Sexual Strategies Underlie Religious Inclinations

The positively correlated associations between religiosity (of a Christian-centric nature) and low levels of promiscuity and high levels of abstinence and marriage-centricity are generally quite clear enough. We often see that religion seeks to suppress sexual promiscuity through its doctrines that promote a monogamous sexual reproductive strategy characterized by low promiscuity, exclusive heterosexuality and high premiums on marriage and fertility.

Intuitively, we might guess that our sexual inclinations owe to how much exposure we have towards our adopted religion. Thus, we might, quite reasonably, suppose that someone who regularly attends Sunday school and comes from a religiously devoted family with staunch practices in the home would more likely be shaped into a long-term mating, marriage-inclined and sexually abstinent person, than someone who does not observe those traditions and customs. Indeed, it was found that treating premarital sex as sinful creates incentives to marry earlier, and condemning abortion and birth control as sin makes people have children.

However, when we look at the US, which is considered the most religious nation compared to its other western counterparts, what is fascinating is that it is remarkably evenly divided - approximately 42% of adults never attend religious services, 18% attend intermittently, and 40% attend services regularly (information from the 2006 US General Social Survey).

This suggests that, while a country may adopt non-secular values to predominantly guide its affairs and inform its citizens, not everyone may agree or be inclined to go along with those values. In the case of the US, this divide is exemplified by the emergence of the Religious Right and the Liberal Left.

As evolutionary psychologist Kenrick (2011) colloquially and aptly states it, "the prototypical member of the Liberal Left ... may wait until at least the end of college before marrying and beginning to have children and then may delay even a few years longer to go to graduate school, law school or medical school. Because the human ability to resist sexual urges has a hard time outlasting all that postponement, these folks do not like the Religious Right's attempts to impose rules against premarital sex [or] tools of family planning. ... [The Liberal Left pose a problem for the Religious Right] because a large number of sexually loose young people playing the field threatens to disrupt the strict system that religious folks have set up to enforce and reinforce family bonds."

Working on that insight, Weeden, Cohen and Kenrick (2008) proposed the reproductive religiosity model - instead of religiosity affecting our mating strategy (whether we can be promiscuous short term maters, or should be committed, abstinent long term maters), it is instead our mating strategy that makes us calculate the costs and benefits of adopting a religion, or remaining devoted to our current religion. If I am unable to bear the cost of abstinence from premarital sex and I do not want to marry early, my exit strategy is to drop my impeding religion.

By analyzing data from two large sources - 21,131 respondents in the 2006 US General Social Survey and 902 undergraduate students who were probed about their family plans, sexual attitudes, religious attendance, and moral feelings about issues ranging from lying to stealing - it was found that the strongest predictors of religiosity were factors related to sexual and family values. While there were other typical variables that predicted for religiosity, such as being female, older, or a non-drinker, and being high in conscientiousness and low in sensation-seeking, statistically controlling for sexual and family value items made the links between these other typical variables with religiosity disappear. In other words, everything we might have assumed to be associated with religiosity can be boiled down to sexual and family values. The study by Weeden, Cohen and Kenrick (2008) thus provide evidence that, on average, whether we are religious or not in the first place depends on how promiscuous we want to be.

If that causal link is true, could it be possible to manipulate people's mating strategy and thus alter their religiosity, in the psychology laboratory no less?

A study by Li, Cohen, Weeden and Kenrick (2010) sought to test that idea. A cleverly deceptive cover story and elaborate experimental design was used, but in brief, participants were ultimately made to look at either desirable members of their own sex or desirable opposite sex members (such a priming method has been found to be effective in conjuring either a mating motivation state - when we check out attractive opposite sex persons - or a mating threat state - when we are made to look at attractive same sex persons). Participants were also made to fill out a survey on the pretext of finding out their attitudes; embedded in the survey were questions pertaining to religiosity.

The results showed that when the men looked at attractive ladies and when the women looked at attractive guys, there was no discernable effect of mating motivation on religiosity. Interestingly, the laboratory setting was unable to capture any desire to give up religion when participants were made to feel more motivated to mate. However, what was more interesting was that, instead, participants who looked at attractive members of one's own sex expressed greater belief in religion. Being primed with mating insecurity leads people to become more religious.

