That's still technically charitable donations. So the the factor that's driving up the you know, the rates of donations to nonprofits in this area might be that there's a lot of churches in this area that are in taking that funding and it's going into their programs, it's going to their buildings, going to their, ah you know, their new pews or chairs or whatever they're sitting in these days. So you get the idea. Yeah, interestingly, my master's student Emily Earl and I are looking at charitable donations by religious affiliation.
Understanding Confounding Variables in Research
00:32:46
Speaker
um using nationally representative data from STADCAN. We are just starting the project but we're expecting results probably and sometime in the next six months. Well, you should come to Manitoba, because you got lots to talk about.
00:32:59
Speaker
um We talked about you know dependent and intimate variables and other kinds of variables earlier. And the idea that you brought up just now about how access to volunteering opportunities vis-a-vis being in a religious building once a week ah was something that was affecting ah how much different groups could be volunteering. Now, that's something that I think if ah if we're going to call it anything, we would call it a confounding variable. Would that be right?
00:33:28
Speaker
Sure, there it depends on, there's different parlance for different fields, but the idea that opportunity will impact the amount you'll volunteer is something that you'll at at a minimum want to adjust. And if you can't adjust for it, then it becomes a confound.
00:33:44
Speaker
Okay. So if you're going to, so that's basically your definition of a confound, something that is going to potentially influence your results. And if you don't use some statistical analysis tricks to make sure that it doesn't influence your results, you might draw a conclusion from your data that isn't actually warranted. Is that right? Yeah, that's part of it. Like there's there's always more complexity to it. You had said you're not a statistician. I'm not a statistician either. I'm,
00:34:10
Speaker
and I am aggressively competent at intermediate statistics, but the the stuff where you start introducing a lot more of the Greek letters and a lot more of the 36-letter acronyms named after about 20 people, that's where I really start losing the losing the thread. But generally, a kind of like sometimes you can't statistically just for it. sometimes as you Sometimes it's just bound into your question and that's just,
00:34:37
Speaker
a level of uncertainty that you have to be very openly acknowledging or otherwise you could accommodate some compounds with experimental design via randomization but the research is hard and there's often a lot of different approaches that will approximately agree on what the answer is but we're never sure which one's which.
00:34:57
Speaker
Yeah. So to go back to our example of exam scores and sleep earlier, ah it might be that sleep, you know, lack of sleep is causing the low exam scores. But if those people are struggling with anxiety, ah that like test anxiety, and that that's not only keeping them up at night, but also lowering their test scores, well, anxiety would be a variable that we didn't account for in our study. and sorry We're going to go around saying, hey, you guys need to get more sleep. And they're like, great, one more thing to be anxious about. And now we've just made everything worse. Yes, yes. That's the opposite of what you want to do. Yes, generally. opposite Speaking of making everything worse, ah that is a good transition, I think, into into the fun activity that we're doing for our listeners today, ah breaking down a brand new research paper talking about
00:35:48
Speaker
atheism So i'll I'll introduce it, and and then we'll we'll get started. This past month, the Journal of Sociology and Christianity, which is a peer-reviewed journal, published an article by Dr. Philip Truscott, a professor of sociology at Southwest Baptist University. The article was entitled, Rape, Suicide, and the Rise of the Religious Nuns.
00:36:10
Speaker
It is a quantitative research study, and it comes to some pretty stunning conclusions. Truscott proposes that the rising rate of rape and suicide in the United States are caused by the rising rates of non-religious individuals. So essentially claiming that because religious people have more self-control, as the center of his argument,
00:36:30
Speaker
ah religious religious people have more self-control than secular people, secular people with lower levels of self-control are causing the rape and suicide rates in the United States to increase. Truscott supports his arguments with data showing a positive correlation between the rate of non-religious individuals and the rise of rape and suicide rates. So if the study is to be believed,
00:36:51
Speaker
with secular individuals on the rise worldwide, we could be looking at a serious rape and suicide epidemic coming our way. David, I am surrounded by atheists in my life. How concerned should I be?
Critique of Study Linking Secularism to Crime
00:37:02
Speaker
ah What's your take on this article? So um again, I cannot stress this enough. um So just ah just as a bit of foreshadowing, just so you know, there's no misunderstanding. I am not a criminologist. That is not my area of expertise.
