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The Effect of Peace Prayers and Meditations

One of the special categories we regularly explore is the effect of organized events that recruit as many people as possible to do synchronized prayers or meditations which are intended to have a positive effect on the social climate. I think the number of these has been increasing over the time the GCP has been running, but we have noted them since 1998. They vary greatly in the quality or effectiveness of the organization, and hence also almost certainly in the number of people who participate. But for the sake of a preliminary look at this category of social activism, we can put together all of the examples we have up to 2011. There are 21 of these, and the composite results is shown in the first figure.

Visually it is obvious that the events vary greatly in the size and even the direction of the effect, and indeed the Chisquare Z that measures this variance is substantial at 1.535, though not significant. The composite (or average) Z-score (0.581) is slightly positive, but not impressive. It is, however a bit larger than the average effect size (~0.33) for the GCP database as a whole.

The Effect of
Peace Prayers and Meditations

When we separate out the series of events on the International Day of Peace (September 21), the picture should be simpler because this is a yearly official celebration rather than an ad hoc or unique event. However, we see again the high variability (in this case it is significant at Z = 2.098 and p = 0.018), and a fairly substantial positive deviation. Both are driven primarily by the most recent International Day of Peace, which had an effect size greater than 3 sigma. I received an unusually high volume of suggestions that the day should be a GCP event, and in addition, many suggestions to monitor other kinds of social movements and gatherings focused on that date.

The Effect of
Peace Prayers and Meditations

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every "success" might be largely driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.


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