Study: Religious kids not as kind as secular peers

Sample group of Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Buddhist children scores poorly on generousity and altruisism.

A new study finds that contrary to conventional wisdom, children raised in nonreligious homes are more generous and altruistic than their peers who receive a religious upbringing. Called “The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World,” the study of 1,170 children found that the children from secular homes were more likely to share with their classmates and less likely to endorse harsh punishments for those who pushed or bumped into others, the Los Angeles Times reported. The respondents came from a variety of religious backgrounds.

The results “contradict the common-sense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind toward others,” said the study published Nov. 5 in the journal Current Biology.
The research team, led by University of Chicago neuroscientist Jean Decety, studied a diverse group of children aged 5-12 from seven cities: Chicago; Toronto; Amman, Jordan; Izmir and Istanbul in Turkey; Cape Town, South Africa, and Guangzho, China.

Forty-three percent of the subjects were Muslim, 24 percent Christian, 2.5 percent Jewish and 1.6 percent Buddhist. Twenty-eight percent of the children came from families that identified as “not religious.”
In one component of the study, researchers found that secular students were 23 to 28 percent more likely than religious ones to offer to share. Regardless of the particular faith with which a child identified, the more religious the family, the less generous the child.

In another part of the study, the researchers described scenarios involving bumping, pushing or other types of “interpersonal harm” and asked the kids to rate the meanness of the offenders. Muslim children judged the offenders most harshly, followed by the Christians and the secular. The sample of Jewish children was small, and the study did not compare Jewish children to those of other faiths. The findings “call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that the secularization of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness — in fact, it will do just the opposite,” according to the article.


http://www.timesofisrael.com/study-religious-kids-not-as-kind-than-secular-peers/


Lol why am I not surprsied

I also think there is a very simple explanation for this based on the more religious or literal believers that there are. Literal and more religious people tend to be more hardline conservative than anything else. So it comes as no surprise that literal religious beliefs, espcially in the Abrahamic faiths would be less generous to others, even more so not of their faith. This is evident when you look at the literal Christian Conservatives in the likes of the US and hardline Salafist Muslims. As well as all the prejudiced discrmination taught. It also has much to do with the teaching of a family aspect for the believers of that faith, placing them on a mythical higher pedestal than non-believers, which is why I think even more so the Abrhamic faiths are the biggest hinderance to cohesion and integration. Because they plus much emphasis on eternal punishment for non-believers, it comes as no surpirse how to me, that a religious racism is formed on of non-believers in regards to those who are very religious literally.

I've said it before, but teaching someone the supreme ruler of the universe thinks they're special can obviously be psychologically damaging, easily making someone an egomaniac.

I know lots of religious people who simply live abiding by the universal rules of "Goodness"