00:37:16
Speaker
And you either yeah, I, so there may be things that nuance that I am missing and perhaps this is a much more solid conclusion than I can see. But from what I can tell, I wouldn't be overly concerned. So the paper in essence has looks at this just population level correlation state by state between how many people are not affiliated with religion.
00:37:46
Speaker
and the corresponding rape rates and the suicide rates. and there's there's two metrics of rape but they largely agreed with one another from what I could tell. And the the conceit of the study is that because religious individuals have higher self-control and because suicide and sexual assault are failures of self-control, which we're going to put a pin in that because that is that is a that's a take.
00:38:18
Speaker
um As the kids say, yeah, there is a correspondingly corresponding increase in rape and suicide in states that show higher degrees of nuns. So this paper was interesting to read, and it managed to successfully make sure that I didn't get other work done on time because it was it was a mural of I'm not even sure how I
00:38:49
Speaker
I ra've read it now three times and every time I read it, there's something new that I kind of flag and am just like I have to like comment on. um So thank you so much for sharing this with me. i No problem. My apologies to the deadlines. Yeah, no, that that's the thing. So there is so it's if you if you want to look at this paper or downloads paper yourself, it's available on Google Scholar. um But I just wanted to give some kind of like walkthrough of it.
00:39:20
Speaker
one of the things that One of the things that is really ignored by the paper are, and this is surprising because from what I can tell the authors of sociologists, there does not really seem to be a lot of emphasis placed on life circumstances with respect to poverty and socioeconomic status and how they relate to criminality.
00:39:41
Speaker
Generally, what this paper is framed as is people who commit crimes just can't control themselves. um and this is This is just a reduction of agency for people who are committing crimes. ah It is a reduction of agency for people who are like committing rape.
00:40:01
Speaker
um it is There's an implied moral equivalence between failure to be able to stop yourself from wanting to kill yourself and failure, like and then like sexually assaulting someone. There's a moral equivalence happening there.
00:40:16
Speaker
which implied moral equivalence that I'm reading that I didn't really care for. i And there is very, from what I can tell, and like again, i'm I'm hoping that I'm not being uncharitable, there's supposed to be a degree of there seems to be like a lack of introspection with what are some reasons that this might not be true. Okay. and So I've got, I've got a question for you and feel free to say, I don't know if you don't know, but could you name a country that has a really, really high rate of non religion? Oh, like Sweden, Finland, uh, the Nordic countries, certainly. Yeah.
00:40:59
Speaker
Yeah. So Nordic countries, huge degree of a huge degree of like secularism, right? And they're, they're not rampant places of like, like unstoppable crime. So this, this isn't something like, like you're, no one lands in hell sinking is like, Oh, here comes the, like the criminals trying to get like, that doesn't happen. Um,
00:41:25
Speaker
So there's there's like just an obvious on a sociological level, and i'm again I'm not a sociologist, I'm a social psychologist, there's like a distinction, but just what is an obvious counterfactual for the idea that secularism is going to be driving this major social epidemic? Like what is what is one of those things? So this is this is wild.
00:41:48
Speaker
Another thing with this paper is the implication is that well people who can't stop themselves are like criminals can't stop themselves. Okay, let's look at the demographics of prison ah in the United States, which there's variation and stuff like that.
00:42:05
Speaker
Do you want to guess which group is super underrepresented in prison with respect to the incarcerated? People who aren't religious, like secular people, atheists, agnostics. Atheists and agnostics exist in the context of prison. There are atheists and agnostics in prison. they are not They are underrepresented though relative to the broader population.
00:42:28
Speaker
So if the the idea is that, oh, well, look at this, like secularism or non-religious affiliation is associated with higher rape, higher suicide. Okay, cool. Like what are we seeing in the prison system? Oh, there's no but there there's the exact opposite of that relationship. Okay. okay So that's that's that's that's a separate conceptual problem with this.
00:42:51
Speaker
A big one is the data that the author used was it's publicly available. i I pulled the same data. They were very transparent in their methodology. Like I'm not saying there was anything untoward about it. They were very transparent in their methodology. I was able to get their data and I was able to, from what I could tell, replicate exactly what their analyses did.
