Last week at this book club at work (yeah, yeah, I know. I do not read books on corporate whoring usually but this was an exception. They gave us free food and I got to pick the book), we were discussing Freakonomics. After all the Excel whores in the room were done with why we needed more charts and graphs and numbers in the book in question, we moved on to more interesting things. We came up with a list of questions that we would like to see answered and talked about how we would test our hypotheses. For example, one of our questions was whether there is a correlation between the kind of music one listens to and one's criminal tendencies. Is it possible to predict criminal behaviour of a group of individuals given their music preferences? We talked at length about how we would design studies that would control for all other factors - needless to say, quite a few of these "ideas" would be illegal and so not really practical.
Anyway, one of the questions we came up with but which we did not talk about(for obvious reasons) was whether religion has an effect on morality. I was reminded of this when I saw this post by Primary Red; the claim is that one of the reasons why there is so much lawlessness in India now could be because of "loss of faith". Well, first of all, I am not sure whether A) there is more lawlessness than before and B) we as a society have 'less faith' now than before but hey, those questions not the subject of this post.
This is what interests me - if I would like to test correlation between religion and morality how would I do that? First of all, how do I define being moral? Any definition of morality tends to be relative, so what is my measure of morality? If I were to narrow down a group, say convicted murderers, how would I control for other factors(like environment, "evilness" et al)? Are there are natural experiments(remember the Roe v Wade on crime rate stats was right out there!) at all that I can look at? Any ideas? Open for comments.
PS - I am really not interested in what you think is the answer, most people who read this blog will probably say No anyways. I am much more interested in ideas on proving/disproving the hypothesis.
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3 comments:
"whether there is a correlation between the kind of music one listens to and one's criminal tendencies."
I'm assuming you're talking about crimes like rape, murder, etc. There are those of who consider listening to hip-hop or boy bands, for instance, a crime against sound waves - in which case the question's fairly moot. :-).
Seriously though, I think the first distinction to make is between crime as acts against the law and crimes as immoral acts - the two are very different (though there's some intersection, I suppose). The latter, I suspect, is untestable, since morality is not only subjective and person / faith dependent, it is also, in a sense revealed faith - so that the very definition of what you believe is in the moral precepts you adhere to (the rest is just talk).
For the faith to illegality correlation, I don't see controlling for other factors being that difficult - with a large enough sample you could just include factors like income levels, education, neighbourhood, etc. in the regression. Two things to think about though:
a) Is your hypothesis related to faith in general (i.e. any faith) or do you see the effects of particular faiths being different? I don't know about crime, but there is certainly research to show that religious preferences influence a number of social actions - so Catholics behave differently from Protestants, etc. If you run the analysis at an aggregate level (i.e. any faith to any crime) you may lose some of the detail. For instance, do particular religions display a higher tendency towards crimes against women?
b) The other thing is - how are you measuring degree of 'faith'. Do you measure it based on self-reports (which are notoriously unreliable)? Do you measure it based on religious activity? If so, how do you control for the correlation of that with your other independent variables. In other words the problem is not that people with low income / education levels may have higher crime hazard (because that you can control for), the problem is that people from low income / education levels may spend more time in Church without being more religious in any true sense. And since both of those things are on the same side of the equation, you're going to have covariance problems in your regression.
P.S. Hey, you ASKED for this.
Falstaff: Yes, I did indeed ask for this and thanks for your time and thoughts. (In other words, dude, you are also so jobless kya?).
Yes, I agree that the only option is to look at crimes as acts against the law. Or the ones where those and the ones as immoral acts intersect - though I guess that becomes difficult when a crime such as mass murder becomes an acceptable moral value to the person or group of people committing the crime.
Digression - It is interesting though to see people associating "immoral values" such as homosexuality to religion -would love to see some data reg those claims.
And I guess you are right - we might just be able to include most of the demographic factors for the regression. But I am not sure whether looking at faith on an aggregate level will skew the study if we are looking at henious crimes. All religions are probably on the same side on this one and I'd think that if we were to see a particular religion display a higher tendency towards crime against women, there probably are other important factors such as geography, education and culture at play. But yes, that needs to be proved before we can proceed. Also, I think there is this huge intersection between what we call culture and what we call religion and I am not really sure how we can clearly demarcate between the two.
How do we measure faith? I have no idea. This one, I concluded was the toughest question to answer when I pondered over this before. What do people really mean when they say they are believers? So many people I know who I think are extremely spiritual would never indulge in any kind of "religious" activity. How do we account for that? And what does being religious in the true sense really mean? That you believe in heaven and hell and that you need to go to church every Sunday and vote for Bush? I am wondering if there's a way we could find out what kind of religious teachings the people in the study imbimbed. Maybe that's a start. Though I guess how do you separate out religious teachings from plain common sense.
And then people say I'm jobless...
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