Each month many women experience an ovulatory cycle that regulates fertility. Whereas research finds that this cycle influences women’s mating preferences, we propose that it might also change women’s political and religious views. Building on theory suggesting that political and religious orientation are linked to reproductive goals, we tested how fertility influenced women’s politics, religio...

Cognitive approaches to religious phenomena have attracted considerable interdisciplinary attention since their emergence a couple of decades ago. Proponents offer explanatory accounts of the content and transmission of religious thought and behavior in terms of underlying cognition. A central claim is that the cross-cultural recurrence and historical persistence of religion is attributable to ...

BACKGROUND Tobacco control effort should be first started in people that are looked upon as role models for the general population. We aimed to determine the knowledge, attitude, and behavior of religious officials towards smoking and the new tobacco law. METHOD The study group was comprised of 492 Imams and 149 Quran course instructors working in Kahramanmaras city of Turkey, 641 religious o...

Religion is often conceived as a conservative social force that sustains traditional cultural beliefs and behaviors. Religion, however, also exhibits predictable socioecological variation and facilitates adaptive response patterns in the diverse environments that humans inhabit. Here we examine how the religious system, which is comprised of a number of interacting components, generates adaptiv...

Religion is often conceived as a conservative social force that sustains traditional cultural beliefs and behaviors. Religion, however, also exhibits predictable socioecological variation and facilitates adaptive response patterns in the diverse environments that humans inhabit. Here we examine how the religious system, which is composed of a number of interacting components, generates adaptive...

Though religion has been shown to have generally positive effects on normative 'prosocial' behavior, recent laboratory research suggests that these effects may be driven primarily by supernatural punishment. Supernatural benevolence, on the other hand, may actually be associated with less prosocial behavior. Here, we investigate these effects at the societal level, showing that the proportion o...

We develop an experimental test to distinguish between discrimination against and nepotism. The experiment compares the behavior toward individuals of different groups with the behavior toward anonymous individuals (those having no clear group affiliation). Not only is the distinction between the different types of discrimination important for the study of social segmentation, but it has intere...

We present two studies aimed at resolving experimentally whether religion increases prosocial behavior in the anonymous dictator game. Participants allocated more money to anonymous strangers when God concepts were implicitly activated compared to neutral or no concepts. This effect was at least as large as when concepts associated with secular moral institutions were primed. Self-reported reli...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to examine religious factors associated with alcohol involvement in Mauritius. The three main religions on the island, Hinduism, Catholicism, and Islam, promote different views of the appropriate use of alcohol. Based on reference group theory, we hypothesized that both the content of a religion's alcohol norms and an individual's religious commitment wo...