Are Religious Kids Meaner or Nicer?

A recent study published in Current Biology has called these findings into question. Azim Shariff, a psychologist at the University of California–Irvine, and his colleagues found that the authors of the first study had miscoded the data and didn’t properly take into account differences across countries. It was the equivalent of comparing two girls—for example, a religious girl from Turkey and a non-religious girl from Canada—and concluding that the difference in their sticker sharing was due to religion. However, it’s obvious to most observers that you have to account for the cultural environments in which the kids live. Once Shariff and his colleagues corrected this coding mistake, there were no longer significant differences between religious and non-religious children.