Does ritual intensity affect attractiveness assessments?
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | One of the features of religions that can be universally observed is the costliness of devotion, which gets manifested in ritual participation. Rituals require investments of such currencies as time, energy, or money, yet lack any straightforward causal mechanism that would translate these investments into desired ends. What then explains the prevalence of these behaviors in religious contexts and beyond? How can devotees benefit from investing their resources into rituals? Sexual selection may offer a possible answer to this long-standing puzzle. Scientists have observed differences in religious behaviours between males and females, responding to mate-evaluation by the opposite sex. Men tend to signal reputation through public religious displays and women tend to signal fidelity through private religious displays. These signals mirror the diverse reproductive challenges of both sexes. associated with. Our experiment manipulates religious ritual intensity in a visual stimuli to examine its effects on mate attractiveness assessments. |
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