Religion and Altruism

An recent study looked at altruism among religious and non religious folks.  The study found the children of folks that identified themselves as non religious demonstrated more spontaneous altruism than the children of folks who identified themselves as religious.

The study looked at 1170 families and focused on one child in each family between the age of 5 and 10.  Using a series of forms asking questions about beliefs they broke the participants up into groups according to how religious each family reported itself to be.

They then had the child from each family play a game whereby each child was given 30 attractive stickers and told they could keep 10, but that the child could give away some of his 10 stickers to schoolmates who were not able to take part.  They were given a few minutes to decide whether to give some of their 10 stickers away.

The non-religious children gave away an average of 4.1 stickers. The children from families reporting themselves as religious gave away 3.3 stickers on average.  Muslims and Christians were by far the largest religious beliefs reported, there was little statistical difference between the Muslim and Christian children, Muslims gave away 3.2 on average, Christians 3.3.  Further the researchers found statistically the more religious a family reported themselves to be, the fewer stickers children were willing to give away.

The religious / non religious relationship held regardless of wealth and status (although rich children generally gave more stickers away than poor children).   The results were also contradictory with the parents reported perceptions of their child's sensitivity to injustice.  Religious parents generally evaluated their children as more sensitive than the non-religious parents evaluated their children.

Query - Is this a function of religious training effecting children's judgement?  Or is this self selection - parents who are less altruistic are more likely to feel a need fulfilled by religion?

Relying on report in the Economist (11.7.15 - p.77).  The study was authored by a University of Chicago developmental nueroscientist in collaboration with researchers in Canada, China, Jordon, South Africa and Turkey, was published in "Current Biology".