A new study published in Current Biology has found that children who are supposedly brought up in a religious environment are more selfish than children without any religious affiliation.
Decety’s team of psychologists assessed altruism using ‘the dictator game’: each child was given 30 stickers and told to choose how many to share with an anonymous child from the same school and similar ethnic group. This task reflects choices in ecology – allocating limited resources – and the results were used to calculate a ‘generosity score’. The researchers looked at 1170 children aged 5-12 years old, from six countries (USA, Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey and South Africa). Most kids came from households that identified as Christian (24%), Muslim (43%) or not religious (28%). (Small numbers from Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and agnostic homes weren’t compared.)
The results revealed that secular children shared more stickers. Muslim children appear to be less generous than Christian kids, but this is not statistically significant (labelled ‘ns’ in the bar chart below). All three groups became less altruistic with age, though religious kids had lower generosity, suggesting that longer exposure to religion leads to less altruism.
This result, of course, goes against the prevailing and unproven notion that religion makes one more "moral".
Parents were also asked to score their children according to a sense of empathy and sensitivity to injustice. This subjective self-reporting showed that religious adults think their children have strong moral tendencies, contradicting objective assessments of altruism (generosity and moral sensitivity).
Why are religious people less moral? One factor is a psychological phenomenon known as ‘moral licensing’: a person will justify doing something bad or immoral – like being racist – because they’ve already done something ‘good’, such as praying. “It’s an unconscious bias,” Decety explains. “They don’t even see that’s not compatible with what they’ve been learning in church.”
History backs-up the scientific evidence that secular people are more moral, as reviewed by Israeli psychologist Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. Most white supporters of the US Civil Rights Movement were non-religious, for example, while the apartheid regime in South Africa was led by devout Christians and opposed by atheists.
All interesting and eye-opening stuff. This again reinforces my point that just because Talking Heads that you listen too says such-and-such, it doesn't mean that it has been socially or culturally verified to be true!
The source paper can be obtained (at least for now) from here.
Zz.
