What's the bigger crime: Religion, non-religion, or meta-analysis? [Cognitive Daily]

Published: August 1, 2007, 11:42 am

Eric Schwitzgebel has been doing a lot of thinking about the relationship between thinking about ethical behavior and actually behaving ethically. In his most recent post, he takes on a meta-analysis claiming that religious belief correlates negatively with criminal activity: I found a 2001 "meta-analysis" (Baier & Wright) of the literature that shows all the usual blindnesses of meta-analyses. Oh, you don't know what a meta-analysis is? As usually practiced, it's a way of doing math instead of thinking. First, you find all the published experiments pertinent to Hypothesis X (e.g., "religious people commit fewer crimes"). Then you combine the data using (depending on your taste) either simplistic or suspiciously fancy (and hidden-assumption-ridden) statistical tools. Finally -- voila! -- you announce the real size of the effect. So, for example, Baier and Wright find that the "median effect size" of religion on criminality is r = -.11! Schwitzgebel, as you might expect, doesn't buy

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