Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (22 page)

By checking up on one another, the members of a sexually conservative religious community reduce the potential costs of early marriage and high familial investment. Religious communities don't just frown on promiscuity; they condemn it, and they impose costs on those who break the rules, impugning their reputations and ostracizing them. But besides punishing sexual promiscuity, religious groups reward family orientation in various ways—they set up preschools, they join together to share babysitting chores, and they provide assistance to their members when they lose their jobs or get sick.

The prototypical member of the Liberal Left, on the other hand, plays a very different life strategy. He or she 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, nor do they like anything that limits their access to all the tools of family planning. Liberal Lefties typically do not give a hoot what you do in the privacy of your bedroom or whom you do it with. These folks pose a problem for the Religious Righties, though, 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.

To check the validity of his reproductive religiosity model, Weeden analyzed a mountain of data—from 21,131 people in the U.S. General Social Survey. Cohen and I also joined him to look at data from another more focused survey, in this case of 902 undergraduate students at four American universities who were asked questions about their family plans, their sexual attitudes, their religious attendance, and their moral feelings about stealing, lying, and so on.

We found that people's inclination to attend religious services could be predicted by some of the usual variables—being a woman, being older, being a nondrinker, and being low in sensation-seeking and high in conscientiousness, for example. We also found that attending church was linked to people's opinions about nonsexual transgressions like lying to parents, shoplifting, cursing, and using illegal drugs. But what was more interesting was this: The strongest predictors of attending church were those related to sexual and family values (opposition to infidelity, to premarital sex, to abortion, and so on). And when Weeden statistically controlled for the sexual and family value items, the links between religious attendance and the other variables disappeared.

These findings make two important points. First, conservative attitudes about sex and reproduction are at the heart of people's participation in traditional religious groups. Second, attitudes about sex and family are causes of religious attendance, and not just the effects of religious training. The traditional view was that religious teachings cause people to hold conservative attitudes about sex; our findings suggested a very different causal path: that conservative attitudes may cause people to become involved in religion. If this view is correct, people may decide to increase or decrease their level of religious participation as a function of whether that participation advances or hinders their current sexual and reproductive strategies.

Back to my own falling away from the Catholic Church. It happened at a time when I had started attending college and was beginning to realize that I would be in school for a lot longer if I wanted to become a research scientist. Although I was not planning on getting married soon, I was not doing a very good job of avoiding the temptations of premarital sex. So my early theory that I was forced to choose between sex and God might apply to many college-educated people, and not just Roman Catholics. Weeden also has some evidence that many university students switch away from traditional religious beliefs during college, when the temptations of uncommitted premarital sex combine with obstacles to getting married. Later on, when the college-educated settle down to family life, many of them switch back to traditional religious beliefs. Again, people's love lives may drive their religiosity at least as much as their religiosity drives their love lives.

We began to wonder whether the link between religiosity and reproduction was malleable enough to be moved around with a laboratory manipulation. Could we make people more or less religious just by
having them think about attractive mates, for example? Weeden had his doubts, and they were well-founded; although it made sense that someone could undergo a gradual change in his or her life strategy if there was a big change in his or her mating opportunities, that shift should not happen in a few minutes.

On the other hand, people can only change if they have mental mechanisms that calibrate themselves to the current environment. As I described in Chapter 2, for example, we have done laboratory experiments showing that people's commitment to their long-term partners can be shifted merely by informing them that there are a lot of available and desirable members of the opposite sex around. And we have also found that people's opinions of their own mate value could be moved around in a short experiment by telling them that there are a lot of available and desirable members of their own sex on campus. These findings told us that events in the short-term can kick in some of the same shifts in mating strategy as do long-term changes in the environment. If religiosity is to some extent a mating strategy, then it might well respond similarly to information about the local mating pool.

To investigate this possibility, we began a series of experiments with Jessica Li, who was a bright and eager new graduate student working with Adam Cohen and me. In these experiments, we brought students into the lab and told them the study was about evaluating dating profiles. If you were a participant, you would have been told:

After reading that, you would have looked over six dating profiles that were presumably from other ASU students. The people in the photos were actually highly attractive models. The photos were accompanied by self-descriptions in which the attractive people talked about their positive characteristics and expressed their eagerness to date. Half of the time, subjects saw attractive and available people of their own sex; the other half of the time, they looked over six attractive and available people of the opposite sex.

When you were done rating all the profiles, you would have been told we needed some information about you. At this point, you would have answered some questions about your own attitudes on several topics. Buried in the list were questions about the extent to which you believed in God and about whether you thought people would be better off if religion played a bigger role in their lives.

