religiousness wasinversely predictive of children’s altruism
and positively correlated with their
punitive tendencies.
While it is generallyaccepted that religion contours people’s moral judg-
ments and prosocial behavior, the relation between
religiosity and morality is a contentious one.
Across all countries, parents in religious house-holds reported that their children expressed more
empathy and sensitivity for justice in everyday life
than non-religious parents. However, religiousness
was inversely predictive of children’s altruism and
positively correlated with their punitive tendencies.
Together these results reveal the similarity across
countries in how religion negatively influences chil-
dren’s altruism, challenging the view that religiosity
facilitates prosocial behavior
These notions have been forwarded by recent pub-lications as well, mostly using self-reports of hypothetical giving
and charity, documenting that religious people are more likely to
report higher rates of intended giving, but in fact, a careful meta-
examination of the studies measuring actual behavior shows that
there is little evidence for such a positive relation
Our findings robustly demonstrate that children fromhouseholds 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 be-
tween religiousness and spirituality and altruism changes across
age, with those children with longer experience of religion in the
household exhibiting the greatest negative relations.
A second major finding from these data is that religiosity affects
children’s punitive tendencies when evaluating interpersonal
harm. Interestingly, this result is in sharp contrast with reports
thatpatternsofmoraljudgmentsmadebysubjectswithareligious
backgrounddonotdifferfromthosewhoareatheists
Overall, our findings cast light on the cultural input of religion on
prosocial behavior and contradict the common-sense and popu-
lar assumption that children from religious households are more
altruistic and kind toward others. More generally, they call into
question whether religion is vital for moral development, support-
ing the idea that the secularization of moral discourse will not
reduce human kindness—in fact, it will do just the opposite
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