Though mostly everyone thinks that children who are religious are more strong and gentle but recently, a study conducted by Chicago revealed that kids who are non-religious are kinder and has more empathy towards others.
This study was done by Professor Jean Decety who analyzed children from six different cities. He observed their perceptions, behavior, likeliness to share, their habits and their way of punishing others for bad habits.
“Overall, our findings … contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others,” said the authors of The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World.
They distributed stickers to children and then asked some to share them, along with this they also showed movies of kids pushing and bumping other children, to see their responses.
The result that came out of this entire study was surprising as they found that children who are religious were more judgemental towards the other people’s actions.
The professor also stated that having a religion pressure suppress the child’s own views and thus we should emphasise more on Altruism.
“It would be interesting to see further research in this area, but we hope this goes some way to undoing the idea that religious ethics are innately superior to the secular outlook. We suspect that people of all faiths and none share similar ethical principles in their day to day lives, albeit may express them differently depending on their worldview” the professor further added.
