Trends in Sexual Preference
Age, Gender, and Political Affiliation
In last month's edition, we noted that sexual preference was not symmetric across the various political cohorts. Conservatives were more likely to categorize themselves as heterosexual than were the Liberals, Moderates, or Libertarians.
We also noted that sexual preference is the intersection of many genetic, biological, environmental, and social influences that create a continuum of reproductive phenotypes within a large population.
The curious persistence of non-heterosexuality among species that are millions of years old may imply that the optimization of the populational sustainability in a given habitat occurs when inconsistent heterosexuality is present in a varying proportion of that population.
Age and Sexual Preference
In our most recent survey, we also noticed that heterosexuality was not constant across age cohorts, particularly with females. Below we see the age and sex breakdown of the 2,844 respondents to our Ethnic and Religious Attitudes survey.
Percent Reporting They Are Heterosexual by Gender and Age Cohorts (F=Female, M=Male)65% of the Under-25 females reported they are heterosexual, compared to 85.5% of the 25-34 age group, 84.7% of the 35-49 age group, and 91.2% of the 50+ age group. The substantial decline of heterosexuality among the Under-25 females is not matched by the Under-25 males, who report heterosexuality at a rate of 86.4%. The rest of the male age cohorts are remarkably constant, as the 25-34 cohort reported 88.8%, the 35-49 cohort reporting 89.9%, and the 50+ cohort reported 88.5%.
So what happened to the Under-25 females? If they did not report heterosexuality, what did they report? Let's look at those respondents reporting bisexuality in the chart below.
Percent Reporting They Are Bisexual by Gender and Age Cohorts (F=Female, M=Male)Bisexuality was the next most common sexual preference selected across all the age and gender cohorts. It was strongly elevated in the Under-25 females, at 21%. The 25-34 females came in at 10.2%, the 35-49 females dropped to 6.6%, and the 50+ group fell to 2.8%.
The males were only slightly elevated in the Under-25 cohort, at 6.4%. The 25-34 males were slightly less, at 6%, the 35-49 dropped to 4.3%, and the 50+ was slightly higher, at 4.4%.
The high rates of bisexuality reported by the Under-25 females will be discussed later. But first, let's take a look at the rate of homosexuality, which was the third most popular sexual preference in our survey, and displayed in the graph below.
Percent Reporting They Are Homosexual by Gender and Age Cohorts (F=Female, M=Male)Rates of homosexuality are much lower for females relative to their rates of bisexuality. The Under-25 females reported homosexuality at a rate of 4.9%, which then dips to 2.8% in the 25-34 females. Next is an increase in the 35-49 cohort, at 5.3%, followed by a dip in the 50+ females, at 2.8%.
The males were consistent across age groups, with a slight dip in the 25-34 cohort. The Under-25 group reported 3.2%, the 25-34 group reported 2.8%, the 35-49 group reported 3.6%, and the 50+ group reported 3.8%.
The rates of reported asexuality were very low, and will not be displayed here, however the Under-25 and 50+ females were highest in that segment, both reporting 2.8%. The rates of people unsure of their sexual preference were also low, and again, the Under-25 females reported in at 4.2%.
Trends by Political Affiliation
Let's take a look at these age cohorts by political affiliation. For these next few graphs, we have combined the Very Liberals with the Liberals, and the Very Conservatives with the Conservatives. Those reporting they are bisexual are shown in the graph below.
Percent Reporting They Are Bisexual by Political and Age Cohorts (F=Female, M=Male) (L=Liberal, M=Moderate, LB=Libertarian, C=Conservative)There are several notable tendencies in the above graph. First, among the females, all the Under-25 political cohorts had sharp elevations in reported bisexuality rates, even the Conservatives. Reported rates of bisexuality generally decline with age for females. The Libertarian and Moderate females reported the highest rates of bisexuality in the Under-25 age group. (Both the Moderate and Libertarian females had low sample sizes, and are not reliable statistics when broken down into age cohorts).
Among the males, the Liberals had no discernable trend, and were relatively consistent across all age groups, while the Moderates and Conservatives were elevated in the Under-25 cohort. The Libertarians had the most curious pattern, which were elevated rates of bisexuality as they got older. (Again, the Moderate and Libertarian males had low sample sizes, and are not reliable statistics when broken down into age cohorts).
Now let's take a look at reported homosexuality in the graph below.
