TY - JOUR
T1 - Religious cognition down-regulates sexually selected, characteristically male behaviors in men, but not in women
AU - McCullough, Michael E.
AU - Carter, Evan C.
AU - DeWall, C. Nathan
AU - Corrales, Carolina M.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
PY - 2012/9
Y1 - 2012/9
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Discounting
KW - Evolution
KW - Impulsivity
KW - Physical strength
KW - Religion
KW - Sexual selection
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U2 - 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2012.02.004
DO - 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2012.02.004
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84865284441
SN - 1090-5138
VL - 33
SP - 562
EP - 568
JO - Evolution and Human Behavior
JF - Evolution and Human Behavior
IS - 5
ER -