Comments on: Why are Women more Religious than Men?

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:32:34 +0000

Men are, on the whole, more analytic than women, and therefore less susceptible to being mislead into worshipping fairy tales.

By: roy belmont

roy belmont — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 18:18:25 +0000

#50-
“…vs. the extent to which how things go for them are determined by dumb luck, nature red in tooth and claw, and the decisions of people in power”

The assumption being that that’s the complete list of determining forces in our lives – chance, nature, and other humans with more power than us. So the simple and beleaguered manufacture, or are prey to the manufacturers of, propitiatable entities.
The straw man of current organized religious endeavor has been dealt with already it seems, outside the discussion. So then it’s just a matter of figuring out where they went wrong, and itemizing it – and confirming our superior, rational, biases. The presence of false gods proving the falsity of all.
It could be though that our instruments haven’t delivered a whole enough picture of where we are yet. That there could quite easily be ways and means of influencing our lives from what looks from here like outside the system but is in fact simply a larger system, its real boundaries invisible to us, that we’ve been living in all along.
The arrogance and self-projection, and lack of rational depth, of many if not most religionists makes it easy to dismiss any and all claims to “higher things”, but the same could as well be said of science or politics, or any other human enterprise that’s been infested with opportunism and cynical hypocrisy.

By: greensmile

greensmile — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 21:28:23 +0000

My hat is off to H. E. Baber. The intrepetation that explains MORE than it was called upon to deal with is always attractive but this a particularly nice fit over three areas. Is this being discussed somewhere else? I’d like to see if persuading details for or against are marshalled anywhere.

By: eweininger

eweininger — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 16:14:57 +0000

Here's another one on the same topic. Similar conclusions to Roth and Kroll.

By: Tracy W

Tracy W — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 05:28:43 +0000

Roger – rational expectations theory relates to how people form beliefs about the future. It has nothing to say about risk preferences, which the paper in question addressed.

Rational expectations theory deals with things like how I predict inflation, or share prices, or the risk of my house burning down. Risk preference relates to what I do with those predictions. Two people might have perfectly rational predictions of the risk of their house burning down over the next year, and yet differ about buying insurance due to different risk preferences. There are of course other motivations apart from risk preferences that relate to people’s actual decisions – examples within the ambiet of economics include budget constraints, indifference curves, signalling theory, etc.

Rational expectations theory is of course very important to explain how people respond/will respond to changes in the money supply. It leads to quite different results than adaptive expectations – the theory rational expectations replaced. Hyper-rational expectations leads to different results again. Personally I think inflation is not utterly trivial, but that is a value judgement and YMMV. I am not sure, however, how you believe rational expectations theory, or adaptive expectations, or hyper-rational expectations do not address people’s expectations. They are, after all, competing models of how people form expectations.

Roth and Kroll appear to have proved what you are arguing here – that risk preference does not explain religious behaviour. I am not sure therefore why you are accusing economists of trying to explain everything by one variable.
I venture to suggest though that religious behaviour is only one part of the full range of human behaviour and risk preferences may be useful in understanding other parts of human behaviour (like purchasing insurance, or doing up seatbelts, or gambling).

By: H. E. Baber

H. E. Baber — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 01:49:59 +0000

Proportionately fewer athiests in than out of foxholes?

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 01:22:47 +0000

it explains why there are no atheists in foxholes

I thought we laid this to rest some months ago..?
There are, in fact, some atheists in foxholes.

By: roger

roger — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 01:16:26 +0000

Tracy, as you point out, a number of things are interesting – anthropology and numerology among them. That you can prove things with the rational expectations model about larger social phenomena is something I don’t doubt in one way – but in another way, I think what you can prove is utterly trivial. This thread is a nice example of the imposition of a heuristic on a very very macro category across cultures that is either trivially true – you can construct a social scenario in which religion mitigates risk for women in some way, (and if the differential was the other way, you could plug in the same model) – or has to be so supplemented that it can be dispensed with. It definitely doesn’t explain variances, and it certainly does as little as, say, some probably bogus scenario from evolutionary psychology (re 48) to explain differences. I don’t doubt one can set up situations in which rational expectations theory actually applies at a deep level – that is, a level that really addresses human motivations and expectations – but the question of the religiosity of men and women is not one of them. I actually think it is a pretty poor way to explain social action, and its implicit use of the market as a metaphor for all human interchanges seems ahistorical and tendentious. As this thread shows, any scenario can be opened up by the supposed risk aversion factor.

By: lindsey

lindsey — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:25:23 +0000

This gives people who are in fact powerless the illusion that they can do something to improve their chances of getting what they want or need. Actually, for some religious folks, religion is seen as a way of giving up power to something more powerful than yourself. Perhaps men are unwilling to let go of control (seeming control)? Maybe it's a pride thing? The existence of God is hard to accept without humility (if you accept his existence and live like you actually accept it). Also, at least for the early rising of the Christian church, women were a huge part of its success for an important reason. They saw in the teachings of Jesus someone who saw their worth, who told them they were equal in the eyes of God. Galations 3:28 says: There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Throughout history men have tried to hide that part of Jesus' teaching, but that was not the case in the beginning and thankfully the old message is being rediscovered in more modern times as well. Perhaps that accounts for some of women’s inclination towards religion (at least towards Christianity)?

