A recent research study done at the University of Chicago seems to have revealed some rather startling and unpredictable findings. The study has concluded that children who have been raised in families guided by certain religious beliefs and traditions are actually less benevolent and compassionate than children who are brought up without any specific religious guidelines.

The study considered 1,170 children from the cities of Toronto, Chicago, Istanbul, Amman, Guangzhou, Izmir, and Cape Town. All of the children were between the ages of 5 and 12 years old, according to The Los Angeles Times. The conclusions of the study were recently published in Current Biology.

According to recent data, nearly 6 billion people on Earth consider themselves to be the followers of a particular religion. In the study of over 1,000 children, 24 percent came from Christian families, 43 percent from Muslim families, 2.5 percent were Jewish, 1.6 percent were Buddhist, 0.4 percent were Hindu, 0.2 percent considered themselves agnostic and 28 percent of the families declared that they weren’t religious at all

Regardless of the religion followed, researchers claim that those children showed less compassion and altruism than those children who are being raised without formal religion in the home. The researchers gave all of the children 30 stickers apiece. The children were informed that they could only keep 10 of the ones they favored the most. The researchers then informed the children that not everyone would be able to get stickers because time restraints on the game would prohibit everyone from getting stickers.

The researchers observed that many of the children would just share some of the their stickers with many of the other children who didn’t have any. When researchers studied the results from the three largest groups of children, they said that those children from non-religious backgrounds were more benevolent toward the other children. Those children shared 23-28 percent more than children raised under a certain religion did. They also found that Christian and Muslim scores were about the same.

One final experiment involved having the children witness what the researchers referred to as “interpersonal harm.” This involved seeing other children shoved or hit or pushed and researchers wanted to evaluate what the children thought should be done with the aggressors. The non-religious children wanted more mercy and understanding shown while Muslim and Christian children were he hardest on the transgressors demanding severe punishments.

The researchers seem to suggest that morality, an ethical way to conduct one’s life, doesn’t necessarily depend on religious teachings.