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Matthew 22_39 _ the Economist

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11/7/2015
Matthew 22:39
| The
Economisthttp://www.economist.com/node/21677613/print 1/2

Religion
and altruism

Matthew
22:39

Far
from bolstering generosity, a religious upbringing diminishes it

Nov
7th 2015 | From the
print edition

AN
ARGUMENT often advanced for
theencouragement of religion
is that, toparaphrase
St Matthew’s report of Jesus’s words,
it leads people to love their neighboursas
themselves. That would be a powerful point were
it true. But is it? This was the questionJean Decety, a
developmental neuroscientist atthe University
of Chicago, asked in a
study (http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)01167-7) just
published in

Current
Biology

.Dr Decety is not
the first to wonder, in a scientific way, about the connection
betweenreligion
and altruism. He is, though, one of the first to do it without recourse to that
standard but
peculiar laboratory animal beloved of psychologists, the undergraduate student. Instead,he
collaborated with researchers in Canada, China, Jordan, South Africa and Turkey,
as wellas
with fellow A mericans,
to look  at
children aged between five and 12 and their families. Altogether, Dr Decety and his colleagues recruited
1,170 families for their
project, andfocused
on one child per family. Five hundred and ten of their volunteer families
describedthemselves
as Muslim, 280 as Christian, 29 as Jewish, 18 as Buddhist and 5 as Hindu.
A further
323 said they were non-religious, 3 were agnostic and 2 ticked the box
marked“other”.Follow-up
questions to the faithful among the sample then asked how often they engaged
inreligious activities, and
also about spirituality in the home. That let Dr Decety calculate
how religious
each family was. He found that about half the children in religious households
camefrom highly observant
homes; the spiritual lives of the other half were more relaxed. He
thenarranged for the children
to play a version of what is known to psychologists as the dictatorgame—an activity
they use to measure altruism.In
truth, the dictator game is not much of a game, since only one of the
participants actually

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