By: H. E. Baber

H. E. Baber — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 23:57:37 +0000

Maybe the core issue that determines religiousity is how much control people have over their lives vs. the extent to which how things go for them are determined by dumb luck, nature red in tooth and claw, and the decisions of people in power. This would explain not only why women as a group are more religious than men, but why poor people are more religious than rich people, why religion is thriving in the third world but becoming extinct in Europe and why in the bad old days everyone was religious but as people gained more control over their lives through technology and expanded opportunities for political participation, people became less religious. For that matter, it explains why there are no atheists in foxholes.

This should be obvious. Most of what passes for religion is quasi-magic: petitionary prayer, sacrifice to induce the gods to look favorably on your projects, healing rituals, rain-making ceremonies, etc. This gives people who are in fact powerless the illusion that they can do something to improve their chances of getting what they want or need. If you’re at the mercy of Nature and the powers at be, if there’s little or nothing you can do—you pray.

By: Tracy W

Tracy W — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:39:34 +0000

Tracy, the reason is …”Because it’s more interesting.” Wow. That is the reason people do numerology and astrology too.

And chemistry and physics and anthropology, and etc. Personally I find economics, physics, anthropology, etc more interesting than numerology or astrology as it is possible to disprove something in one of the sciences, which makes the game tougher. Just making up something you like the sound of, as in astrology or numerology is not very interesting to me, although of course YMMV.
(Although of course there are other motivations for studying any science, or indeed numerology or astrology).

The choice really isn’t between utility maximizers and idiots. Unfortunately, that is what the economics profession has convinced itself of. Actually, people have a diversity of motives – sometimes, they even believe things because they think it is true! – and they rarely make decisions in complete isolation one from the other.

I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. Having a diversity of motives and a variety of beliefs does not have any bearing on whether you are rational or not in the economics sense. (To what extent those beliefs are true and to what extent you alter them in light of new evidence does have a bearing). Nor am I aware of any economist who argues that people make decisions in complete isolation – the whole point of marginal utility theory is that the value of something can vary according to how much you already have and what you want to use it for. And of course the whole study of prices in an economy, or indeed of public choice economics, is about how decisions are made when one decision is affected by others’ decisions.

Louise Roth and Jeff Kroll considered a hypothesis as to why one group of people’s behaviour differed from another, tested it, and discarded it. What in that required assuming that people make decisions in complete isolation from one another, or that people only have one belief, or that people only have one set of motives?

By: roy belmont

roy belmont — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 20:28:53 +0000

Inside the capitalist hive, where children are at most another consumerist choice and gender differences are assumed to have no more real bearing than pigmentation or height, the apparent difference between the states of “being religious” or “being irreligious” is a superficial thing, making them like a fad or a fashion, a phenomenon that can probably be explained by something incomplete in the past that either is or isn’t being overcome – it’s something cultural, to be accepted or transcended, or adopted and abandoned, at whim, or through enlightened understanding. Like genital mutilation.
That there may be biological differences between the two sexes as regards their p.o.v. of things like time and the larger contexts of our lives, things like eternity and the eventualities of generation – where this all goes – isn’t going to get much hearing. But there probably is – certainly you’d expect there to be a profoundly substantial difference between the two as regards children. Men being capable of fathering whole multitudes in one lifetime, women a handful, or a dozen at most, and that in an occupation of great and focused labor, no pun intended. Those irrefutable biological facts probably account for most of the gender-bigotries of the patriarchal religions, and their consequent evolution into cultural, a-religious but equally-bigoted norms. Men institutionalizing mechanisms for the protection of their genetic offspring, women trading inherent reproductive authority for the security and protection of theirs within those institutions.
The difference between the cultural architecture of organized religions and the presence of a subjective religious “feeling” about life isn’t clearly made in the question as presented, because the biases of the presenters, both originally and here, are mainly against “being religious”, even if somewhat tolerantly curious about what exactly’s going on there. Those biases are confirmed and maintained against the straw men of current iterations of those institutions, not “religion” itself, which, like language, is cultural in form but not in essence. Probably religion is serving another purpose than it ostensibly exists to, in the main.
Maybe women are more naturally inclined toward the long view, men toward the immediate.

By: Ingrid Robeyns

Ingrid Robeyns — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 19:51:49 +0000

harry, I think that’s too nice on women. I am sorry to say that I believe that higher levels of guilt and anxieties (whether innate or hormone-induced or promoted by patriarchy or a combination), and higher levels of submissiveness (definitely promoted by patriarchy) seem a more plausable answer to me…

By: harry b

harry b — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 19:05:19 +0000

Being generally more emotionally integrated, they are generally more open to the possibility that something exists that matters other than themselves, and then they generalise? Or, to put it another way, they are more open to the possibility that God is something other than them?

By: Amanda Marcotte

Amanda Marcotte — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 16:35:45 +0000

Nobody has blamed the patriachy yet?

Fine, I will. Religion is primarily a social institution and women are usually tasked in a patriarchal society to do the unpaid social work to hold that society together. Looking at it from that perspective, the issue is a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, it has a bad political side effect in that religion is the primary force behind anti-abortion efforts, so women’s greater religiosity means that larger percentages of women buy into the anti-choice movement than otherwise would.