[neaden]

"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."

And how many of these will cover the retraction? A dozen at most? And all those articles will be sitting out there, getting cited and read on occasion.

[charliesharding]

Really sad to see and feels like it's becoming more common (maybe just because I'm paying closer attention). If it fits the narrative, accept first, retract later. It would be interesting to see view statistics on the original article vs the retraction.

[astine]

It's not just narrative fitting. There is also a strong bias towards publishing results that seem surprising because that gets more readers. Of course, that also biases toward wrong results because wrong results are likely to be surprising.

[gumby]

"wrong results are [more likely] to be surprising".

This case is interesting because there's a large population who would find these (unproven as it turns out) results confirmatory rather than unexpected.

In the end they were neither.

[twy123456]

Narrative fitting and surprise bias are largely orthogonal biases. Both are at work in this case. In the western press it is trendy to paint religion in a negative light, which is the narrative the paper reinforces. Imagine a bogus paper painting in an unfavorable light one of the western virtuous identities: not white, not religious, not male, not hetero. For example, "The Negative Association between Atheism and Children’s Altruism across the World". Or "The Negative Association between Homosexual Parents and Children’s Altruism across the World". Such papers will never be covered by over 80 media outlets without questioning, in spite of being surprising with respect of the narrative.

[hos234]

It's not sad, it's great.

The history of science is full of drama where most issues took multiple generations to resolve. It's easy to forget, in those interim periods, people would build all kinds of castles on total BS all the time that cost society in so many ways.

Today stuff gets resolved faster and that's a good thing. People, qualified or not, who get carried away by hype or bias look foolish much much faster. And thanks to how hard it is to erase mistakes from the internet good luck rebuilding lost cred.

[scollet]

This is a very reassuring viewpoint. I think the onus of acceptance relies on each individual perception and how they can relate to such facts. I will disagree on your usage of 'foolish' because I don't think it's in anyone's best interest to declare foolishness, but to paint a wholistic, optimistic picture of a realistic future. It is my opinion to embrace misconceptions about past mistakes that can have astounding detrimental effects and not to look down, but to unabashedly represent a truth and allow others to accept it.

[yesenadam]

I collected some headlines in 2015:

Study Shows Non-Religious Kids Are More Altruistic and Generous Than Non-Religious Ones (TIME)

Religious children more punitive, less likely to display altruism (Boing Boing)

Study: Religious children less altruistic, more mean than nonreligious kids (Chicago Sun-Times)

Religious Kids Aren’t as Good at Sharing, Study Finds (Yahoo Parenting)

Study: Religion Makes Children Less Generous (Newser)

Religion doesn’t make kids more generous or altruistic, study finds (LA Times)

Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts, study finds (The Guardian)

Being religious makes you less generous, study finds (metro.co.uk)

Kinder Without God: Kids Who Grow Up In A Religious Home Less Altruistic Than Those Without Religion (Medical Daily)

Surprise! Science proves kids with religious upbringings are less generous — and so are adults (rawstory.com, the Medical Daily story reposted with a new headline)

[bediger4000]

The article said that the retraction was covered by 4 outlets.

[efa]

Boy how common and sad that is. Sensational findings on the front page. Correction saying sensational finding totally wrong buried on page ten or not published at all.

[caseysoftware]

Which furthers the "fake news" narrative because now even more people can point out the BS on the front page.

Why don't reporters get angry about this and demand more and better retractions? This hurts their credibility more than anyone.

[baddox]

Apparently the journal published the original paper in 2015, published someone else's correction in 2016, and only published a retraction of the original paper just last month.

[mackrevinack]

there should be a law that makes them keep reposting the story every year until they reach the numbers from the original release

[dukoid]

I think there is no need to be concerned that the retraction won't be widely covered in the long run in this particular case though -- all the religious interest groups will make a big fuss about this...

[TimTheTinker]

That's almost like saying it's OK to falsely report about religion in the first place because "the religious interest groups will defend themselves adequately", etc.

False reporting of any sort (including the failure to correct prior false reports, whether intended or not) always causes harm. Truth and principles matter.

Furthermore, reducing ideas to power struggles between those who speak them is to commit both the genetic fallacy and the ad-hominem fallacy.

[nurettin]

Why would an idea exist other than to serve a purpose, and why would that purpose be distant from the mindset which benefits the most from it?

[TimTheTinker]

> Why would an idea exist other than to serve a purpose

Because ideas are the substrate of thought, belief, motivation, desire, and human life itself. Without ideas we lack the ability to understand anything at all.

[nurettin]

Not sure how that relates to my question. Why would an idea exist without someone to give it purpose?

[TimTheTinker]

Because it constitutes belief and/or knowledge.

Because it is true, or someone believes it to be so.

Because it carries explanatory power - something we all strongly desire.

You might call those reasons “purposes” - if so, I don’t disagree. But the truth or falsehood of an idea transcends any “purpose” someone may have for speaking it. This is the academic posture: to dispassionately evaluate truth claims without fearing the speaker.

[xamuel]

A good religious institution should rise above the fray and not even bother fussing about something like this. No-one who would otherwise have accepted Christ would have rejected him based on that study. It's the religious equivalent of a political cartoon--it changes no one's mind, it just fills up space and generates clicks/citations.

"Then Abraham said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.'" (Luke 16:31)

[gnicholas]

No-one who would otherwise have accepted Christ would have rejected him based on that study.

It may be true that reading about the study would not have convinced anyone to become a practicing Christian. But there were undoubtedly people who were on the fence about going back to church, either for themselves or for their kids, who decided not to based on the purported conclusion that it made kids less generous. So just because the study alone might not have convinced anyone to follow Christ, there still might be more practicing Christians if the study had been done correctly (and therefore garnered very little coverage) or if the correction had been covered as widely as the original flawed study.