The subject line "Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts" appears to be inaccurate, unless I'm misunderstanding the study. The measured difference is not in "meanness", i.e that religious children are meaner, but in perceptions of meanness and the appropriateness of various levels of punishment:
Quote:
Post hoc Bonferroni-corrected paired comparisons showed that children in Muslim households judged interpersonal harm as more mean than children from Christian (p < 0.005) and non-religious (p < 0.001) households, and children from Christian households judged interpersonal harm as more mean than children from non-religious households (p < 0.01). Moreover, children from religious households also differ in their ratings of deserved punishment for interpersonal harm (F(2, 847) = 5.80, p < 0.01, h2 = 0.014); this was qualified by significantly harsher ratings of punishment by children from Muslim households than children from non-religious households (p < 0.01). There were no significant differences between children from Christian households and non-religious households.
"judged interpersonal harm as more mean" is not the same as
being mean, as far as I can tell. It does make sense intuitively that children raised in religious households have more punitive morals though, which I would probably agree is often undesirable, but they weren't measuring that religious kids are "meaner" than their secular counterparts.
I also wish there was a little more detail on the linear regressions based on SES and country of origin for the data on punishments. They report those regression results for generosity and parent-reported sensitivity to injustice but seem to omit them for the differences in punitive judgment. I'm not sure if I'm parsing this too closely, but I wonder if the differences there mostly just map to the background culture in the country of origin. That is, it's not too surprising that people in Jordan support much harsher punishments for perceived crimes than people in Canada. But that might tell you more about Jordan than about (for example) Muslims in Europe. Obviously the cultural milieu can't be separated from religion, but it's obviously a very important factor.
In some ways, I think it would be useful to see the comparisons broken down by country, but they probably don't have the sample sizes.