Religious children are meaner than their
secular counterparts, study finds
Harriet
Sherwood Friday 6 November
2015 theguardian
Religious belief appears to have negative influence on children’s
altruism and judgments of others’ actions even as parents see them
as ‘more empathetic’
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 Porteus Wood of the UK
National Secular Society.
“It would be interesting to see further research in this area,
but we hope this goes some way to undoing the idea that religious
ethics are innately superior to the secular outlook. We suspect
that people of all faiths and none share similar ethical principles
in their day to day lives, albeit may express them differently
depending on their worldview.”
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.