Before we ran our study, we were not really sure what to expect. I thought that perhaps seeing beautiful available women might have made men less inclined to be religious. As it turned out, however, seeing attractive people of the opposite sex had no effect on either men or women. Instead, we found that looking at attractive people of one's own sex led both men and women to express more belief in God.

Why? We think that the results fit with Weeden's ideas about dueling religious strategies. 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 (a strategy that is popular among many undergraduates at schools like ASU, where mating opportunities sometimes seem unlimited). 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.

Psychologists have traditionally focused on the ways in which early religious indoctrination might lead people to later shun sexuality. William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, the famous sex therapists, listed religious training as one of the big causes of sexual inhibitions. It is certainly true that many religions teach young people that premarital and extramarital sex are evils to be avoided. But the results of our studies suggest that the causal arrow may go in the opposite direction as well. Not only can religion shape people's sexuality, but people's sexual strategies can also shape their religiosity.

The findings I just discussed also support the less flattering version of my life story—the one in which I left the Catholic Church because my choice came down to either devotion to the Virgin Mary or surrender to the recreational sexual opportunities of the 1960s. If so, my principled objection to war-mongering priests was just a self-serving excuse. But besides inspiring a bit of humility, these various findings also helped tone down my self-righteousness about my political beliefs. As a card-carrying member of what Spiro T. Agnew dubbed “the knee-jerk liberal” set, I often find myself ranting and raving about the moral inconsistencies of the Religious Right, the Sarah Palin–supporting, church-on-Sunday-guns-on-Monday crowd. But it turns out that Jason Weeden had it right: A whole lot of the differences between the Left and the Right boil down to dueling mating strategies. Oddly enough, that makes it easier to take a Zen perspective when I
see a big SUV sporting a Jesus fish logo right alongside a sticker that says “Support Our Troops.”

In this chapter and in Chapter 9, I have implied that some of those behaviors that seem uniquely human—like the desires to build pyramids or care for the poor—are linked to baser motivations and simple selfish biases that we share with other animals. I've reviewed research suggesting that even those creative and spiritual motivations that defined the top of Maslow's pyramid are not divorced from biology at all. All of this implies that the heights and depths of human motivation are intimately connected to one another and that we need to revise our self-perceptions as enlightened beings standing outside of nature. But the news is not all bad. I will now explore the flip side of that equation and present some evidence that many of our judgmental biases that seem hopelessly irrational to economists are, on closer examination, deeply rational.

A
lmost four decades have passed since I was that long-haired graduate student who walked into a bookstore to avoid studying for his doctoral qualifying exams. My research adviser from those days, Bob Cialdini, was also a young guy, fresh out of graduate school himself. But a few months ago, I introduced Cialdini's “last lecture” to our department on the occasion of his retirement.

Although I still like to think of myself as a young rebel, I now see a “distinguished” gray-haired fellow looking back at me when I pass by the mirror. (I don't look there so much anymore, unless I'm trying to trim the distinguished white hairs that now sprout randomly from my ears.) And some of my other once-youthful graduate student fellows, the ones who sat with me on campus ogling beautiful young hippie women in halter tops, have also retired. But not me. My retirement account is so thin that if I were to quit working in the next few years, I would either have to pack up and move to Ecuador or turn to a life of panhandling (“will lecture for food”).

Although I have underfunded my retirement account, I've spent well over half a million dollars on my two sons. From the perspective of classical economic theory, this feature of my money handling has been decidedly irrational. In the case of my older son, Dave, to take just one example, I could have insisted that he attend ASU, where the dean of the honors' college offered him free room and board on top of free tuition. Instead, I agreed to shell out tens of thousands of dollars so that he could attend New York University's film school (itself a decidedly irrational decision from an economic perspective). Since then, I have given him additional tens of thousands of dollars to attend graduate school, then to make a down payment on a house, and now to help out with the expenses of having two children of his own. (Like many of his freelancing fellow film-school graduates, he has yet to achieve an income that will allow him to buy the mansion next to Steven Spielberg's.)

Besides all this, I have contributed many of my limited nonfinancial resources, spending many hours helping Dave care for his own children. (With another young child of my own at home, I realize how energetically expensive it is to respond to their incessant demands.) In fact, I will have to stop writing this very afternoon because Dave is about to bring the grandchildren over. Time is of course money; during those many hours spent with my own young child and the grandchildren, I could have been tending to retirement investments or doing other things to make more of the long green.

How do I feel about all that spent money and time? From the purely rational economic perspective, I should be sending both sons a monthly bill and making angry phone calls when they fall behind on their repayment plans. The little one is five years old, and has his own bicycle, so perhaps I should soon consider insisting that he take a paper route!