Here’s a discovery that could make secular parents say hallelujah: Children who grow up in nonreligious homes are more generous and altruistic than children from observant families.
A series of experiments involving 1,170 kids from a variety of religious backgrounds found that the non-believers were more likely to share stickers with their classmates and less likely to endorse harsh punishments for people who pushed or bumped into others.
The results “contradict the common-sense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind toward others,” according to a study published this week in the journal Current Biology.
It’s often taken as an article of faith that religion promotes altruism. If that is true, then “children reared in religious families should show stronger altruistic behavior,” wrote the members of the research team, which was led by University of Chicago neuroscientist Jean Decety.
To see whether this was indeed the case, Decety and his colleagues recruited children from seven cities around the world. All of the kids were between 5 and 12 years old.
Among them, 24 percent were from Christian households, 43 percent were Muslim, 2.5 percent were Jewish, 1.6 percent were Buddhist, 0.4 percent were Hindu, 0.2 percent were agnostic and 0.5 percent were classified as “other.” In addition, 28 percent of the kids came from families described as “not religious.”
The researchers showed each child a collection of 30 stickers and told the kids they could keep the 10 they liked best. Then the researchers told their young subjects they wouldn’t have time to play the sticker game with every student in the school, so some kids wouldn’t get any.
The children responded by sharing some of the stickers with their classmates — and the kids from secular households shared more stickers than their religious counterparts. When the researchers examined the three biggest groups of kids, they found that the generosity scores for Christians and Muslims were essentially the same, and that the scores for nonreligious children were 23 percent to 28 percent higher.
The researchers also found that the more religious the family, the less altruistic the child. This pattern held up for all religions in the study.
In another part of the experiment, the researchers showed the kids a series of scenarios involving bumping, pushing or other types of “interpersonal harm.” They then asked the kids to rate the meanness of the offenders.
Muslim kids judged the offenders most harshly, followed by Christian kids and then secular kids. Accordingly, the children from Muslim families endorsed harsher punishments than kids in the other two groups, who were essentially tied on this score, according to the study.
