asker's odds.

"Professor, there appears to be an odd finding in your numbers."

No, nah, scratch that.


"Sir, you have a supernatural glitch in your data."

Bah. Blerg.

I'm drafting an email to a psychology professor and researcher whose paper I read this past week. In a nutshell, the paper is predicated on the notion that attending church acts to restore our cognitive resources (ie. helps us to better deal with life). To that end, these researchers surveyed 771 college undergraduates, asking them about the frequency with which they attend church, their reasons for going to church, the activities they most partake in at church, and the outcomes they feel are a result of their church involvement.

Psychologists are great at statistically validating things we already know, and this study was no exception, but wrapped up in this one was something cool.

They found that students who reported engaging in what they termed "Asking" behavior at church also reported feeling more attentive, focused and effective in their lives as an outcome of their church attendance. "Asking" in this study referred to asking God for help and forgiveness.

There are three things you should know.

Firstly, this one finding, this link between asking and effective functioning was far and away the largest effect size found in the study. Secondly, asking God for help or forgiveness predicted greater effectiveness in life above even the stated goal of wanting to know God. There was still a strong link between wanting to know God, and effective functioning, but significantly lower than that of asking and functioning. Thirdly, you would expect that any effect of asking God for help would be mediated through a sense of calm. I ask God, I feel calmer, so I function better. But that's not the case here. Though there was a statistically-significant link between asking for help, and feeling peace, the connection between asking and effective functioning was much, much stronger (think 3% versus %28 prediction--which would you rather have?).

In English, then.

1. The most incredible finding in the study was that asking God for help was associated with students feeling more effective in their lives.

2. Students who asked felt more effective than students who merely sought after God, or spiritual feeling.

3. Asking didn't just correlate with students feeling more peaceful about their lives, it actually correlated with them feeling that they were more effective in their lives, regardless of whether or not they felt calmer.

So all of this begs one question: What the flip is going on with this dude's data?

You read these studies, and sometimes, the findings are a little fishy for a supposedly closed and God-less system. But, since most of the researchers are liberal agnostics or atheists, everybody just seems to scratch their heads, and move on. This time, though, the finding was too big to ignore. The researchers acknowledge the oddness in their discussion, saying that "Because the asking items deal with issues that cannot be resolved by an individual, the strong relation with effective functioning points, even more clearly than the spirituality results, to the importance of being able to offload difficult issues onto a higher power." Basically, they're saying that asking is cognitively-adaptive because it allows people to pawn off their problems on a god, freeing up their mental resources to deal with situations they can fix.

And this is true. Spirituality is adaptive in that way. I make no secret of the fact that God can do things in and through my life that I alone cannot, hence my asking. But, the problem remains--if that explanation cut it, you'd expect to see students reporting greater sense of peace as often as they reported effective functioning. Not so, in this case.

It seems that whatever those kids were asking for, their prayers were answered.