“They did not find that nonreligious people were more generous overall, just that they needed emotional responses to be generous more than religious people do,” he said. “So all those TV ads of starving children are important for the nonreligious to give money, but not so much for the religious.”

Atheists and others who don’t adhere to a religion often say they can be good without God. Now, three new studies appear to back them up.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley conducted three experiments that show less religious people perform acts of generosity more from feelings of compassion than do more religious people. The findings were published in the current issue of the online journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Their results challenge traditional thinking about what drives religious people to perform acts of kindness for others.

“The main take-away from the research is that there may be very different reasons why more and less religious people behave generously, when they do,” said Robb Willer, an assistant professor of sociology at Berkeley and a co-author of the studies.

“Across three studies, we found compassion played a much bigger role in the way that less religious people treated others. Religious people, in contrast, tended to behave as generously as they would regardless of how compassionately they felt.”

At the same time, Willer said, the view of nonreligious people as cold and amoral needs adjustment. “We find that nonreligious people do feel compassion for others, and that those feelings are strongly related to whether they choose to help others or not.”

The goal of the studies was to uncover what drives people’s “pro-social” behaviors — acts intended to help others.

In the first experiment, researchers analyzed a national survey of more than 1,000 American adults. Those who agreed with the statement, “When I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel kind of protective towards them,” said they were more inclined to act generously towards those people — giving them a seat on a bus, for example, or loaning them a belonging.

“These findings indicate that although compassion is associated with pro-sociality among both less religious and more religious individuals, this relationship is particularly robust for less religious individuals,” the researchers wrote.

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