The sex premium in religiously motivated moral judgment.

Abstract

Recent theorizing suggests that religious people’s moral convictions are quite strategic (albeit unconsciously so), designed to make their worlds more amenable to their favored approaches to solving life’s basic challenges. In a meta-analysis of 5 experiments and a preregistered replication, we find that religious identity places a sex premium on moral judgments, causing people to judge violations of conventional sexual morality as particularly objectionable. The sex premium is especially strong among highly religious people, and applies to both legal and illegal acts. Religion’s influence on moral reasoning emphasizes conventional sexual norms, and may reflect the strategic projects to which religion has been applied throughout history.

Karma and God: Convergent and divergent mental representations of supernatural norm enforcement.

“…(Dis)loyalty, (dis)respect for authority, and bodily or sexual (im)purity were mentioned much less often. This is true even though our samples contain American Christians and Hindus—groups who have been found, in past research to personally moralize issues of respect, loyalty, and purity, as much as they moralize harm and fairness concerns (Graham et al, 2013; Graham & Haidt, 2010; Hone et al, 2021; Johnson, Hook, et al, 2016; McCullough et al, 2012; Shweder et al, 1997; Weeden et al, 2008; Weeden & Kurzban, 2013). All participant groups responded very similarly, despite variability in their religion affiliations, ethnicities, and how they learned about God and karma 4 .…”

Moral disciplining: the cognitive and evolutionary foundations of puritanical morality

“…Mate-guarding surely partly underlies many sexual restrictions, and is consistent with the frequent double-standard favoring men in the moralization of sexual promiscuity (Broude & Greene, 1976;Dabhoiwala, 2012;Mernissi, 2011). Consistent with the Reproductive Religiosity Model, individuals with a monogamous reproductive strategy more harshly oppose sexual promiscuity (Weeden & Kurzban, 2016) and its facilitators (e.g., drugs; Kurzban et al, 2010;Quintelier et al, 2013), and seem to use religion to facilitate and encourage monogamous pair-bonding (Baumard & Chevallier, 2015;Hone et al, 2020;Jacquet et al, 2021;Moon, 2021;Moon et al, 2019;Weeden et al, 2008;. However, these accounts fail to sufficiently explain the more general condemnation of hedonic excesses (e.g., gluttony, drinking), intemperance, and lack of self-discipline beyond sexuality -promiscuous impulses are only one of the many short-term-oriented tendencies that puritanical morality condemns.…”

Is There Anything Good About Atheists? Exploring Positive and Negative Stereotypes of the Religious and Nonreligious

“…Thus, targets perceived as being fun, open-minded, and/or scientific might be considered opportunities by most social perceivers, even as they are considered threats by others. This might be the case here to the extent that fun is associated with short-term mating and religious people might avoid such individuals (Hone et al, 2020;Moon et al, 2019). Similarly, other work has shown that some religious individuals view open-mindedness unfavorably when choosing a mate (Jackson et al, 2015) and some religious individuals might view scientific thinking as threatening to their worldviews (Rios et al, 2015).…”

“…Thus, targets perceived as being fun, open-minded, and/or scientific might be considered opportunities by most social perceivers, even as they are considered threats by others. This might be the case here, to the extent that fun is associated with short-term mating and religious people might avoid such individuals (Hone et al, 2020;Moon et al, 2019).…”