We see support here for the classic antagonism played out between the Religious Right and Liberal Left. Once again, Kenrick (2011) states it best, so he will be quoted here: "When you become aware that there are a lot of highly attractive mating competitors out there, it reduces the perceived benefits of playing a fast and loose mating strategy ... For women, a lot of attractive competitors means less attention from the attractive men who might provide good genes, and fewer fellows vying to support your offspring. For men, on the other hand, an abundance of especially handsome and available guys means that if you are playing the field, you may be playing with yourself for most of the game. Under circumstances of limited opportunities, any normal person - who does not look like a fashion model - could benefit from the religion-based supports for monogamy."

This is not to say that religious practices do not reduce sexual promiscuity - all other things equal between two people who are subjected to different levels of religious piety, we would expect the one who has been told that things like premarital sex are sinful would be less inclined to do the deed. However, these studies highlight another crucial direction in the causation, that sometimes people may choose how religious they want to be based on the perceived cost of carrying out sexual "transgressions" under the religion they are affiliated to. And at the heart of the differing values the Religious Right and the Liberal Left promote, each camp is sustainable because they encourage and reinforce different mating patterns; there is antagonism only because a clash of these value systems is highly disruptive to each side's foundations for their own reproductive status quo.



Weeden, J., Cohen, A., & Kenrick, D. (2008). Religious attendance as reproductive support Evolution and Human Behavior, 29 (5), 327-334 DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2008.03.004

Li YJ, Cohen AB, Weeden J, & Kenrick DT (2010). Mating Competitors Increase Religious Beliefs. Journal of experimental social psychology, 46 (2), 428-431 PMID: 20368752

Jealousy, Turning Saints into the Sea?

"Not so long ago jealousy was considered a pointless, archaic institution in need of reform. But like other denials of human nature from the 1960s, this bromide has not aged well. ... The rock musician who wrote 'If you love somebody set them free' also wrote 'Every breath you take, I'll be watching you.'"

- Steven Pinker, on David Buss's The Dangerous Passion


Have you ever felt threatened in the presence of others you perceive to be superior to you? I recall one time when I was a teaching assistant in an introductory psychology course and, in the middle of a discussion about how jealousy is experienced when your partner interacts with someone else who appears to have higher mate value than you, an eager student asked, “Professor, but how do you know if that person has a higher mate value than you?” To which the professor smiled and cheekily said, “Oh, you just know.”

To humour the bemused student, the professor gave some scenarios. If you’re a guy, just imagine this. Some other socially dominant male is talking to your girlfriend or wife, and he’s trying to make her laugh. Worse, she actually laughs along and looks like she’s having a very comfortable and enjoyable time. If you’re a lady, imagine the reverse – your boyfriend or husband has met a younger and physically attractive woman, and now he’s the one trying to make her laugh, and she’s playing along and being very reciprocative. That creeping feeling of alarm bells and jealousy becomes just a tad more resonant.

In the dating and mating game, what exactly are those social cues that get us to be on our guard, to experience inferiority and to feel threatened? Gutierres, Kenrick and Partch (1999), researchers looking at the issue through an evolutionary perspective, explored the oft-cited mating preferences of men for physical attractiveness and women for status and social dominance, and elucidated interesting sex differences in contrast effects.

The researchers gathered data from 91 undergraduate females and 99 undergraduate males and primed the men with either physically attractive men or socially dominant men while, on the other hand, priming the women with either physically attractive women or socially dominant women. Exposure to physically attractive men or women was done by showing participants photographs of people, while exposure to socially dominant men or women was done by getting participants to read a descriptive profile of a person with high dominance.

Interestingly, their study found that men’s self-assessments of desirability were adversely affected by exposure to highly socially dominant men and were relatively unaffected by exposure to physically attractive men. Conversely, women’s self-reports of their mate value were more affected by the physical attractiveness than by the social dominance of the women to whom they were exposed. This demonstrated that humans are sensitive to the selective mate preferences of the opposite gender. If we consistently fail to match up to the quality of our rivals, this can have an effect on how we perceive our own desirability!

More recently, another set of experiments conducted by Maner, Gailliot, Rouby and Miller (2007) also looked at how our state of mind affects the level of attention we give to stimulus objects in our environment.

A total of three studies were done on undergraduate students to explore how this interacts in the scene of human mating. It was found that when participants were primed with feelings of romantic and sexual arousal, a ‘mate-search’ psychological mechanism was activated which resulted in greater attentional adhesion* towards attractive members of the opposite sex. On the contrary, when participants were evoked with feelings of jealousy (imagining a scenario that perhaps closely resembles the one that the professor had painted), a ‘mate-guard’ state of mind was primed which led to greater attentional adhesion to attractive same-sex targets.

