Detailed Instructions: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Problem:Religious doctrines typically urge the faithful to treat others with compassion and to put the greater good before selfish interests. But when it comes to generosity, nonreligious kids seem to be more giving, according to a new study of 1170 children from around the world. Children from religious homes—particularly Muslims—also showed a greater inclination to judge someone’s misdeeds as wrong and punish the perpetrators. The study, the first large-scale analysis of its kind, suggests that religion and moral behavior don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand for children. 
  
 “Our findings support the notion that the secularization of moral discourse does not reduce human kindness. In fact it does just the opposite,” says Jean Decety, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, in Illinois, and the study’s lead author. 
  
 Past research has already called into doubt the common stereotype that religious people are more moral than their nonreligious brethren. In surveys, religious people report higher levels of charitable activity. But it’s not clear whether this is accurate or an exaggeration. It’s also unclear whether the altruistic spirit is mostly confined to other members of their religion. In actual tests of generosity, there are also mixed results. One study found both religious and nonreligious people shared more money with a stranger after reading sentences containing religious words such as “spirit” and “God.” But people were also more generous after reading words associated with secular authorities such as “police.” Another study found that more religious people were just as likely as less religious people to bypass a stranger in distress. 
  
 The new research, done with children in six countries (Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey, South Africa, and the United States), included 510 Muslim, 280 Christian, and 323 nonreligious children. The study, the first to take such a large-scale look at how religion and moral behavior intersect in children from across the globe, focused on one facet of moral behavior: altruism, or the willingness to give someone else a benefit that also comes with a personal cost. 
  
 The test revolved around that ubiquitous childhood currency, stickers. Children ages 5 to 12 met individually with adults who let them choose 10 of their favorite stickers. The children were then told that the adults didn’t have time to distribute the rest of their stickers to other kids in a fictive class. But each child was told they could put some of their 10 stickers in an envelope to be shared with other kids, who were described as being from the same school and ethnic group. The scientists used the number of stickers left in the envelope as a measure of altruism. 
  
 The children from nonreligious households left 4.1 stickers on average, a statistically significant difference from Christian children (3.3) and Muslim ones (3.2). Also, the more religious the household, based on a survey of parents, the less altruistic the child. The child’s age, socioeconomic status, and country of origin also played a role, but not enough to override the effect of religious differences, according to the study. In older children, the split was most stark, with religious youth increasingly unlikely to share. 
  
 Kids in the study also watched short videos in which one child did something bad to another, such as shoving. The children then ranked how mean they thought the incident was, and how severely they wanted the instigator punished. Nonreligious children tended to rank the incidents as less mean. Muslim children on average gave the highest rankings and sought harsher punishments than either their Christian or secular counterparts. Decety says he is unsure why this is the case. 
  
 Decety, whose work focuses on the emergence of morality in children, says the pattern of religious children being less generous may be tied to a phenomenon called “moral licensing.” That’s when a person feels permitted—even unconsciously—to do something wrong, because they see themselves as a morally correct person. 
  
 With so many children from different cultures, the new study offers vital insights, said Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, a psychologist at the University of Haifa in Israel and an expert in the psychology of religion. He suspects the results are connected to the importance many religions place on an external authority and threats of divine punishment. Whereas children in religious households learn to act out of obedience to a watchful higher power, children raised in secular homes could be taught to follow moral rules just because it’s “the right thing to do,” he says. Then, “when no one is watching, the kids from nonreligious families behave better.” 
  
 The study is already prompting head scratching over how it squares with similar studies of adults. Azim Shariff, a psychologist at the University of Oregon in Eugene, says it contrasts with his analysis that, taken as a whole, previous research found no overall effect of religion on adults faced with these kind of moral tests. 
  
 “It doesn’t fit in easily with what’s been out there so far. So I’ve got to do some thinking—other people have got to do some thinking—with how it does fit,” says Shariff, who praised the scale and depth of the study. He suggested the new findings could reflect a developmental stage for children, producing different results than for adults. He also noted that such controlled tests might not fully capture how people behave in daily life. 
  
 Decety has expanded his research to examine the effects of religion on children’s behavior in 14 countries, and is also exploring whether religion influences how children decide to distribute goods among different people in a group. “My guess is that I will find the same result as I did in this study,” he says. ||||| Morality is often associated with religion, but new research reveals that children from religious households are actually less generous than kids from a secular background. 
  
 This conclusion comes from a study of over 1000 children from around the world, published in the journal Current Biology. The project was led by Professor Jean Decety, a neuroscientist from the University of Chicago, who didn't originally aim to compare moral behavior. "I was more interested in whether I would find differences in empathy or sharing depending on the culture," he says. 
  
