ASK 100 people what they get out of religion and you will probably get 100 different answers. Some worship out of habit, others out of fear of death. New experiments offer two surprising reasons people find God: sex and stress relief.
Men and women shown dating profiles of attractive members of the same sex will describe themselves as more religious than people who don鈥檛 feel as if they have to compete in the attractiveness stakes. Meanwhile, another study finds that thoughts of randomness push people toward God 鈥� but only if they can鈥檛 attribute feelings of stress to some easily defined external factor. Subjects were primed for random thoughts by being exposed to phrases containing words such as 鈥渃hance鈥�, 鈥渉aphazard鈥� and 鈥渞andom鈥�.
鈥淵ou can become more or less religious depending on the situation,鈥� says , a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who was not involved in the studies.
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Promiscuous behaviour
Such fickle religious behaviour could be especially important as promiscuous students mature into monogamous adults, says , a psychologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, whose team uncovered the link between mating and religion.
In a previous survey of 22,000 mostly Christian Americans, he and colleague Jason Weeden found a strong correlation between mating behaviour and religiosity. As you might expect, believers were more likely to be married, want to have large families and frown upon cheating and contraception.
To probe the relationship between sex and God more explicitly, Kenrick and colleague Yexin Jessica Li presented hundreds of students at their university with dating profiles of highly attractive men or women, then probed them about their religious beliefs. A control group of 1500 students merely filled out the religion survey.
Strong religious feelings
Men and women who looked at attractive members of the same sex reported stronger religious feelings than those who checked out prospective mates or just filled in the survey. They were more likely to say 鈥淚 believe in God鈥� and 鈥淲e鈥檇 be better off if religion played a bigger role in people鈥檚 lives.鈥�
鈥淚t鈥檚 an interesting and surprising phenomenon,鈥� says Kenrick, who speculates that people ramp up their belief in a system that tends to enforce monogamy when they鈥檙e confronted with fierce sexual competition. It might have been expected, for example, that people are more religious when they are young, when they have to compete more for sex. 鈥淧eople actually switch on and off their religious beliefs over their lifetime to fit the current mating context they鈥檙e in,鈥� he adds.
Sexual strife might not be the only reason people dial up and down their belief in God. Another new report pins changes in religious belief on anxiety.
鈥榮 team at the University of Waterloo asked 37 undergraduates to his laboratory, he told them, to study the effects of an herbal supplement on colour perception. He told half of them that the supplement had no side effects, the other half that it causes mild anxiety.
Slimy worms
Next, he asked participants from both groups to unscramble lists of five words into four-word sentences that primed them for either unpleasant feelings or random behaviour. So the random group might transform 鈥渢he haphazardly flew for robin鈥� into 鈥渢he robin flew haphazardly.鈥� While the other translates 鈥渆at slimy worms for robins鈥� into 鈥渞obins eat slimy worms.鈥�
Finally, Kay鈥檚 team probed the religious and spiritual beliefs of the volunteers, none of whom picked up on the ruse after the experiment was done.
Volunteers who thought about random behaviour reported stronger religious beliefs than volunteers who pondered slimy worms and other unpleasant subjects, Kay鈥檚 team reports, but only if they believed that the herbal supplement had no side effects. Given an excuse to explain away their anxiety with a pill, volunteers were happy to chose it rather than God. 鈥淵ou want to get rid of this anxiety and one way to get rid of it is supernatural control,鈥� Kay says.
Norenzayan, who has shown that temporary thoughts of death also make people more religious, agrees that religion can sometimes act like Prozac: 鈥淭his is one of the reasons why I think religion is such an important part of human life and culture, it addresses some of these deeply rooted anxieties people have about life,鈥� he says.
Journal references: Sex:
Stress: Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1177/0956797609357750