So is jealousy simply a manifestation of insecurity? Perhaps the answer is both yes and no. Yes, because it does seem apparent that the mind is designed to experience jealousy when the environment provides feedback on where you stand. If there are many people of the same sex as you in the room who are far more attractive, that’s good reason to feel insecure especially when being evaluated by members of the opposite sex. But jealousy isn’t only just a manifestation of insecurity because it serves an important adaptive function – to alert us to the potential dangers of losing your mate, telling us to be aware of snakes and wolves in the environment, and getting us to turn on our A-game where necessary. As David Buss writes in The Dangerous Passion, jealousy is as necessary as love and sex.

* Attentional adhesion refers to how readily a person tends to a particular stimulus. In most documented cases, this is determined by measuring participants' reaction time taken to respond to stimulus.


Maner JK, Gailliot MT, Rouby DA, & Miller SL (2007). Can't take my eyes off you: Attentional adhesion to mates and rivals. Journal of personality and social psychology, 93 (3), 389-401 PMID: 17723055

Gutierres, S., Kenrick, D., & Partch, J. (1999). Beauty, Dominance, and the Mating Game: Contrast Effects in Self-Assessment Reflect Gender Differences in Mate Selection Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25 (9), 1126-1134 DOI: 10.1177/01461672992512006

Buss, D. M. (2000). The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is As Necessary As Love and Sex. New York: Free Press.

What the Presence of Attractive Young Women can do to Men

Much has been said about the female preference for resources and the male preference for physical attractiveness, but at the time of James R. Roney's (2003) writing little had been done to tease out cognitive mechanisms that underlie this adaptive preference.

Roney thus set out to ascertain the ability of ecological cues to prime and activate psychological constructs related to mate attraction and establish linkages between human mating and social cognition.

In his first study, participants - young students from the 10th and 12th grades of a Midwestern high school - were made to answer three large booklets of surveys. However, the manipulation of the environment within which the surveys were answered was as follows: in the first condition, all participants were male; in the second condition, all participants were female; in the last condition, males and females were present during the study. Without knowing what the experimenter was up to, participants answered questions in the surveys, and nested in those surveys were questions related to one's attitudes towards wealth and resources.

The results fascinatingly appear to support evolutionary theories about human mating. Male students in the mixed-sex environment reported higher valuations of material wealth than did male students in the same-sex environment.


The young men in the mixed-sex condition also reported higher ratings of having an active dating life. These findings suggest that the presence of females may have primed implicit mate attraction goals and, subsequently, the activation of cognitive attitudes associated with mating objectives (detailed manipulation checks were conducted via cleverly placed questions on items such as current relationship status and mate preferences, reducing the possibility of confounding variables).

Now that the first experiment appears to be consistent with evolutionary theory predictions, Roney sought to find out if other mating goal-related attributes in men can be primed. In his second study, male participants were exposed to advertisements featuring either younger female models or older female models, after which they filled out a questionnaire.

The results again confirm evolutionary theory hypotheses - men in the younger models condition reported higher valuations of wealth (replicating the findings of the first study), had a greater desire to display/showcase talent and, interestingly, listed self-descriptive traits that increase men's odds of attracting women (this was confirmed through separate ratings of the male participants' self-descriptive traits by women), such as ambitiousness and aggressiveness.

Roney's study thus brings evolutionary psychology one step further by utilizing ecologically realistic stimuli, in the process demonstrating powerful but previously unknown psychological effects. Specific to this study, visual exposure to young women caused significant changes in the attitudes and personality trait descriptions of the young male participants. In particular, young men who were exposed to young women reported far more favourable attitudes towards material wealth than did men exposed to either other men or older women.

This makes sense because if securing a mate was an important task in ensuring the survival of one's lineage (without which those of us alive today wouldn't be here), then there should be psychological mechanisms present to facilitate the achievement of such goals, and men should thus be sensitive to cues that relate to both potential mates and resources. Using an adaptive basis for understanding psychology can also prove useful, because without this evolutionary context of mating, such stable behavioural changes demonstrated in Roney's study can, at best, only appear random and lead to invalid conclusions.


Roney, J. (2003). Effects of Visual Exposure to the Opposite Sex: Cognitive Aspects of Mate Attraction in Human Males Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29 (3), 393-404 DOI: 10.1177/0146167202250221