A recent study conducted by researchers on over 1,000 children from different cultural backgrounds has shown that children raised in religious households tend to be less social than those raised in atheist households. The study found that children from Christian and Muslim backgrounds were less likely to share with their peers, but were more likely to punish uncooperative behavior. The more religious the family, the more pronounced this behavior was observed.
Religion is often considered an important guide for morality and is believed to promote social behavior. However, previous studies have shown that the strictness of religions is heavily influenced by social and ecological factors, and that moral behavior is influenced by factors such as time of day, stress levels, and language. Researchers at the University of Chicago were interested in whether a religious upbringing actually leads children to exhibit more social and generous behavior. To test this, they conducted game experiments on over 1,100 children between the ages of five and twelve from Canada, the United States, Jordan, Turkey, China, and South Africa.
In the first game, children were asked to decide how many stickers they wanted to share with an unknown child of the same ethnic and religious background. In the second game, children watched a short film in which an actor pushed another person, and were asked to evaluate whether the action was morally acceptable and how the pusher should be punished. The researchers found that the most generous and sharing children were not from religious families, but from atheist families. The least generous children were from the two major world religions: Christianity and Islam. Additionally, the researchers found that the more religiously a child was raised, the less generous they were.
The surprising results of the study also showed that religiously raised children found the aggressor in the video to be much meaner or more evil than their peers from atheist families. Muslim children, in particular, called for much harsher punishment of the perpetrator. The study confirms that religious people, and their children, are less altruistic and more intolerant towards others. This study challenges the common belief that religion promotes social behavior and highlights the need for further research on the effects of religious upbringing on children’s social behavior.
