The left has recently been liking, sharing, and posting about a study from Current Biology that purports to show a negative association between religiousness and children’s altruism.

The conclusion that the researchers come to is pretty heavy:

Overall, our findings cast light on the cultural input of religion on prosocial behavior and contradict the common-sense and popular 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, supporting the idea that the secularization of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness—in fact, it will do just the opposite.

The problem with the left using this study to say the world would be better off without religion is that it also shows a clear tendency of those without a religious upbringing to side with victimizers over victims. The researchers word the results as that “children who are raised in religious households frequently appear to be more judgmental of others’ actions”, but the actions were ones that caused “interpersonal harm”. From the description, the actions were the actions of bullies. It would be just as easy, if not easier, to claim that the study showed children from non-religious households side with bullies more often than children from religious households.

That, however, is not an interpretation that supports “secularization of moral discourse.”

Further, if you look at the graph the data indicates that Islam is worse than Christianity when it comes to altruism. The graph labels that difference as “ns.” for “not significant”, but it doesn’t tell us what the significance level is. But regardless of that, the graph doesn’t fit well with the comments that the left is leaving on the study, such as “I have seen stats that over 40% of Americans are evangelical Christians. I suspect they are the worst”.

Folks, you can’t pick and choose your study results. If you want to believe this study when it says Christians are less altruistic, you’re also going to have to believe that the non-religious are more likely to side with bullies—and possibly, that Islam is worse than Christianity when it comes to altruism. Certainly not the other way around.

Personally, I think that the study is a load of crap. If you read the way it was performed, there is no way you can go from the results to the conclusion I quoted above. The altruism portion of the study goes out of its way to take all information away from the participants about who they are giving someone else’s resources to. It isn’t necessarily altruistic to give resources to unknown recipients, nor does it make one lacking in altruism to avoid giving resources away willy-nilly—especially when, as in this case, the participants were giving away other people’s resources. You might as well say that it’s just as altruistic to give grant funds to Donald Trump as it is to give grant funds to the Sisters of the Poor.

Really, re-reading how they performed the study, you could just as well interpret it as showing that children with a non-religious upbringing are more wasteful of other people’s resources than are children with a religious upbringing in addition to that children with a non-religious upbringing identify more with bullies than religious children do. This appears to be yet another study where the interpretation far outstrips the data, where the conclusions tell us more about the researchers than they do about the study itself.