Percent Reporting They Are Homosexual by Political and Age Cohorts (F=Female, M=Male) (L=Liberal, M=Moderate, LB=Libertarian, C=Conservative)Except for possibly the Liberal male tendency to report increased rates of homosexuality as they get older, there are no discernable patterns in the age-distribution of reported homosexuality within political cohort. We had previously noted no discernable age-related patterns in homosexual preference when we viewed the same data aggregated across all political cohorts. Again, sample sizes were insufficient in both Moderates and Libertarians to provide any reliable statistics on homosexual trends with age.
Changes in Female Sexual Preference
Changes in sexual preference over the human lifecycle have been proposed by Alfred Kinsey, and our results are consistent with that hypothesis. About 8.6% of our respondents either indicated that their sexual preference has changed, or they were not sure if it had changed.
The shifts in sexual preference over the female life cycle are interesting, and seem to indicate that hormonal influences are partially involved in modulating sexuality. In the graph below, we see those females indicating that their sexual preference has changed during their lifetime. While the framing of the question is ambiguous as to how old they were when their sexual preference changed, the results seem to shadow the female reproductive years quite well.
Females Indicating Changes in Sexual Preference by Current Sexual Preference and Age Cohort (F=Female) (H=Heterosexual, B=Bisexual, HO=Homosexual, NS=Ambiguous, AS=Asexual)The female pattern of changing sexual preference is fascinating, and seems to be minimizing the negative impact of non-heterosexuality on reproduction. As seen in the above graph, in the Under-25 cohort, bisexuality is the most common preference of those indicating a change. In the 25-34 age cohort, bisexuality drops substantially, as heterosexuality is now the preeminent result of a change in sexual preference. This trend continues into the still reproductive 35-49 cohort. In the menopausal 50+ cohort, asexuality now becomes the primary target of sexual preference changes.
While we did not capture the exact age of the change in sexual preference, the above data is consistent with a shift in female sexual preference towards bisexuality prior to the active reproductive and child-rearing years. This follows the pattern of sexual-encounter frequency in females from a previous survey, which we will report next month. The Under-25 females have fewer sexual encounters than the 25-34 females. The 25-34 females shift towards heterosexuality and away from bisexuality during their surge in copulation frequency. The 50+ females shift towards asexuality in the menopausal years.
From Doomsday Cult to Religion
The Social Management of Human Beliefs
Defining where cults begin and ordinary social behavior ends has no consensus within the psychiatric community, which has yet to unequivocally define any psychopathology to cult membership. However, the handful of psychographic studies of ex-cult members have reported elevations in the rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal tendencies, familial hostility, and loneliness in the years preceding and following their cult membership.
Evolutionary Echoes of Human Belief Coordination: AllogroomingBehaviors associated with social network formation and termination are influenced by a variety of hormones, such as testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, oxytocin, vasopression, etc. These hormones vary throughout the human life cycle, and subsequently result in corresponding variations in social behavior--particularly social behaviors that relate to reproduction.
As any parent of a teenager knows, starting with puberty, the sex hormones break down familial bonds and prepare the individual for forming into new social groups to facilitate reproduction. This explains the correlation between cult participation and age, as cult members are in the early stages of their reproductive years. The average age of a cult member is under 25.
So what is behind the appeal of cults? What would cause people to sacrifice their relatively unscrutinized lifestyles in secular society for the behavioral and cognitive uniformity of a small group of strangers? Is the social management of beliefs and behaviors programmed into our genes, with cults being the most obvious example of this propensity?
The Primate Correlate of Human Belief Coordination: Allogrooming
It seems that mutual grooming behavior (allogrooming) in primates correlates closely with the human propensity to synchronize beliefs within small groups. Allogrooming, or the removal of insects and other debris from the hair of another conspecific, serves the functions of social bonding, inhibition of intragroup aggression, and the management of the dominance hierarchy.
Allogrooming can take as much as 20% of a chimp's day, which certainly implicates not only a strong social value to the behavior, but a corresponding neurological value. In non-human primates, allogrooming has been found to stimulate the serotonergic system, and vice-versa. The serotonergic impact of allogrooming would most likely apply to humans, if they weren't so shy about picking insects off one another.
Fortunately, the development of language would provide humans with more effective mechanisms for social bonding. Conversation would materially replace the major social functions of primate allogrooming, and Robin Dunbar even went so far as to propose that humans developed language as a more effective form of allogrooming.
But conversations can be aggressive and antagonistic, so social bonding is not necessarily a by-product of human language. If humans are going to manage serotonin levels via conversations, they are more likely to occur during affiliative conversations than with quarrelsome ones. While there is yet to be any proven link between affiliative conversations and serotonin levels, there is research linking the quarrelsome conversations with low serotonin levels.