00:43:15
Speaker
We're going to put a pin in that and circle back to that in a minute too. So there is, what they did is they looked at state level data for rape and state level data for non-religious affiliation and state level data for ah suicide. And they correlally just randomly basically basic correlations across those. At no point in their study,
00:43:38
Speaker
did they like look at individual factors in the prediction rate? So they looked at a general rate of secularism and a general rate of suicide correlated those two things and were like, ah, secularism, you know, that's probably a driving force of suicide. This is right.
00:43:58
Speaker
They didn't even test if secular people were more likely to commit suicide. they I don't know, like that's the much stronger way of doing the analysis. They didn't look at are secular or non-religious people more likely to commit rape. That was absolutely not something that was part of the analysis.
00:44:15
Speaker
at so it's just this very crude approximation of secularism like just this where it's a crude approximation of secularism secularism is more diverse than just simply non-religious affiliation.
00:44:29
Speaker
um there was no there was no attempt to disentangle those pieces of information. And it was it was shocking the the conclusions drawn from these correlations. ah So yeah, yeah. Did you want to jump in at any point here? Because I'm going to keep going otherwise.
00:44:50
Speaker
Oh yeah, and and I want you to because this is, ah this is the kind of stuff that I that I signed up for, you know, i I have a bunch of friends in academia and I joke with one of them recently you know we don't, we don't tell each other that we love each other. We just sit and listen to each other. well we go on for about 30 minutes on our topic of choice. And that's basically the same thing. So I i totally get that. And I think that one of the things that you ah had pointed out is kind of drawing these conclusions from correlations. This goes back to some of the basics we talked about. Correlations don't mean causation. It's just because something is correlated doesn't mean that one thing causes the other. And if anybody wants to ah have a fun afternoon, they could go to tylervigen dot.com. Yeah.
00:45:37
Speaker
Uh, even just look up spurious correlations and it'll be the off result where he uses statistical analysis to discover correlations between variables that are very obviously not caused by each other, such as I'm looking at a couple of randoms here. Now, number of grand slam finals played by Roger Federer correlates very strongly.
00:46:03
Speaker
with the number of electronics engineers in New Mexico. It's actually really impressive, this this data right here. And then another one ah it is the air pollution in Wichita actually correlates quite strongly ah with it with a very low with very low P value, if you understand what that means, to the tech resources stock price. That might actually have something to it, to be honest, but there's there's so many you could spend, and I have spent an entire afternoon just clicking through these random correlations and laughing your butt off. But it is just you know just an illustration of what you're exactly what you're talking about. There's some correlations here, and then there's this this gap, and then there's a conclusion that doesn't seem to be warranted. So please continue. Yeah, no, this is this is absolutely the case. So I'm just kind of working my way through yeah paper from beginning to end. And one of the things that, um so you had mentioned that
00:46:57
Speaker
When I read the abstract initially, I think of it maybe half a dozen things and like, oh, it could be this, it could be this, it could be this, it could be this, it could be this, it could be this, it could be this sort of thing. And I went through the introduction and there was like, oh, like, oh, well, it's probably not this though. It's probably not that. It was very quickly like looking at potential reasons that the paper could be criticized and like, oh, it's probably not this though. And you described it as hand waving, which I thought was like fairly apropos.
00:47:28
Speaker
It was just, oh yeah, it's probably not this thing. And one of the things that kind of jumped out at me on the second read through or third read through, I can't recall now, is that there was there was very much so an effort on the part of the author to be like, okay, even though some people are religious and some people aren't religious, people who are religious and people who aren't really just are equally likely to acknowledge ah basically like a rape had occurred or acknowledge that something had was a rape. And this was something that this was something that they were using to justify that that the differences we're going to see in the data down the road. They're not a product of differential reporting. And so they reported or they cited ah work by a pig in Anderson from 2022 and they had said
00:48:16
Speaker
ah the binary regression i'm quoting from the paper The binary regression model using religious factors and assault characteristics to predict acknowledgement was not significant. Neither importance of religion nor assault characteristics significantly contributed to the prediction of acknowledgement. So this is how they justified the idea that religious people and non-religious people are equally likely to acknowledge war.
