The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Statistics

The readers of the previous post may be of the kind who is very reluctant to accept an history of anything which does not make a large case for protestantism. Fortunately, this was in our case a mere omission. For we are strong defenders of the idea that, like most of the time, the answers to most of our questions are to be found in calvinism.

It is a common defect of historians to be unable to see the statistical nature of most of the historical controversies they study. The Reformation's case is a good example of such an inability. Indeed, religious aspects of the emergence of calvinism should not hide what must be considered as one of the first attempts to state the difference between correlation and causation. For here is the primary message of calvinism: the Roman Church, the Calvinists say, noting that virtuous lives are strongly correlated with an afterlife in paradise, jumped to the conclusion that the virtuous actions cause their author to go to Heaven. This is a poor understanding of the statistical nature of this correlation. To the contrary, we can bring strong evidences that a common-causal variable, namely "being chosen", causes both virtuous life and acceptance to Heaven.

And this is the kind of change that can account for the European economic take-off.

To conlcude this opening lecture on the history of statsistics, we shall notify that the two precedent posts are inspired by Quattrone & Tversky's 1984 article, Causal versus diagnostic contingencies: On self-deception and on the voter's illusion, a summary of which can be found here. (Tversky was a cognitive psychologist, co-author for 10 years of 2002 Economics Nobel Prize-recipient Daniel Kahneman, with who he conceived the Prospect Theory, the most famous non Expected-Utility theory of decision in uncertainty. It is commonly accepted that he would have jointly received the prize, hadn't he died in 1996.)

Tversky and Quattrone's analysis is opposite to this one : according to them, Calvinists would behave as if their actions were causes of where they will go in the afterlife, even though their doctrine asserts that the correlation between virtuous lives and Heaven is by no mean causal. More precisely, they take Calvinists as an example of deceptive diagnosis, which is a form of self-deception where people select an action to make a favorable diagnosis of a positive outcome as if the favorable diagnosis caused the positive outcome : people deceive themselves by mistaking the correlation between the favorable diagnosis and the positive outcome for a causal relation. A calvinist tempted soul could for instance resist the temptation, even though his temptation is already the proof that he is not chosen ("Calvinists ought to transgress upon experiencing the desire to do so, other things being equal, for heaven and hell are independant of actions conditional to the urge to sin. Contrary to this analysis, we believe that many Calvinists would nonetheless resist the temptation and choose instead the virtuous acts correlated with paradise."). Interestingly, for Weber's argument on the origins of accumulation in calvinism to be valid, we need to assume the existence of such kind of self-deceiving process, which is confirmed by Tversy and Quattrone's experiment.