Article: Would the world be better off without religion?

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In a study of high-school students, Furrow and colleagues (2004) similarly found a strong association between religiosity and prosocial interests, including empathy and a sense of responsibility toward others. Most, although not all, investigators (e.g., Kohlberg 1981) have also reported positive correlations between individuals’ religiosity and their level of moral reasoning (Ellis and Peterson 1996), meaning that more religious individuals tend to reason in slightly more sophisticated ways about moral problems compared with nonreligious individuals (although moral reasoning and moral behavior tend to be only moderately correlated; e.g., Stams et al. 2006).