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Author Topic: Religion Makes Children More Selfish, Say Scientists  (Read 2770 times)

RandallS

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Religion Makes Children More Selfish, Say Scientists
« on: November 05, 2015, 09:58:40 pm »
Quote
Morality is often associated with religion, but new research reveals that children from religious households are actually less generous than kids from a secular background.



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Faemon

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Re: Religion Makes Children More Selfish, Say Scientists
« Reply #1 on: November 06, 2015, 01:44:32 am »
Quote from: RandallS;181953

Read the Article


Quote
Most kids came from households that identified as Christian (24%), Muslim (43%) or not religious (28%). (Small numbers from Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and agnostic homes weren't compared.)


Abrahamic minus jews equal report ofor all religion agenst secular!

Quote
The results revealed that secular children shared more stickers. Muslim children appear to be less generous than Christian kids, but this is not statistically significant (labelled 'ns' in the bar chart below). All three groups became less altruistic with age, though religious kids had lower generosity, suggesting that longer exposure to religion leads to less altruism.


Families don't convert often enough to make inconsistent data? Correlation, causal, blah.

Quote
The psychologists also assessed views on justice through a moral sensitivity task: after children were shown videos of mild interpersonal harm -- such as pushing or bumping -- they were asked for a judgment of meanness and a rating for the level of punishment the perpetrator deserved.

Compared to the other two groups, Muslims thought harmful actions were meaner and believed in harsher punishment. Christians judged the harm to be meaner than secular kids, though there was no difference in their punitive ratings.

This is consistent with fundamentalism, when actions are seen as either right or wrong, with no gradient in morality between two extremes. Overall, religious children are less tolerant of harmful actions and favored harsh penalties.

 
Why is that framed as fundamental intolerance and therefore bad, rather than sensitivity and empathy to the wronged party...that isn't even the "selfish" test subjects' own selves, or possibly even fellow insiders to faith rather than age group?

Quote
Why are religious people less moral? One factor is a psychological phenomenon known as 'moral licensing': a person will justify doing something bad or immoral -- being racist -- because they've already done something 'good', such as praying.


Such as praying, oooor...anything secularly valued to be good works this way, too. From what I've heard from the secular humanist movements that mainly oppose harmful expressions of religious beliefs, there remains not a small amount of unexamined racism and sexism.

(Carl Sagan left us too soon; I'm going by the irrepressible Richard Dawkins' TEDtalk about tolerating kids who wear baseball caps backwards even though he doesn't get it, but opposing "voodoo of any kind" and I think he meant magic or superstition or even woo of any kind but it's just easier to pick on Voodoo. And then his position on Rebecca Watson. And then his position on Ahmed Mohamed. Yes, he's just one guy, but he's the face and the most prolific voice and does have a hell of a lot of supporters and zero inclination to minimizing secular harm in secular matters. If this is peculiar to movement secularism rather than default secularism, tests like this ought to make mention of that.)

Quote
It's sometimes claimed that secular families are dysfunctional and rudderless because they lack the security of religion. But sociologist Vern Bengston, who has run California's Longitudinal Study of Generations since 1971, says this isn't true: "Many nonreligious parents were more coherent and passionate about their ethical principles than some of the 'religious' parents ... The vast majority appeared to live goal-filled lives characterised by moral direction and sense of life having a purpose." So we learn good moral behavior from family life and education, not religious teachings.


I can believe that, but I don't understand why Bengston spoke quotes around "'religious' parents". Were so few of the parents who claimed to be affiliated with their religion not affiliated after all? Or were the parents not really moral, even though they claimed to be religious, and religion and morality still have identical connotations, hence the wryness? Or was it excluding immoral religious people as therefore not really religious? I'm not liking this article.

Quote
This raises another question: Why does morality exist in the first place?


Huh? No. It doesn't raise that question, if the entire argument was that morality can exist without religion, then the obvious next question isn't, "Then why is it existing at all?" I'm hating this article.

Quote
"Morality and religion are two separate things: religion has been made by humans and morality is part of our biology," says Jean Decety. Decety, who is director of Chicago's Child NeuroSuite lab, explains that moral sensitivity is almost innate in human babies and starts at around 6-9 months. "Before they can speak, before culture can shape their mind, they already have the building blocks of morality."

"It makes our species able to cooperate, to live in large groups," says Decety. "That's why morality has probably evolved: it helps us to be more social."

"Religion has evolved because it helps the in-group to survive and fight better against the out-group," says Decety. Globalization, thanks to things like air travel, brings different groups together. "The problem we have today is that we live in a very different world -- we are not on the Savannah any more, and we live in a world which is an open market."


According to lab person, we're innately moral because culture shapes our minds before culture shapes our minds...and diversity is the problem.

I don't think I like this article. :p Interesting results, but the headline and the actual paragraphs are more than a bit of a mess?
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Juniperberry

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Re: Religion Makes Children More Selfish, Say Scientists
« Reply #2 on: November 06, 2015, 01:59:44 am »
Quote from: RandallS;181953

Read the Article

 
"Scientists say"

Yeah. Because that's an unbiased group.
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MadZealot

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Re: Religion Makes Children More Selfish, Say Scientists
« Reply #3 on: November 06, 2015, 04:50:38 am »
Quote from: Juniperberry;181959
"Scientists say"

Yeah. Because that's an unbiased group.


They're unbiased until you pay fund them enough.
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RandallS

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Re: Religion Makes Children More Selfish, Say Scientists
« Reply #4 on: November 07, 2015, 07:56:54 am »
Quote from: Faemon;181958
Abrahamic minus jews equal report ofor all religion agenst secular!

I don't know that that is what the actual paper says, all I've seen is this news report and news reports on science have a long history of leaving out details.

Quote
I don't think I like this article. :p Interesting results, but the headline and the actual paragraphs are more than a bit of a mess?

Science news reporting is often like that.
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