A psychological study published in the most recent volume of Current Biology is challenging our cultural perceptions of religiosity and morality. Researchers found that children brought up in religious homes are significantly less altruistic than their secular peers.
Religion is kind of having a bad week, isn’t it?
In the United States, there exists a commonly-held perception that religiosity is causal to moral behavior. A survey conducted by Pew last year found that 53 percent of the population attest that a belief in God is necessary for someone to have positive morals — a percentage that dwarfs numbers accumulated in each polled North American and European nation. Americans have an overwhelming tendency to elect politicians with deep religious beliefs and are typically distrustful of atheists. In direct relation to the study, when it came to whether or not their kids exhibited empathy and sensitivity for justice, the religious parents said their kids did exhibit those traits far more often than the secular parents did.
However, the actions of these religious children swiftly and bluntly called the perceptions of their parents into question. Not only did the study show that children from religious households were less generous and were harsher in their punitive tendencies, but that the longer children lived in a religious household, the stingier they became.
1,170 children from ages 5 to 12 from six countries (Canada, China, the United States, Turkey, Jordan, and South Africa) were assessed in the psychological study. Researchers evaluated responses from the children as they relate to altruism and third-party evaluation of scenarios depicting interpersonal harm. Aside from age and national demographics, researchers also factored the religiousness of the child’s household and parental responses pertaining to their child’s empathy and sensitivity to justice.
Researchers asked the children to play a game where the children had to decide how many stickers to share with an anonymous peer from the same school who had a similar ethnic makeup (this was done to rule out any other biases the child might have). Each child was told to pick 10 stickers they liked and the researcher told the child they could keep all 10 of them. The researcher also explained to the child that some students would not get any stickers at all. The researcher asked the child if they would like to donate some of their stickers to their less fortunate classmates and then turned away while the child decided to either keep all 10 or put some aside to be donated.
Also, each child was shown videos in which one person performs an action on another person (such as pushing or bumping). In some of the videos, the actions were deliberate. In others, they were accidental. The child watching the videos was asked to assess how mean the behavior was and to what extreme should the perpetrator be punished.
Overall, the results of the study found that religiosity in the home negatively affected the psychological development of children and that the longer the child was exposed to religiosity in the home, the worse off the child’s psychological development. In effect, there is strong evidence indicating that religiosity in the home turns kids into little bastards while their parents wholeheartedly believe they’re little saints.
If the claims are true and God is necessary to have positive morals, then the results of the study would be inverse — secular children would be less generous and harsher in their punitive tendencies while religious children would be more prosocial. However, since this study found the opposite to be true, then how can that claim continue to exist? The researchers do not definitively know, but suspect “moral licensing” — where the act of doing something that strengthens positive self-image (such as prayer or doing good deeds, in this case) makes people less concerned about the consequences of immoral behavior, thus making them more likely to make immoral choices — may have something to do with it.
That’s another point for the nurture argument.
Featured image by Kenji Ross, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
