Kids from religious homes less altruistic, study finds

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 nonbelievers 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 last week in the journal Current Biology.

Worldwide, about 5.8 billion people consider themselves religious, and religion is a primary way for cultures to express their ideas about proper moral behaviour — especially behaviour that involves self-sacrifice for the sake of others.

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 behaviour,” wrote the members of the research team, 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: Chicago; Toronto; Amman, Jordan; Izmir and Istanbul in Turkey; Cape Town, South Africa; and Guangzhou, China. All were between five and 12 years old.

Among them, 24 per cent were from Christian households, 43 per cent were Muslim, 2.5 per cent were Jewish, 1.6 per cent were Buddhist, 0.4 per cent were Hindu, 0.2 per cent were agnostic and 0.5 per cent were classified as “other.” In addition, 28 per cent 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 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. Researchers found that the generosity scores for Christians and Muslims were essentially the same, and that the scores for nonreligious children were 23 per cent to 28 per cent 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.

The researchers also noted that the religiousness -altruism results were more pronounced among kids ages eight to 12, who had more years of religious experience.

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, then secular kids. The children from Muslim families endorsed harsher punishments than kids in the other two groups, who were tied on this score, the study found. The findings “call into question whether religion is vital for moral development,” the researchers said.