Religious Children Less Altruistic?

"Our findings contradict the common-sense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind toward others," psychology and psychiatry professor at the University of Chicago Jean Decety, who worked on the study, pointed out. "In our study, kids from atheist and non-religious families were, in fact, more generous."

The research team reported that their results "robustly demonstrate that children from households identifying as either of the two major world religions (Christianity and Islam) were less altruistic than children from non-religious households". Was that perhaps the result of the fact that young children haven't yet learned how to implement the values they are being raised with? The answer is no —  the study found that older children from religious families, presumably those with the greatest exposure to the family's religious teachings, "exhibit the greatest negative relations". 

Furthermore, those children who decided to place stickers in an envelope would have ended up sharing with peers from the same school, and frequently children with comparative ethnic backgrounds. In other words, though it is already well known that people have a greater tendency to share with those belonging to the same group, "this result cannot be simply explained by in-group versus out-group biases that are known to change children’s cooperative behaviors from an early age".

The interesting thing here is that those parents who identified as either Muslim or Christian were more likely than those from the non-religious group to consider their own children to be "more empathetic and more sensitive to the plight of others".  Despite this belief, children from these groups were found to have an increased likelihood of being "more judgmental of others’ actions". 

Could their preaching of "hell fire and brimstone" lead fundamentalists to see God as more punitive than compassionate, in turn causing them to believe in correction above empathy? The additional finding that fundamentalists are also less likely to differentiate between different types of transgressions seems to support that idea. 

READ When Is It Helpful to Share Your Feelings?

What Can We Learn From This Study?

This study of 1,200 children most certainly does not warrant a blanket condemnation of religious practices. Instead of concluding that religion induces selfishness — indeed exactly the message some have taken away from this study — we can, however, learn that it is high time to put the idea that atheists cannot be good people that possess the moral values that allow humans to live harmoniously in groups to rest. Rather than judging atheists for a lack of morality, parents who are raising their children with faith may need to question whether their religious teachings alone are enough to instill a spirit of sharing and compassion.