Unkind Faith

November 5, 2015 5:09 PM

Instilling religious faith in children tends to make them less altruistic than kids who grow up in a nonreligious home. That’s the conclusion reached by a new study published Thursday in Current Biology. Testing over 1,000 kids from a diverse variety of countries and religious backgrounds on a sharing task, the study authors found a noticeable generosity gap between those religious and nonreligious, a gap that only increased the more religious their households were. They also found that religious kids were more likely to be judgemental and to advocate harsher punishments for being wronged by others.
posted by Sir Rinse (17 comments total)

Without even reading TFA, I am thinking: this is likely due more to the approaches and attitudes of the indoctriner-parrents, than the fact that religion / faith is involved.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 5:33 PM on November 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

These categories are so large as to be effectively meaningless, aren't they? For example, what is a "Christian", and is that a useful label for this kind of cultural analysis?
posted by robcorr at 5:40 PM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

Additionally, these children were asked to judge the meanness of an “everyday mundane” act of interpersonal harm and to determine how severe the perpetrator's punishment should be. Once again, the pattern held firm, with nonreligious children significantly more likely to turn the other cheek than Christians and Muslims. “Thus, children who are raised in religious households frequently appear to be more judgmental of others’ actions, while being less altruistic toward another child from the same social environment, at least when generosity is spontaneously directed to an ambiguous beneficiary,” the authors wrote.

That latter conclusion isn’t out of left field either, with the authors citing prior research suggesting that Christians in particular might “view the moral wrongness of an action as a dichotomy and are less likely to discriminate between gradients of wrongness.”

As a sharp contrast to these results, religious parents were more likely to tout their kids as being very empathetic and sensitive to the plight of others than their nonreligious counterparts. That finding might signal the early emergence of a sociological phenomenon known as moral licensing, wherein people who see themselves as especially moral in one area of life (religion) give themselves implicit permission to be less noble elsewhere. It should be noted that no one group was entirely devoid of empathy; the average score on the generosity scale (1 to 5) was 3.25 for religious children compared to 4.11 for the nonreligious.

I'm not understanding why the researchers seem to say these things are "in contrast" (and it did seem like the actual study was presenting them that way, too). It seems like it could be interpreted that because the religious kids were so highly empathetic to the portrayed victims' plight, they thought the portrayed perpetrator deserved a harsh punishment. It's not a balanced form of empathy, but it's not a total lack of empathy. I mean, one could argue that the non-religious kids weren't showing much empathy to the victims.
posted by jaguar at 5:40 PM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

These categories are so large as to be effectively meaningless, aren't they? For example, what is a "Christian", and is that a useful label for this kind of cultural analysis?

Religiousness was assessed in three ways. First, parents of participants were
asked their religious identification (e.g., Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc.) in a free response question. Parental religious identification was then coded into Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, atheism, agnostic, spiritual, multi-theistic, other, and no answer. From the frequency distributions, three large groupings were established: Christians, Muslims, and not religious. Beyond parental identification, caregivers also completed the Duke Religiousness Questionnaire (DRQ) [32], which assesses the frequency of religious attendance rated on a 1–6 scale from never to several times per week (frequency of service attendance and at other religious events), and questions regarding the spirituality of the household (1–5 scale; see DRQ). Average religious frequency and religious spirituality composites were created, standardized, and combined for an average overall religiousness composite.

posted by jaguar at 5:43 PM on November 5, 2015

Without even reading TFA, I am thinking: this is likely due more to the approaches and attitudes of the indoctriner-parrents, than the fact that religion / faith is involved.

On the other hand religious people have shitty values because the lord is telling them it's okay to.
posted by Artw at 5:49 PM on November 5, 2015

Yes, I see that, but a Catholic who identifies as strongly spiritual and regularly attends Mass would still (likely) be very different from, say, a Quaker who identifies as strongly spiritual and regularly attends Meetings. And even within the Catholic Church there are massive differences.
posted by robcorr at 5:50 PM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

One more consistent data point: Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a conservative Catholic, said about the current refugee crisis "The imperative to 'love your neighbour as yourself' is at the heart of every Western polity … but right now this wholesome instinct is leading much of Europe into catastrophic error."
posted by oluckyman at 6:00 PM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's been a long day at work and my brain is fried, but I have the same question that jaguar does about how they're defining empathy. It sounds like they were presented with a scenario where a kid pushed or hit another kid, and the religious kids thought that the hitter/ pusher should be punished more severely than the non-religious kids. I'm not sure that the conclusion that I would draw from that would be that the religious kids were less empathetic. They may just have more empathy for the pushed than for the pusher.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:02 PM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

This study does not say "religious faith" has any effect one way or the other. At most, it makes claims about "Christians" and "Muslims" as groups. It makes no claims about any other religion or spiritual tradition.