00:48:40
Speaker
So it's important, I think, when you bring that up to to talk, because you mentioned reporting. ah Rapes are famously under-reported. It is an obvious issue. Yes. And and Prescott is is dealing with it here by kind of, like you said, touching on it and saying, well, I found a study that, you know, I found studies that say like religious people and non-religious people report rapes at the same rate, so it's all good, basically, is the the summation.
00:49:06
Speaker
that's that was my agreeon the intent of it might have been different but this is very much so my read on it what and i do want to acknowledge I do want to acknowledge like Prescott's not wrong about the rape reporting issue and to his credit later in the paper he says we really ought to have a widely publicized non-police method of rape reporting to to mitigate both the the crime and the trauma. I think yeah absolutely these are this is a good idea here but I came to the same conclusion you did reading through that this you know i'm I'm not convinced you made the case that people who are conservative and religious are reporting rapes to the same rate that people who are not conservative and not religious and may have less motivations to keep it quiet.
00:49:51
Speaker
Well, that's that's absolutely the thing. And like what what Trust God is doing or what Trust God failed to mention was that in the paper he cited was the authors had said those who experienced rape compared to the other two groups were significantly less likely to remain affiliated with the religion in which they were raised. In other words, a person is victimized when they are young.
00:50:17
Speaker
they are more likely to leave their religious circumstances. So if you were to look at, just like conceptually, just based on that one sentence alone, and assuming, you know, this is an accurate and true finding, which we have no reason to believe this isn't anything other than that, we can infer that as rape goes up,
00:50:40
Speaker
secularism or non-affiliation goes up as well because the way this is structured and this was at least like much more causally oriented, people are leaving their religion because they're experiencing sexual assault. This will look like non-religious It's correlated and it is, but the, the, the interpretation, the interpretation trust has is rape is happening because of disaffiliation, not disaffiliations happen because of rape, and like
00:51:14
Speaker
Very complex topic when you're talking about what is what are causes of rape and what are things driving this trend or that trend? It's very complicated and complex and sensitive topic that needs to be handled with delicacy But pointing to the fact that like oh these two things are correlated. We've solved it or or we can arguably solve it like through it and just it it isn't giving it the due diligence and credit it deserves in my opinion. um So there there was that. And there was also people, you know, some people had their faith strengthened apparently in some research where there is, they're experiencing sexual assault, but for most people it is the very opposite effect. It makes them question and leave and it makes them lose faith when they experience horrific things, which is completely understandable.
00:52:05
Speaker
That's a really interesting ah perspective that you that you brought to it, where, yes, these two things might be correlated. They might be both increasing, ah you know, the rise of religious nuns and the rise of reported rape, but it might not be the nuns causing the rape. It might be the rape causing the nuns. And that is and that is one really like it's it's a really tricky thing looking at statistics.
00:52:31
Speaker
and looking at quantitative analysis because you can't always tell what direction things are flowing when you're just looking at ah a simple correlation like this. So I think that's a really, really good point. And I'm glad you brought it up. No. And mean like this, this is part of the frustration that I have with the papers. Like I have.
00:52:47
Speaker
friends and family who like survive sexual assault. And the idea that this is just being like, oh, it's, you know, secularism is the thing driving the relationship or religious non affiliation is the thing driving the relationship just really, it frustrates me in in ways that I cannot completely articulate. So there is there are just and this just just goes on so one of the One of the arguments that is either parroted or championed by Truscott is that, quote, while media may critique religious males who deny the necessity of sexual consent, a scrivener, some author, makes a historical argument that the concept of sexual consent
00:53:29
Speaker
grew out of the christian restriction of intercourse to monogamous marriage this is and i'll continue the author contends that there was widespread acceptance in the ancient world that all people of lower status should be sexually available to those of higher status thus the concept of rape did not exist unless it was violating the daughters of aristocracy The author's claimed link between Christianity and consent is supported by contemporary research on religiosity and intimate partner violence. This is such a parochial view of history and how religion has played a
00:54:09
Speaker
wildly varying role with respect to the advancement of ah social rights and privileges enjoyed by women in society. And the idea that just as an example, like the concept of spousal rape in Canada It didn't exist like it was it was a legal impossibility to rape one's spouse I think prior to the 1980s. This is because there was oh well there's an implied consent here. This is, this is just, to me this is as a as a perception.
