Expressing Religion as a Mating Strategy or as a Function of Uncertainty: Replicating Li, Cohen, Weeden, and Kenrick (2010)

A recent study by Li, Cohen, Weeden, and Kenrick (2010) proposed that the tendancy for individuals to report increased religiosity after viewing attractive same-sex rivals is evdience of an intrasexually competitive mating strategy through the process of sexual suppression. These findings represented a novel and intriguing concept of religion, but perhaps proposed more questions than they answered. As such, the current thesis sought to test the conclusions drawn from Li et al., (2010) by replicating and expanding the study to directly measure intrasexual competition and rule out uncertainty as an alternate explanation for the results. As people have been known to rely more on religious and other personally relevant cultural world views in times of uncertainty (Barber, 2011), uncertainty may be an alternative explanation for the results. If changes in beliefs were due purely to a mating strategy of sexual suppression, it was hypothesized that only religious beliefs will increase after being exposed to same-sex rivals as they are associated with sexually conservative norms. Alternatively, if the change in beliefs were an attempt to decrease uncertainty, paranormal beliefs that have previously been found to decrease uncertainty as a coping mechanism (Case et al., 2006) but have no link to the sexual suppression mating strategy proposed by Li et al., (2010), would also increase. The results revealed that uncertainty may be a more accurate explanation for the results as paranormal beliefs were found to increase with higher intrasexual competition, while religious beliefs did not. While any conclusions drawn must be tentative, the results do help to clear up a potential inconsistency in the current literature and reveal an exciting new future direction for research into a number of evolutionary and social psychological constructs