By RICK NAUERT PHD Senior News Editor Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on May 1, 2012 A provocative new study from the University of California, Berkeley suggests highly religious individuals are less likely to help a stranger than less religious people. In three experiments, researchers discovered the highly religious are less motivated by compassion when helping a stranger than are atheists, agnostics and less religious people. Paradoxically, social scientists found that compassion consistently drove less religious people to be more generous. For highly religious people, however, compassion was largely unrelated to how generous they were. The findings will be published in the July issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science . Experts say the results challenge a widespread assumption that acts of generosity and charity are largely driven by feelings of empathy and compassion. In the study, researchers discovered the link between compassion a