00:54:41
Speaker
it's it's ahistorical. This, what's being said, it might be like technically true on some level or through some lens, but this is as an interpretation is absolutely wild to me. Yeah. yeah Similar to some of the conversations around to antebellum slavery, I think, where ah Certainly, many of the abolitionists were were Christians, many very famous ones and very strong ones. and ah But who are they arguing against? well Also Christians, because just about everybody was back then. you know it was ah it was it was ah It was a Rorschach test. like you You read the Bible and you see whatever it is. like You're right, like the most staunchest opponents to slavery is ah slavery were like quoting the Bible at length to demonstrate it's wrong. and
00:55:29
Speaker
the rabid supporters of slavery were quoting the same book at different parts and saying well no this is obviously okay so yeah very much so like you You see what you want to see in that context, I think.
Historical Context and Religion's Varied Effects
00:55:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. why You said like wildly variable ah role of the church in history or the religion history when it comes to this, and I think that's that's a perfect way to put it. It's like it's certainly not been, and I'm not going to be, you know, like many ah Richard Dawkins-esque new atheists, ah you know, say, oh, religion is all bad and there's never any good that comes with it for anybody. That's just not
00:56:06
Speaker
realistic but i don I do think that looking at it and saying hey there's a there's a broad effect on society we can't just put down one side or the other is a really good way to respond to the to the comments like the one the paper you identified yeah that's that's just yeah yeah um and some other stuff too is just like just picking through it uh the author is fairly critical of Zuckerman, of Phil Zuckerman's work on this, a related topic and pointed out that, well, because the authors are talking about the same and they're not using longitudinal data, they can't really, you know, you know talk about causality. And this is deeply ironic because in about three pages, the author starts just cross-sectional analysis and is
00:56:53
Speaker
inferring causality between secularism and sexual assault, which is just the same thing on just, it's because it's just wild that this is happening. um Yeah, so this this continues for some time and then they jump into it. So the data that the author used, that Truscott used, was publicly available, i you're able to access it. like Again, I have never met the author before, ah but they were very transparent with what analyses they were doing. They were very transparent with where they got their data from. And again, I there's nothing i don't see any evidence of malfeasance on the author. It seemed very transparent and honest in what they were doing.
00:57:35
Speaker
Um, everything else I'm talking about, I will, yes, that's fine. I will have it out about those topics, but there's honesty does not, is not factoring into the conversation as far as I can tell. Absolutely. So what the author has done is they've kind of done like a really crude state level, state by state correlation between sexual assault and the number of non-religious people in the state. And they do this for every single year from 2014 to 2020.
00:58:04
Speaker
And they have correlations that are moderate to strong. And what's really interesting about this is that there're is really it's just there's nothing being controlled for it. There's no adjustment for things that we know might relate to secularism and might relate to sexual assault and might relate to ah suicide. So for example, the proportion of males in a society is going to positively predict all three of those things.
00:58:36
Speaker
So, the more males you have in a society, the more secular individuals you'll have in a society just statistically, the more suicidal likely to commit suicide and the more sexual assault you'll have in society because males are disproportionately more likely to commit sexual assault. The number of males could confound this analysis. The age of a population is going to affect secularism, suicide, and sexual assault. ah The income of a of the state, the education level of a state, these things could all in theory influence what those relationships are.
00:59:14
Speaker
So this is one of the things, it's a very, like again, like what the what I'm able to replicate what the author did and reported in their paper, but it it doesn't mean anything because the things that could be driving this plausibly, then we can't address them. And the most that the author is able to show is that there's a very crude correlation between the crude level of religious non affiliation and a crude estimate of sexual assault and suicide. But there's no evidence that people who are non-religious are committing sexual assault. There's no evidence that the non-religious are the ones committing suicide. It's just these two numbers happen to go up. If the author had, for example,
01:00:02
Speaker
ah Looked at the average number of perhaps like Minecraft players or Fortnite players on each server in the United States. They would have likely found a similar correlation simply because if you have population level data and one of those values is kind of going up and the other value is kind of going up.
