dsgrue3 said:
"In a second experiment, 101 adults were shown either a neutral video or an emotional video about children in poverty. They were then given 10 fake dollars and told they could give as much as they liked to a stranger. Those who were less religious gave more when they saw the emotional video first." Terrible study. - Sample Size - Fake dollars Either way, study as-is shows that Atheists are governed by compassion as opposed to a mechanical response to charitable donations. |
A) That's a perfectly fine sample size. It's lab work. You won't find much bigger sample sizes for that kind of thing. It's not a freakin survey.
B) They weren't fake dollars. That's just a misreporting of the study.
C) It's consistant with all other research.
D) Not really... that's the way the researcher decided to interpret it... being an ahteist herself who admitted to be specifically looking for that result.
Let me ask you a question though...
Do you think those people just didn't know how much it sucked to be a starving child in Africa? Seems unlikely right? Everybody has seen those videos before... everybody knows what a starving child in africa is like. Everyone knows what starving is.
So why no compassion for the starving children when not shown the video? Why only after being shown a video reminding them just how horrible it is over there?
Seems less like motivated by compassion and more motivated by guilt to me. Or a breaking through of a deadening to others problems. Where only by it being shown can people ackowledge just what's going on.
.
E) Your arguement in D was pushing the goalposts anyway. Since like I said... atehists more often need to be prodded to give to charity. As was shown.