 While previous research has examined generosity in adults, Decety's work shows that upbringing shapes morality early in life. This includes altruism – actions that benefit a recipient at a cost to the donor. Children learn religious values and beliefs from their family and community, through rituals like going to church. If religion promotes morality, kids from religious households should have stronger altruistic tendencies. 
  
 Generosity and punishment 
  
 Decety's team of psychologists assessed altruism using 'the dictator game': each child was given 30 stickers and told to choose how many to share with an anonymous child from the same school and similar ethnic group. This task reflects choices in ecology – allocating limited resources – and the results were used to calculate a 'generosity score'. The researchers looked at 1170 children aged 5-12 years old, from six countries (USA, Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey and South Africa). Most kids came from households that identified as Christian (24%), Muslim (43%) or not religious (28%). (Small numbers from Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and agnostic homes weren't compared.) 
  
 The results revealed that secular children shared more stickers. Muslim children appear to be less generous than Christian kids, but this is not statistically significant (labelled 'ns' in the bar chart below). All three groups became less altruistic with age, though religious kids had lower generosity, suggesting that longer exposure to religion leads to less altruism. 
  
 The psychologists also assessed views on justice through a moral sensitivity task: after children were shown videos of mild interpersonal harm – such as pushing or bumping – they were asked for a judgment of meanness and a rating for the level of punishment the perpetrator deserved. 
  
 Compared to the other two groups, Muslims thought harmful actions were meaner and believed in harsher punishment. Christians judged the harm to be meaner than secular kids, though there was no difference in their punitive ratings. This is consistent with fundamentalism, when actions are seen as either right or wrong, with no gradient in morality between two extremes. Overall, religious children are less tolerant of harmful actions and favored harsh penalties. 
  
 Parents were also asked to score their children according to a sense of empathy and sensitivity to injustice. This subjective self-reporting showed that religious adults think their children have strong moral tendencies, contradicting objective assessments of altruism (generosity and moral sensitivity). 
  
 Why are religious people less moral? One factor is a psychological phenomenon known as 'moral licensing': a person will justify doing something bad or immoral – like being racist – because they've already done something 'good', such as praying. "It's an unconscious bias," Decety explains. "They don't even see that's not compatible with what they've been learning in church." 
  
 Attitudes and assumptions 
  
 History backs-up the scientific evidence that secular people are more moral, as reviewed by Israeli psychologist Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. Most white supporters of the US Civil Rights Movement were non-religious, for example, while the apartheid regime in South Africa was led by devout Christians and opposed by atheists. 
  
 But the view that non-religious individuals are morally dubious is deeply embedded in American society. Atheists and agnostics are considered less trustworthy, even immoral, which explains why people who don't believe in God are unlikely to be elected to high political office, such as President of the United States. 
  
 "If you look at the campaign in the US, everyone who wants to go on TV and talk about being a candidate – from Hilary Clinton to Donald Trump – has to say that they love the Bible," says Decety. "They have to say that to make sure that people will vote for them, which is not the case in Europe." 
  
 It's sometimes claimed that secular families are dysfunctional and rudderless because they lack the security of religion. But sociologist Vern Bengston, who has run California's Longitudinal Study of Generations since 1971, says this isn't true: "Many nonreligious parents were more coherent and passionate about their ethical principles than some of the 'religious' parents ... The vast majority appeared to live goal-filled lives characterised by moral direction and sense of life having a purpose." 
  
 So we learn good moral behavior from family life and education, not religious teachings. This raises another question: Why does morality exist in the first place? |||||
Solution:
Religion makes people more generous and empathetic toward their neighbor, right? Wrong, according to a study published Thursday in Current Biology. Forbes reports researchers found children from religious backgrounds are actually less altruistic than children from secular households. Researchers tested more than 1,100 Christian, Muslim, and nonreligious children between the ages of 5 and 12 from around the world. They gave the kids stickers and had them choose how many to share with another anonymous child. It turns out secular children shared more of their stickers. "Our findings support the notion that the secularization of moral discourse does not reduce human kindness," lead researcher Jean Decety tells Science. "In fact it does just the opposite." But the relationship between religion and altruism in children was even more pronounced than that. Science reports the more religious a child's household—based on interviews with parents—the less generous the child. And while all kids shared fewer stickers as they got older, the difference was even more pronounced in kids from religious households, according to Forbes. Decety says the differences may be because of something called "moral licensing," in which an individual—unconsciously or not—feels like they can behave badly because they see themselves as a morally right person, Science reports. "These results reveal…how religion negatively influences children’s altruism, challenging the view that religiosity facilitates prosocial behavior," researchers conclude in the study.