52% Yes, a signiicant crisis 3% No, there is no crisis 7% Don't know 38% Yes, a slight crisis 38% Yes, a slight crisis 1,576 RESEARCHERS SURVEYED M ore than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research. The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproduc-ibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant 'crisis' of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature. Data on how much of the scientific literature is reproducible are rare and generally bleak. The best-known analyses, from psychology 1 and cancer biology 2 , found rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively. Our survey respondents were more optimistic: 73% said that they think that at least half of the papers in their field can be trusted, with physicists and chemists generally showing the most confidence. The results capture a confusing snapshot of attitudes around these issues, says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. "At the current time there is no consensus on what reproducibility is or should be. " But just recognizing that is a step forward, he says. "The next step may be identifying what is the problem and to get a consensus. "

The current study examined the cultural factors (i.e., religious background, religious participation, parents' views of prayer, and parents' concepts of God) that contribute to children's differentiation between the capabilities of human minds and God's mind. Protestant Christian, Roman Catholic, Muslim, and Religiously Non‐Affiliated parents and their preschool‐aged children were interviewed (N = 272). Children of Muslim parents differentiated the most between God's mind and human minds (i.e., human minds are fallible but God's is not), and children who had greater differentiation between God's and humans' minds had parents who had the least anthropomorphic conceptions of God. Additionally, there was a unique effect of being raised in a Religiously Non‐Affiliated home on the degree of children's differentiation between God's and human minds after religious context factors had been accounted for; in other words, children of Religious Non‐Affiliates differentiated between humans and God the least and their differentiation was unrelated to religious context factors. These findings delineate the ways in which religious context differences influence concepts of God from the earliest formation. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Children's concept of God develops during the preschool years. The degree of anthropomorphism in children's concept of God varies. What does this study add? Muslim children have a strong differentiation between what God's mind and human minds can do. Religiously Non‐Affiliated children have almost no differentiation between God's and human minds. Parent anthropomorphism explains variance in children's God concepts, both within and across religious groups.

When considering other persons, the human mind draws from folk theories of biology, physics, and psychology. Studies have examined the extent to which people utilize these folk theories in inferring whether or not God has human-like biological, physical, and psychological constraints. However, few studies have examined the way in which these folk attributions relate to each other, the extent to which attributions within a domain are consistent, or whether cultural factors influence human-like attributions within and across domains. The present study assessed 341 individuals’ attributions of anthropomorphic properties to God in three domains (psychological, biological, and physical), their religious beliefs, and their engagement in religious practices. Three Confirmatory Factor Analyses tested hypothetical models of the underlying structure of an anthropomorphic concept of God. The best fitting model was the “Hierarchical Dimensions Concept,” the analyses indicated one overall dimension of anthropomorphism with three sub-domains. Additionally, participants’ religiosity was negatively related to attributing human-like psychological properties to God, suggesting that the more people engage with their religion, the less they think about God as having a ‘human-like’ mind. Religiosity was positively related to individual consistency scores in the biological domain. In other words, greater religiosity was related to less consistent answers about God’s biological properties. As a result, the findings of the current study also suggest that individuals do not just vary between each other in how much they anthropomorphize God, but additionally, variation exists in the type of anthropomorphic reasoning used within an individual person’s concept of God.

The current study examined (a) the impact of religious socialization practices and parents’ concepts on the development of an abstract religious concept (i.e., God) in young children, and (b) whether or not children’s socio-cognitive ability moderates the relationship between their religious concept and sources of information about the concept. 215 parent-child dyads from diverse religious backgrounds (Protestant Christian, Roman Catholic, Muslim, non-affiliated) participated. Children were between the ages of 3.52 and 6.98 years of age (M = 4.770, SD = .767). Four main findings emerged from this study. First, children conceptualized God as more humanlike than their parents did. Second, younger children were more likely to have a humanlike conception of God than older children. Third, parents’ concept of God and children’s concept of God had a stronger relationship when the child’s mental-state reasoning was more accurate. Fourth, the frequency of children’s engagement in religious practices was unrelated to children’s concept of God after controlling for child’s age. Taken together, these findings lend support for the view that social cognition is an important factor in young children’s acquisition of cultural information about abstract entities.

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During the preschool years, children understand prayer as a form of communication and are sensitive to the physical behaviours of prayer. Theorists have suggested a connection between the ability to reason about others' mental states and the inflexible nature of religious rituals. Thus, the current study examined this connection in preschool children's understanding of prayer. Child-parent dyads (N = 182) from multiple religious backgrounds were interviewed about their views on how people pray. Children additionally were tested for their understanding of others' knowledge, specifically their understanding that God and humans may have limited knowledge. Analyses indicated that children who believed that prayer could not incorporate unconventional actions had parents who also advocated this view, indicating children's views on prayer reflect the messages they receive about prayer from their parents. Additionally, controlling for age and parents' views on prayer, children's belief that prayer requires specific actions was significantly related to their understanding of the limitations of human knowledge, but not to their understanding of the limitations of God's knowledge. These findings indicate that children view the functions of prayer actions as communicating to other humans, but not necessarily to God, the intentions to be praying.

Previous research has indicated that the physical actions of prayer are especially salient for preschool-aged children, and children in this age range tend to associate prayer with communicating with God. As the context in which children learn about new concepts impacts on how children come to understand those concepts, and children are often introduced to the concept of God through prayer, the current study examined if the views of parents and preschoolers about the function of actions (e.g., bowing head, closing eyes) involved in prayer are related to, and provide the basis for, children's developing conception of God. Protestant, Catholic, and Muslim parent-child dyads were interviewed (N = 246). Results indicated parents and children primarily think the actions of prayer function as helping the individual praying to think about God. However, parents who endorsed the possibility that prayer actions served a ritualistic, communicative function had children with more anthropomorphic views of God. These findings are discussed in terms of the implications for the ways in which prayer serves as a context of religious concept development.

Previous research has shown that the more individuals view observable entities as animate, the more those entities are associated with having psychological and physiological experiences. This study examined the relationship between children's animistic and anthropomorphic reasoning for concepts of unobservable scientific (i.e., germ) and religious (i.e., God) entities. This study further explored how children's conceptions vary according to the social learning opportunities (i.e., discourse, rituals) parents reportedly create. Parent-child dyads with young children from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds participated. Three central findings emerged. First, children readily associated God with psychobiological characteristics but did not do so to the same extent for germs. Second, children applied more psychobiological properties to both entity types when they believed that the entity was animate. Third, engaging in rituals and discourse with parents was indirectly related to children's concepts of God but not related to their concepts of germs. Overall, this study presented support for a connection between children's animistic and anthropomorphic reasoning for unobservable entities, and an indirect effect of cultural input on this reasoning. The implications of these findings will be discussed.