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Prosocial behaviors are ubiquitous across societies. They emerge early in ontogeny and are shaped by interactions between genes and culture. Over the course of middle childhood, sharing approaches equality in distribution. Since 5.8 billion humans, representing 84% of the worldwide population, identify as religious, religion is arguably one prevalent facet of culture that influences the development and expression of prosociality. While it is generally accepted that religion contours people's moral judgments and prosocial behavior, the relation between religiosity and morality is a contentious one. Here, we assessed altruism and third-party evaluation of scenarios depicting interpersonal harm in 1,170 children aged between 5 and 12 years in six countries (Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey, USA, and South Africa), the religiousness of their household, and parent-reported child empathy and sensitivity to justice. Across all countries, parents in religious households reported that their children expressed more empathy and sensitivity for justice in everyday life than non-religious parents. However, religiousness was inversely predictive of children's altruism and positively correlated with their punitive tendencies. Together these results reveal the similarity across countries in how religion negatively influences children's altruism, challenging the view that religiosity facilitates prosocial behavior., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Despite cultural and individual variation, humans are a judgmental bunch. There is accumulating evidence for early social and moral evaluation as shown by research with infants and children documenting the notion that some behaviors are perceived as right and others are perceived as wrong. Moreover, social interactions are governed by a concern for fairness and others' well-being. However, although generosity increases between infancy and late childhood, it is less clear what mechanisms guide this change. Early predispositions toward prosociality are thought to arise in concert with the social and cultural environment, developing into adult morality, a complex incorporation of emotional, motivational, and cognitive processes. Using EEG combined with eye tracking and behavioral sharing, we investigated, for the first time, the temporal neurodynamics of implicit moral evaluation in 3- to 5-year-old children. Results show distinct early automatic attentional (EPN) and later cognitively controlled (N2, LPP) patterns of neural response while viewing characters engaging in helping and harming behaviors. Importantly, later (LPP), but not early (EPN), waveforms predicted actual generosity. These results shed light on theories of moral development by documenting the respective contribution of automatic and cognitive neural processes underpinning social evaluation and directly link these neural computations to prosocial behavior in children., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)