Nothing like a good piece of confirmation bias.

Do you remember that paper from a few years back that reported religious children were meaner than their secular peers? It was shared by outlets including the Los Angeles Times, Slate, and the Guardian, none of whom, at the time of this writing, have issued updates to their breathless recitations of the conclusions of this now-debunked paper.

Slate concluded, piously, “Perhaps the thing to take away from this is that studies that tout the moral authority of a certain community should be taken with a grain of salt. Or, more biblically: Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

It was clear all along that something was not right with the paper, published in 2015 by Current Biology. First, it measured altruism through subjective metrics such as how mean children thought actions such as pushing were and how harshly they’d punish the perpetrators. Another one of the tests measured how many stickers they were willing to share with others. On average, nonreligious children gave away four stickers, while religious children only gave away a mere — three.