AN ARGUMENT often advanced for the
encouragement of religion is that, to
paraphrase St Matthew’s report of
Jesus’s words, it leads people to love
their neighbours as themselves. That
would be a powerful point were it
true. But is it? This was the question
Jean Decety, a developmental
neuroscientist at the University of
Chicago, asked in a study just
published in Current Biology .
Dr Decety is not the first to wonder, in
a scientific way, about the connection
between religion and altruism. He is,
though, one of the first to do it
without recourse to that standard but
peculiar laboratory animal beloved of
psychologists, the undergraduate
student. Instead, he collaborated with
researchers in Canada, China, Jordan,
South Africa and Turkey, as well as
with fellow Americans, to look at
children aged between five and 12
and their families.
Altogether, Dr Decety and his
colleagues recruited 1,170 families for
their project, and focused on one
child per family. Five hundred and ten
of their volunteer families described
themselves as Muslim, 280 as
Christian, 29 as Jewish, 18 as Buddhist
and 5 as Hindu. A further 323 said
they were non-religious, 3 were
agnostic and 2 ticked the box marked
“other”.
Follow-up questions to the faithful
among the sample then asked how
often they engaged in religious
activities, and also about spirituality in
the home. That let Dr Decety calculate
how religious each family was. He
found that about half the children in
religious households came from
highly observant homes; the spiritual
lives of the other half were more
relaxed. He then arranged for the
children to play a version of what is
known to psychologists as the dictator
game—an activity they use to
measure altruism.
In truth, the dictator game is not
much of a game, since only one of the
participants actually plays it. In Dr
Decety’s version, each child was
presented with a collection of 30
attractive stickers and told that he or
she could keep ten of them. Once a
child had made his selection, the
experimenter told him that there was
not time to play the game with all the
children at the school, but that he
could, if he wished, give away some of
his ten stickers to a random
schoolmate who would not otherwise
be able to take part. The child was
then given a few minutes to decide
whether he wanted to give up some of
his stickers—and, if so, how many.
The researchers used the number of
stickers surrendered as a measure of
altruism.
The upshot was that the children of
non-believers were significantly more
generous than those of believers.
They gave away an average of 4.1
stickers. Children from a religious
background gave away 3.3. And a
further analysis of the two largest
religious groups (Jews, Buddhists and
Hindus were excluded because of
their small numbers in the sample),
showed no statistical difference
between them. Muslim children gave
away 3.2 stickers on average, while
Christian children gave away 3.3.
Moreover, a regression analysis on
these groups of children showed that
their generosity was inversely
correlated with their households’
religiosity. This effect remained
regardless of a family’s wealth and
status (rich children were more
generous than poor ones), a child’s
age (older children were more
generous than younger ones) or the
nationality of the participant. These
findings are, however, in marked
contrast to parents’ assessments of
their own children’s sensitivity to
injustice. When asked, religious
parents reported their children to be
more sensitive than non-believing
parents did.
This is only one result, of course. It
would need to be replicated before
strong conclusions could be drawn.
But it is suggestive. And what it
suggests is not only that what is
preached by religion is not always
what is practised, which would not be
a surprise, but that in some unknown
way the preaching makes things
worse.


www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21677613-far-bolstering-generosity-religious-upbringing-diminishes-it-matthew-2239?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/matthew2239