01:00:22
Speaker
you're going to get a correlation across those two things. But this, this, this wasn't a thing. I was going to take the time and try to download server information, but I ran out of time before the interview. Like I, this is, I think I was, I fed in median age into the same model. It was a significant predictor. Uh, so like this is all, any one of these things could theoretically explain components of that relationship. So this is, this was kind of the the, frustrating thing in this conversation would not learn not conversation that within the paper where it's like, right, well what about this or this or this or this or this, it's not, oh, like, you know, technically, you should be doing this, it's I'm not even making that argument, it's just, you should be controlling for things we know relate to all three of these.
Long-term Trends and Study's Methodological Flaws
01:01:11
Speaker
When you say, and this is just for our listeners, when you say that you you put ah your median age into the model and you also got significant results, um that's sort of like you redid the the study, but you replaced one of the variables with a different variable and you still found a similar kind of connection. Yeah, so like i I started playing around with what, because there are so many things that this could be confounded by, yeah but part of it is just, it's hard,
01:01:39
Speaker
part of the delay was it's hard to scrape data off a website or take data from a website and organize it in the way that it has to be done. So they're using aggregated data by state across year, which means there are 50 data points for 2014.
01:01:55
Speaker
50 data points for 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020. So basically the trick is to figure out what you can put in for all 351 of those data points. um But i just age was a significant predictor. I think i population at one point is like a like population size is a predictor. there's like There's a large degree of things that you could theoretically control for. um And one of the things I actually wanted to bring up is that a lot of the discussion around this specific um A lot of the discussion around this specific thing is like, oh, like secularism rates should climb with like sexual assault rates. That should be the that should be the the take-home message of that.
01:02:42
Speaker
and If you're actually to look at if you're to actually look at sexual assault rates ah for the United States from 1990 to 2022, I pulled it up from the ah the research department from Statista, you can see that there is a declining rate from about 1990 to about 2012.
01:03:06
Speaker
and then the reported rape rate skyrockets and this is ah I'm assuming not coincidentally although I'm not sure um I'm assuming this is the time at which the new reporting standards ah that the paper had brought up there for Cleary were introduced and you see this skyrocketing rate of sexual assault and it kind of keeps out in 2018 and starts to decline. Specularism has been happening since the 1980s. It's been growing since the 1980s. So if it's been growing since the 1980s and the sexual assault rate was declining since the 1990s until like 2012,
01:03:47
Speaker
what's where's that relationship you should be seeing? Now, um they they you know they didn't have access to data, but you know blah, blah, blah. But just on a conceptual level, if one number is going up and the other number is going down, they're not positively related to each other. like this This isn't what's happening. So this ah this I found just really fascinating. And if you want to if you want to go check out the the The graph for yourself is just the number of reported forcible rape cases in the United States from 1990 to 2022. And it's a very clear illustration of what is actually happening with sexual assault. Again, I'm not a criminologist. This is just kind of my take on this as just a researcher and looking for alternative explanations that
01:04:32
Speaker
you know, may not involve people who are non-religious engaging in sexual assault. right Because that there's no evidence to support that. So moving right along, um the other things I wanted to touch on is there wasn't, there was kind of a lack of, again, like,
01:04:58
Speaker
A lack of entertaining alternative explanations that I feel like should have existed for the study. And again, I don't know the, I'm not sure of the exact nature of how the study was formulated. I'm assuming every word was written by Trusca and like he did everything that he was supposed to and yada, yada, yada. But one of the things that they had mentioned.
01:05:22
Speaker
um is that the reason we might see this relationship is because people who are non-religious are more likely to drink and do drugs. And that's what's driving them to commit sexual assault. And so they specifically mentioned like mentioned the legalization of marijuana.
01:05:40
Speaker
So this is, yeah, legalized marijuana is causing suicide and sexual assault. Like it's, it's as though the author had watched reefer madness. It's all this as like an, like a, as a serious documentarian effort as opposed to, you know, drug propaganda from that time and place in history.
01:06:03
Speaker
um So it is just, it is shocking that this is offered as an explanation given that the only thing that was established was a bivariate correlation between aggregated state level data. So like it's the this paper in some ways hard to critique because there's not much of substance that you can kind of dive into and critique. And this is something that I find frustrating as I'm working my way through it is that Well, I'm not even sure what the underlying relationship might be because there was no testing of anything else. You can't point to a ah variable that wasn't in them like you can.
