[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.