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Religious People Less Driven By Compassion Than Are Atheists And Agnostics, Study Says
Atheists and agnostics are more driven by compassion to help others than are highly religious people, a new study finds.
That doesn't mean highly religious people don't give, according to the research to be published in the July 2012 issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. But compassion seems to drive religious people's charitable feelings less than other groups.
"Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not," study co-author and University of California, Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer said in a statement. "The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns."
Willer's co-author Laura Saslow, now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco, became interested in the question of what motivates charity after a non-religious friend lamented that he donated money to earthquake recovery in Haiti only after seeing a heart-touching video of a woman being pulled from rubble, not because of a logical understanding that help was needed.
"I was interested to find that this experience – an atheist being strongly influenced by his emotions to show generosity to strangers – was replicated in three large, systematic studies," Saslow said in a statement.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/01/religious-compassion-atheists-agnostics_n_1468006.html
That doesn't mean highly religious people don't give, according to the research to be published in the July 2012 issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. But compassion seems to drive religious people's charitable feelings less than other groups.
"Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not," study co-author and University of California, Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer said in a statement. "The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns."
Willer's co-author Laura Saslow, now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco, became interested in the question of what motivates charity after a non-religious friend lamented that he donated money to earthquake recovery in Haiti only after seeing a heart-touching video of a woman being pulled from rubble, not because of a logical understanding that help was needed.
"I was interested to find that this experience – an atheist being strongly influenced by his emotions to show generosity to strangers – was replicated in three large, systematic studies," Saslow said in a statement.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/01/religious-compassion-atheists-agnostics_n_1468006.html
10 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
return to talking about Stalin and Mao and all the terrible damage atheists do, and we must repeat that meme day after day.
That's how things must work in the religion forum. 
