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Religious Children Are Meaner Than Their Secular Counterparts
Religious Children Are Meaner Than Their Secular Counterparts
children are meaner than their secular counterparts, study finds | World news | The Guardian
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’
The moment of truth. No pressure, kid. Photograph: Allen Donikowski/Getty Images/Flickr RM
Harriet Sherwood Religion correspondent
@harrietsherwood
Friday 6 November 2015 17.10 GMT
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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
nonreligious 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.
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11/8/2015 Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts, study finds | World news | The Guardian
“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% nonreligious. 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 nonreligious 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 nonreligious children the least judgmental. Muslim children
demanded harsher punishment than those from Christian or nonreligious 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
prosocial behaviour, the relation between religion
and morality is a contentious one,” it said.
Young Americans
The report was “a welcome antidote to the
shifting US towards
presumption that religion is a prerequisite of
becoming less religious
morality”, said Keith Porteus Wood of the UK
nation
National Secular Society.
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“It would be interesting to see further research in this
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11/8/2015 Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts, study finds | World news | The Guardian
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.
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