Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T18:48:21.783Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Examining the link between religiousness and fitness in a behavioural ecological framework

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2019

Janko Međedović Open the ORCID record for Janko Međedović [Opens in a new window]
Janko Međedović*
Affiliation:
Institute of Criminological and Sociological Research, Belgrade, Serbia
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In recent years there have been attempts to explain religiousness from an evolutionary viewpoint. However, empirical data on this topic are still lacking. In the present study, the behavioural ecological theoretical framework was used to explore the relations between religiousness, harsh environment, fitness (reproductive success and parental investment) and fitness-related outcomes (age at first birth, desired number of children and the romantic relationship duration). The data were collected from 461 individuals from a community sample who were near the end of their reproductive phase (54% females, Mage = 51.75; SD = 6.56). Positive links between religiousness, harsh environment, fitness and fitness-related outcomes were expected, with the exception of age at first birth, for which a negative association was hypothesized. Hence, the main assumption of the study was that religiousness has some attributes of fast life-history phenotypes – that it emerges from a harsh environment and enables earlier reproduction. The study findings partially confirmed these hypotheses. Religiousness was positively related to environmental harshness but only on a zero-order level. Religious individuals had higher reproductive success (this association was especially pronounced in males) but religiousness did not show associations with parental investment. Religiousness was positively associated with desired number of children and negatively associated with age at first birth, although the latter association was only marginally significant in the multivariate analyses. Finally, path analysis showed that desired number of children and age at first birth completely mediated the relation between religiousness and reproductive success. The data confirmed the biologically adaptive function of religiousness in contemporary populations and found the mediating processes that facilitate fitness in religious individuals. Furthermore, the findings initiate a more complex view of religiousness in a life-history context which could be fruitful for future research: a proposal labelled as ‘ontogeny-dependent life-history theory of religiousness’.

