A tale of mistake and retraction shows that science works—eventually

IN NOVEMBER 2015 a team of psychologists led by Jean Decety of the University of Chicago published an unexpected finding. Based on an experiment involving coloured stickers (trinkets valued by the children who took part) they concluded that youngsters living in religious households are less generous than those who dwell in non-religious households. Many news outlets, including , reported this result—precisely because it was so surprising. It turns out, though, that it was wrong. In August , the journal which published the original paper, published a retraction, saying:An error in this article, our incorrect inclusion of country of origin as a covariate in many analyses, was pointed out in a correspondence from Shariff, Willard, Muthukrishna, Kramer and Henrich. When we reanalysed these data to correct this error, we found that country of origin, rather than religious affiliation, is the primary predictor of several of the outcomes.