01:06:43
Speaker
You can't say, well, you know this relationship that you also measured was quite large because nothing else was measured. And this was something that was just kind of extraordinarily frustrating about it um just because there is very much so, there are so many, there's a world of possibilities that could explain this association that doesn't involve blaming people who are non-religious for higher rates of sexual assault and for ah suicide.
01:07:13
Speaker
And I think that's a really good um that's a really good point and one that I wanted to at least touch on once before before we started wrapping up. I know we we can go on for a while yet, and we been we may still, I don't know, but um it's a it's quite a...
01:07:33
Speaker
it's quite an accusation, I guess, if I can put it like that. Or it's it's quite ah it's quite a conclusion to draw if we're going to go less inflammatory. um And he he does acknowledge that his conclusions are ah unlikely to be palatable to all the political actors connected with the topic, in his words. um Yeah, no, that's id like bang on, Prescott. I think I called Prescott earlier, sorry. But bang on, I think you're absolutely right about that. I i don't find them especially palatable. David, you identified ah a number of reasons that I think are very legitimate that are issues with the paper. oh One of the things that stuck out to me was this is quite a conclusion to draw in these times with this political climate when
01:08:20
Speaker
I'm sure there are right-wing media agencies that would love to wave a paper in the air and say, guess what? Non-religious people are causing the increase in rapes, and isn't that terrible? And and they just some there's some hair triggers out there, ah folks, and I don't think we need to give them any more reason to be.
01:08:42
Speaker
upset. um This just seems a little bit, I don't want to say negligent, but I i do want to say ah maybe not done with as much thought as it could have been in this climate. I think that's, I think it's a fairly charitable description of that. um Again, like the the question, this is the thing I really
Legitimacy of Research Questions vs. Methodology
01:09:03
Speaker
wanted, sorry, it's really what I'm saying is the yeah question of How does secularization impact in society? How is secularization, which is replacing this like these millennial old norms when it comes to religion and culture, having an increasing secular society, what is how does that impact society? like What are some outcomes? That is a valid scientific question.
01:09:24
Speaker
honestly Do secular people, are they responsible for, are they more likely to commit sexual assault or are they more likely to commit suicide? um I believe, and that this is someone who I am secular.
01:09:39
Speaker
That is also a valid, that's a valid question. is Is there a relationship between these things? These are valid questions. This methodology, the approach used in the study does not lend itself to answering that question. There's not even, they they can't even, there's there's not even an establishment that secularism or non-religion predates the sexual assault or the suicide. So if you can't even there's not even a temporal precedence that we can establish with these data. And again, like the interpretation of
01:10:12
Speaker
secularism drive sexual assault, well this analysis lends itself equally well to the conclusion sexual assault drives secularism secularism. Like it is equally valid to interpret those data in the same way. I agree and I think that is a and That is a point that perhaps if future conversations, and I don't know if Dr. Truscott knows many of the researchers he was quoting or even criticizing, um you know, we we both mentioned ah Phil Zuckerman as one of them.
01:10:49
Speaker
um But that that might be cause for a further conversation around these issues, especially like we said in this political climate when there's, you know, tempers are running hot, there's an American election that at the time of recording is is about two weeks away. You might be listening to this in the post-apocalyptic hellscape that comes after that election. I don't really know what's going to happen.
01:11:14
Speaker
ah Maybe we don't publish after the world ends. I have no idea what's going on. But ah I do think it's it's important to continue conversations and to temper our research efforts against each other. And that's that's the thing that I didn't mention earlier in describing social science research is the peer review process. That's part of all scientific research. And it's where we present our results to the world and allow other researchers to examine them, critique them, do what David is doing here exactly right now, ah pick them apart and find not just the flaws, but the things that might hold true that could be examined later and that might lead to one more step and one more step and one more step down the ah down the road of knowledge and to getting potentially a better understanding of human nature. Absolutely.
01:12:07
Speaker
Well, David, that's our time for today. And I want to thank you for coming on and sharing your your expertise and yeah your time with us, ah with our listeners, those who have tuned in and hopefully are walking away with a bit better understanding of what social science research is and how people like yourself are contributing to a better understanding of our species on this little rock. So ah yeah, it's very grateful for your time.
01:12:34
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me on. No problem. And I look forward to the next conversation. Absolutely. Take care everybody.
01:12:45
Speaker
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