Keywords

ReligiousnessLife-history theoryHuman behavioural ecology
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Biosocial Science , Volume 52 , Issue 5 , September 2020 , pp. 756 - 767
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alcorta, CS and Sosis, R (2005) Ritual, emotion, and sacred symbols: the evolution of religion as an adaptive complex. Human Nature 16, 323–359.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Atran, S and Norenzayan, A (2004) Religion’s evolutionary landscape: counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 27, 713–730.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bahr, SJ and Marcos, AC (2003) Cross-cultural attitudes toward abortion: Greeks versus Americans. Journal of Family Issues 24, 402–424.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baumard, N and Chevallier, C (2015) The nature and dynamics of world religions: a life-history approach. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 282, 20151593.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bering, JM (2011) The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and The Meaning of Life. Norton, New York.Google Scholar
Blom, G (1958) Statistical Estimates and Transformed Beta-Variables. John Wiley and Sons, New York.Google Scholar
Blume, M (2009) The reproductive benefits of religious affiliation. In Voland, E and Schiefenhovel, W (eds) The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior. Springer, New York, pp. 117–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bouchard, TJ Jr (2009) Authoritarianism, religiousness, and conservatism: I ‘obedience to authority’ the explanation for their clustering, universality and evolution? In Voland, E and Schiefenhöven, W (eds) The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behaviour. Springer, New York, pp. 165–180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bourrat, P (2015) Origins and evolution of religion from a Darwinian point of view: synthesis of different theories. In Heams, T, Huneman, P, Lecointre, G and Silberstein, M (eds) Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences. Springer, the Netherlands, pp. 761–780.Google Scholar
Boyer, P (2001) Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. Basic Books, New York.Google Scholar
Bulbulia, J (2012) Spreading order: religion, cooperative niche construction, and risky coordination problems. Biology and Philosophy 27, 1–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Crespi, B and Summers, K (2014) Inclusive fitness theory for the evolution of religion. Animal Behaviour 92, 313–323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delamontagne, RG (2010) High religiosity and societal dysfunction in the United States during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Evolutionary Psychology 8, 617–657.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Del Giudice, M, Gangestad, SW and Kaplan, HS (2016) Life history theory and evolutionary psychology. In Buss, DM (ed.) The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology: Foundations. John Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, USA, pp. 88–114.Google Scholar
Fieder, M and Huber, S (2016) The association between religious homogamy and reproduction. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 283, 20160294.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Figueredo, AJ (2007) The Arizona Life History Battery. URL: https://arizona.app.box.com/s/1prthk79i0zersjeqylgbrwwyfprju4y (accessed 3rd November 2019).Google Scholar
Gladden, PR, Welch, J, Figueredo, AJ and Jacobs, WJ (2009) Moral intuitions and religiosity as spuriously correlated life history traits. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 7, 167–184.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Granqvist, P and Kirkpatrick, LA (2013) Religion, spirituality, and attachment. In Pargament, KIet al. (eds.) APA Handbook for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, Vol. 1. American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, pp. 129–155.Google Scholar
Gurven, Mvon Rueden, CStieglitz, JKaplan, H and Rodriguez, DE (2014) The evolutionary fitness of personality traits in a small-scale subsistence society. Evolution and Human Behavior 35, 17–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, WD (1964) The genetical evolution of social behaviour. II. Journal of Theoretical Biology 7, 17–52.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hayford, SR and Morgan, SP (2008) Religiosity and fertility in the United States: the role of fertility intentions. Social Forces 86, 1163–1188.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hu, L and Bentler, PM (1999) Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling 6, 1–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jensen, L and Jensen, J (1993) Family values, religiosity, and gender. Psychological Reports 73, 429–430.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson-Hanks, J (2008) Demographic transitions and modernity. Annual Review of Anthropology 37, 301–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, RKDarroch, JE and Singh, S (2005) Religious differentials in the sexual and reproductive behaviors of young women in the United States. Journal of Adolescent Health 36, 279–288.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kandler, C and Riemann, R (2013) Genetic and environmental sources of individual religiousness: the roles of individual personality traits and perceived environmental religiousness. Behavior Genetics 43, 297–313.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kirkpatrick, LA (2005) Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion. Guilford Press, New York.Google Scholar
Kirkpatrick, LA (2015) Religiosity. In Zigler-Hill, V, Welling, LLM and Shackelford, TK (eds) Evolutionary Perspectives on Social Psychology. Springer International Publishing, London, pp. 69–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knežević, G (2003) Koreni amoralnosti [The Roots of Amorality]. Institut za kriminološka i sociološka istraživanja, Institut za psihologiju, Beograd.Google Scholar
Lawson, DW and Mace, R (2009) Trade-offs in modern parenting: a longitudinal study of sibling competition for parental care. Evolution and Human Behavior 30, 170–183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Međedović, J (2017) Intelligence and fitness: the mediating role of educational level. Evolutionary Psychology 15, 1–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mahoney, A, Pargament, KI and Tarakeshwar, N (2002) Religion in the home in the 1980s and 1990s: a meta-analytic review and conceptual analysis of links between religion, marriage, and parenting. Journal of Family Psychology 15, 559–596.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neel, R, Kenrick, DT, White, AE and Neuberg, SL (2016) Individual differences in fundamental social motives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 110, 887–907.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pearce, LD (2010) Religion’s impact on the timing of first births in the U.S. In Hummer, R and Ellison, C (eds) Religion, Families, and Health in the United States: New Directions in Population-Based Research. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, pp. 19–39.Google Scholar
Pearce, LD and Davis, SN (2016) How early life religious exposure relates to the timing of first birth. Journal of Marriage and Family 78, 1422–1438.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Reynolds, V and Tanner, R (1995) The Social Ecology of Religion. Oxford University Press, New York.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ross, CT, Mulder, MB, Winterhalder, B, Uehara, R, Headland, J and Headland, T (2016) Evidence for quantity–quality trade-offs, sex-specific parental investment, and variance compensation in colonized Agta foragers undergoing demographic transition. Evolution and Human Behavior 37, 350–365.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rowthorn, R (2011) Religion, fertility and genes: a dual inheritance model. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 278, 2519–2527.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sanderson, SK (2008) Adaptation, evolution, and religion. Religion 38, 141–156.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sanjak, JS, Sidorenko, J, Robinson, MR, Thornton, KR and Visscher, PM (2018) Evidence of directional and stabilizing selection in contemporary humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 115, 151–156.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmitt, DP and Fuller, RC (2015) On the varieties of sexual experience: cross-cultural links between religiosity and human mating strategies. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 7, 314–326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Solt, F, Habel, P and Grant, JT (2011) Economic inequality, relative power, and religiosity. Social Science Quarterly 92, 447–465.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stewart-Williams, S and Thomas, AG (2013) The ape that thought it was a peacock: does evolutionary psychology exaggerate human sex differences? Psychological Inquiry 24, 137–168.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Strayhorn, JM and Strayhorn, JC (2009) Religiosity and teen birth rate in the United States. Reproductive Health 6, 14.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tropf, FC, Stulp, G, Barban, N, Visscher, PM, Yang, J, Snieder, H and Mills, M (2015) Human fertility, molecular genetics, and natural selection in modern societies. PLoS One 10, e0126821.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Watson, D, Klohnen, EC, Casillas, A, Nus Simms, E, Haig, J and Berry, DS (2004) Match makers and deal breakers: analyses of assortative mating in newlywed couples. Journal of Personality 72, 1029–1068.Google Scholar
Zuckerman, P (2015) Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Google Scholar