Religion & Self Control

[James Brody]

There can be little doubt that churches and governments pull impulsive folks - usually males - into compliance and in ways that can be found to benefit female self interest. Or is it more true that less impulsive folks find someone else's religion tolerable? And the impulsive, as if still Yanomamo or recruits into an army, are kept to the fringes until needed for defense or invasion?

JimB

"ScienceDaily (Jan. 1, 2009) — Self-control is critical for success in life, and a new study by University of Miami professor of Psychology Michael McCullough finds that religious people have more self-control than do their less religious counterparts.

"These findings imply that religious people may be better at pursuing and achieving long-term goals that are important to them and their religious groups. This, in turn, might help explain why religious people tend to have lower rates of substance abuse, better school achievement, less delinquency, better health behaviors, less depression, and longer lives."

More at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081231005355.htm

See also Brody J (2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will, Chapter 3
"Emergent Networks: Life Organizes in a Tinker-Toy Way." Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.

[ToddStark]

I think the conceptual distinction made in this kind of research is often at the individual level: whether religious practices leverage behavior control or whether they help the individual leverage impulse control. But of course these things aren't mutually exclusive. If someone uses a tool to try to make me comply, I may be able to borrow the same tool to get myself into line.

What is self-control afterall but me-in-the-present finding ways to make me-in-the-future comply with my long term goals? We tend to think of self-control as something we are doing now to suppress impulses, but I think it really starts with a decision at one point, and setting up some mechanism to help enforce that it will happen later in spite of our later momentary whims.

Historically a number of religious movements broke away from the Catholic Church with the idea that individuals could become their own priests. In one sense, this is borrowing the behavior control tools of broader religion to use for individual or local purposes.