Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts, study finds
Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts, study finds
Religious belief appears to have negative influence on children’s altruism and judgments of others’ actions even as parents see them as ‘more empathetic’
Harriet Sherwood Religion correspondent
Friday 6 November 2015 12.10 EST Last modified on Tuesday 10 November 2015 06.26 EST
Children from religious families are less kind and more punitive than those from non-religious households, according to a new study.
Academics from seven universities across the world studied Christian, Muslim and non-religious children to test the relationship between religion and morality.
They found that religious belief is a negative influence on children’s altruism.
“Overall, our findings ... contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others,” said the authors of The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World , published this week in Current Biology.
“More generally, they call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that secularisation of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness – in fact, it will do just the opposite.”
Almost 1,200 children, aged between five and 12, in the US, Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey and South Africa participated in the study. Almost 24% were Christian, 43% Muslim, and 27.6% non-religious. The numbers of Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, agnostic and other children were too small to be statistically valid.
They were asked to choose stickers and then told there were not enough to go round for all children in their school, to see if they would share. They were also shown film of children pushing and bumping one another to gauge their responses.
The findings “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”.
Older children, usually those with a longer exposure to religion, “exhibit[ed] the greatest negative relations”.
The study also found that “religiosity affects children’s punitive tendencies”. Children from religious households “frequently appear to be more judgmental of others’ actions”, it said.
Muslim children judged “interpersonal harm as more mean” than children from Christian families, with non-religious children the least judgmental. Muslim children demanded harsher punishment than those from Christian or non-religious homes.
At the same time, the report said that religious parents were more likely than others to consider their children to be “more empathetic and more sensitive to the plight of others”.
The report pointed out that 5.8 billion humans, representing 84% of the worldwide population, identify as religious. “While it is generally accepted that religion contours people’s moral judgments and pro-social behaviour, the relation between religion and morality is a contentious one,” it said.
The report was “a welcome antidote to the presumption that religion is a prerequisite of morality”, said Keith Porteous Wood of the UK National Secular Society.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/06/religious-children-less-altruistic-secular-kids-study
According to the respected Pew Research Center, which examines attitudes toward and practices of faith, most people around the world think it is necessary to believe in God to be a moral person . In the US, 53% of adults think that faith in God is necessary to morality, a figure which rose to seven of 10 adults in the Middle East and three-quarters of adults in six African countries surveyed by Pew.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/06/religious-children-less-altruistic-secular-kids-study
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This article was posted on another community discussion site and caught my attention because of the holiday.
I have to say I'm not surprised with the findings. You can look around and see so many examples of adults of faith treating others with disdain and intolerance. It's natural their children would pick up on it and mirror the behavior. I would say it's probably confusing to the child being told by the parent to behave a certain way while observing the parent doing the very thing they've been instructed against.
I also find it rather telling that some of the countries reporting high percentages of citizens that believe God is a necessary moral are the most violent.
For me the report only reinforces what I have believed for some time which is that America is heading in the same direction as some of the violent countries because of the hate and intolerance that religion can breed.
I'm not sure how anyone can expect a child to grow into a moral figure, when it is pounded into their head that there's an entity watching over you that will send you to burn in eternal torment for even thinking 'immoral' thoughts - and that it already murdered all of humanity once. If that God is the epitome of morality, then we would all be better off having never been born at all.