Religious cognition down-regulates sexually selected, characteristically male behaviors in men, but not in women
Article InfoTo view the full text, please login as a subscribed user or purchase a subscription. Click here to view the full text on ScienceDirect.
Fig. 1
Natural log of hyperbolic discount rates as a function of experimental condition and sex. The ns for each group are as follows: women/religious n=36, women/secular n=33, women/control n=33, men/religious n=25, men/secular n=27, men/control n=26. *The mean for men in the religious condition is significantly different (p<.05) from the mean of the men in the other two conditions and is not significantly different from the mean of the women in all three conditions combined.
Fig. 2
Natural log of hyperbolic discount rates as a function of experimental condition and sex. The ns for each group are as follows: women/support n=50, women/challenge n=47, men/support n=36, men/challenge n=38. *The mean for men in the afterlife support condition is significantly different (p<.05) from the mean of the men in the afterlife challenge condition and is not significantly different from the mean of the women in the two conditions combined.
Fig. 3
Natural log of MET as a function of experimental condition and sex. The ns for each group are as follows: women/religious n=40, women/control n=42, men/religious n=39, men/control n=39. *The mean for men in the religious condition is significantly different (p<.05) from the mean of the men in the control condition and is not significantly different from the mean of the women in the two conditions combined.
Abstract
Men are typically stronger, riskier, “showier,” and more impulsive than women. According to sexual selection theory, such behaviors may have enhanced reproductive fitness for ancestral human males. However, such behaviors are facultative, and the mechanisms that cause them respond to social and environmental cues that indicate whether outlays of strength, risk-taking, showing off, or impulsivity are likely to lead to payoffs in any given instance. Recent research based on the Reproductive Religiosity Model suggests that, in contemporary Western societies, religious beliefs and institutions are differentially espoused and promulgated by restricted sexual strategists (whose reproductive strategies focus on high fertility, monogamy, and high parental care) to limit the exercise of unrestricted sexuality, which threatens the viability of restricted sexual strategies (e.g., by reducing paternity certainty and male parental investment). On this basis, we hypothesized that experimental manipulations of religious cognition would reduce men's impulsivity and motivation to demonstrate their physical prowess. Supporting this hypothesis, three experiments revealed that priming participants with religious concepts (i.e., participants wrote essays about religion, read an essay supporting the existence of an afterlife, or were implicitly exposed to religious words) reduced men's (but not women's) impulsivity with money and their physical endurance on a hand grip task. The primes affected men's behaviors irrespectively of men's scores on a self-report measure of religious commitment.
To access this article, please choose from the options below
Purchase access to this article
Claim Access
If you are a current subscriber with Society Membership or an Account Number, claim your access now.
Subscribe to this title
Purchase a subscription to gain access to this and all other articles in this journal.
Institutional Access
Visit ScienceDirect to see if you have access via your institution.
