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kanageddaamen said:
dsgrue3 said:
Kasz216 said:

Do you have university research journal access?   If so i suppose i can dig through it to find that particular article again.  Otherwise you are just going to be stuck behind a paywall anyway.

It's mostly all very bland consumer research for nonprofit organizations... that's been consistant... for pretty much forever.

To Paraphrase one of the most recent cases of research...

 

 They gave people 10 dollars.  Then either showed them a short video about nonsense, or a short video about starving kids in africa....

 

Then were told they give some of the money they had just received to charity to feed starving kids in africa.

 

In both cases religious people I want to say gave ~3.5 dollars.   While Atheists when shown the nonsense video gave ~.60 cents..  while when shown the video gave ~4 dollars.  (Numbers could be off, but the proportions are about the same.)

 

General conclusion being that people without a religious backing more often need to be hit with a sudden urge of intense compassion, while more religious people seem to give regardless, be it out of duty, having the thoughts of the unfortunate more on their minds, or just more "we're all in this together" cohesiveness.

"In a second experiment, 101 adults were shown either a neutral video or an emotional video about children in poverty. They were then given 10 fake dollars and told they could give as much as they liked to a stranger. Those who were less religious gave more when they saw the emotional video first."

Terrible study.

- Sample Size

- Fake dollars

Either way, study as-is shows that Atheists are governed by compassion as opposed to a mechanical response to charitable donations. 

There are also a few studies I have seen that include giving money to your church as charity, which it is not

and in those studies, they ALSO ran the numbers not counting church contributions... and the same patern persisted. 

It also persisted for blood donations, giving of time to causes... etc.

 

It's really remarkably non-controversial and really pretty much common sense regardless, since religions generally require acts of charity therefore the more religious you are, the more you will do charity even if you yourself aren't a default generous person.

 

Though in general it does seem the correlation extends beyond that.  I imagine largely having to do with Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory and most atheists ending up on the specific "Liberal" branch.