(And while I know very little about Islam, "Christianity" is a ridiculously wide term that people with practically opposite views from each other each claim...)
posted by thefoxgod at 6:06 PM on November 5, 2015

Yeah... I wish they were being more specific than "ecologically valid depictions of everyday mundane interpersonal harm that occur in schools".
posted by XMLicious at 6:13 PM on November 5, 2015

BTW if anyone is having trouble viewing the 2nd OP link the site evidently wants you to turn on cookies; that's what got it working for me.
posted by XMLicious at 6:14 PM on November 5, 2015

I'm sorry to say that this study doesn't surprise me a bit.

Not to make this all about the Christians, and it's not the most original observation... but I've often been struck by how "fundamentalist" Christians ignore most of what Jesus said in the bible, often taking stuff out of context and/or misrepresenting it to convince themselves that Jesus would be on their side. The thing is, Jesus was really, really into charity. He had a lot of harsh things to say about rich people, and he would not shut up about giving to the poor. I can't understand how you could read even a few pages of his story and miss that.

So turning away immigrants, denying healthcare to poor people, all that "teach a man to fish" stuff, that does not fit the Jesus of the bible. We don't know what Jesus would have said about abortion, but we have him on record in the bible saying, over and over again, that greed and selfishness are terrible and we should devote our lives to caring for the unfortunate. He wasn't subtle about it. Jesus is a NAG about giving to the poor.

I don't hate all Christians. I have met plenty of lovely Christians, and I know it's a faith that inspires many people to be generous and kind. But I do hate Christians who use Christ to justify their cruelty, intolerance and selfishness, and there are so many of those people in America.

If Christ ever did return, they'd call him a dirty hippie bleeding heart community organizer loonie and laugh in his face. They'd say he had to be a fake, because he sure wasn't the Jesus THEY knew. And it's true; the Jesus of the bible is not the Jesus they know.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 6:17 PM on November 5, 2015 [7 favorites]

One more consistent data point: Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a conservative Catholic

Most of what you need to know about Tony Abbot can be unerringly deduced from that fact that, by his own account, the reason he didn't become a priest was because what he actually wanted was the moral authority of the cloth and he was disgusted by the emphasis on empathy, compassion, and love that was on display at the seminary he attended.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:17 PM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

The study says that regardless of which religion, religious intensity was still inversely predictive of altruism, so I'm not sure that breaking down by denominations and such would make much difference, at least according to their conclusions.
posted by jaguar at 6:22 PM on November 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

Nice find. I wonder if it's just salvaged leftovers from research intended to be more useful or if these results were the goal from the start and misrepresented on the grant application. I wouldn't expect Templeton to waste money like this, but I suppose my impression of them might be due to encountering some of their marketing in the past. The wild writing in the discussion makes me think the authors are trying to dress up a half-baked situation, though, which suggests to me that they know they've fallen short of some standard in the actual study. It's good Facebook-forward fodder, at least.
posted by michaelh at 6:24 PM on November 5, 2015

What the hell is this doing in a peer-reviewed journal called Current Biology? It's got nothing whatsoever to do with biology. Look at the rest of the articles on that issue's table of contents - one of these things is not like the others.
posted by coleboptera at 6:27 PM on November 5, 2015

The empathy/punishment dynamic is arguable, but this part is telling:

Our 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 non-religious households. Moreover, the negative relation between religiousness and spirituality and altruism changes across age, with those children with longer experience of religion in the household exhibiting the greatest negative relations. Of additional note is that the sharing of resources was with an anonymous child beneficiary from the same school and similar ethnic group. Therefore, this result cannot be simply explained by in-group versus out-group biases that are known to change children’s cooperative behaviors from an early age [15], nor by the known fact that religious people tend to be more altruistic toward individuals from their in-group.

Dag, yo.

We all look for shortcuts and excuses at times, ways to weasel out of doing the right thing when it’s inconvenient or hard. Doing the right thing is often hard and unpleasant. In those cases, the urge to do the right thing must grapple with the urge to exert dominance or avoid unpleasantness.

The pious are more vulnerable than the non-devout to bad behavior because they have an easy out at all times – a definition of “the right thing” that makes them right by the power of thought or ritual action. They can ease their consciences of selfish or cruel behavior by resorting to “but at least I have faith in Jesus/go to mass every week/am square with God/etc.”

Religious faith can help people lead better, more moral lives. It provides a connection to something larger than one’s self, which is key to being a good person. But it also provides that easy out that can make you a scumbag.
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 6:30 PM on November 5, 2015