But serotonin is not the only neurotransmitter being modulated by social interactions. The neurological impact of interpersonal romantic relationships has received a lot of recent attention, and implicates the dopaminergic system as being highly activated during the early stages of romantic bonding. As we have noted on numerous occasions, the Conservatives are more likely to exhibit dopaminergic behaviors than the Liberals, and are also more likely to be part of a pair-bond (romantic) relationship.
But these studies are also indicating that the romantically-activated dopaminergic system seems to be suppressing the impact of the serotonergic system, which makes sense, as the serotonergic system is thought to inhibit the rapid escalation of reproductive behaviors brought about by the surging dopaminergic system.
But we must be careful with all discussions regarding neurotransmitter levels and behavior, as aggregate levels can have different behavioral impacts depending on their topographic distribution in the nervous system and their integration with their receptors. The correlation of behavior and aggregate neurotransmitter levels has produced a lot of contradictory and inconsistent evidence.
IQ and Cult Membership
Cult membership is obviously providing some sort of neurological "reward" or psychological payoff, which it does by combining the human neurological wiring for social interaction with hyperactive small group behavior. This provides a high level of excitement for a new cult member, with a substantial increase in demand for neural resources devoted to social cognition and relationship management.
But a few things are happening to the new cult member during this explosion of small group relationships, one of which seems to be a inhibition of the prefrontal cortex in personal decision-making. One of the things noticed in the study of ex-cult members was their progressive improvement in IQ scores as they transition from cult membership back into secular society.
The decline of conventional IQ scores among cult members is related to both their increased load of new social relationships and the corresponding demands to coordinate their cognition with the cult members. Small isolated groups have greater requirements for cognitive coordination, and a new cult member's brain seems to be limiting prefrontal cortical activity in favor of temporal cortical activity, which was most likely already elevated prior to joining the cult. Outside of the medial portion, the prefrontal cortex does a very poor job of coordinating beliefs with others.
As we have discussed previously in Who Killed JFK, the left temporal lobe is the center for the phenomenon of belief-bias, which is the brain's center for the maintenance of beliefs in the face of contradictory information. This is also the primary religious area of the brain. In contrast, the right lateral prefrontal cortex seems to be the major anti-religious locus of neural activity, and the primary reason why the "right-brained" Liberals are less religious than the "left-brained" Conservatives.
But the persistence of belief-bias in human cognition has at least two evolutionary advantages. The first is to promote self-interest. Almost as importantly, it facilitates the formation and stabilization of social groups. In short, humans have evolved to coordinate their beliefs in order to facilitate the functioning of their social groups, and the left temporal cortex is the primary neural locus of the continuity of those socially-managed beliefs.
The drain on human cognition placed by small isolated social groups, such as cults, takes resources away from non-social cognition. The development of urban and suburban social lifestyles have the added benefit of reducing the cognitive demands of tightly organized small groups, and allows the diversion of neural resources into non-social cognition, spurring the development of science and technology.
Doomsday Cults
Managing cult behavior, or the behavior of any isolated small group, often relies on a hierarchical dominance structure similar to those found in non-human primates under environmental or social stresses. Cults usually have an alpha, typically a male, and a chain of dominance that is organized much like a chimp troop.
New cult recruits are typically submissive, and the personal neurological adjustments that are made by humans organizing into a dominance hierarchy resembles those of other primates. Research establishing the modulation of the levels of dopamine, serotonin, and testosterone to dominance status have been found in a number of social vertebrates, including humans.
This modulation of neurotransmitter and sex hormone levels to dominance status can provide a neurological value to all members of the cult's dominance hierarchy. There is some evidence that submissive individuals may experience increased serotonin levels as they solidify their lower positions within the dominance hierarchy.
There is also research that testosterone levels for the dominant members swell, along with dopamine levels. For dominant females, serotonin levels increase. However, the influence of serotonin is complex, so levels may increase in both dominant and subordinate members, but in different topographic regions in the central nervous system. The current evidence on dominance and submissive behaviors seems to point to control by different neural networks.
The Reproductive Advantages of Being a God
Doomsday cults tend to exhibit stronger dominance hierarchies than ordinary cults, and a correspondingly higher level of influence by the cult's leadership. Some estimates indicate that one-third of the world's cults are doomsday cults, which are of particular interest, since Christianity evolved from a doomsday cult.
The doomsday cult's unanimous belief that the world is in the midst of an apocalyptic ending is an important factor in its organization and continuity. This belief enforces the dominance hierarchy and stimulates social-bonding within the cult as they prepare to take their preeminent position in midst of the disarray of the post-apocalyptic world. An isolated doomsday cult that stockpiles weapons and practices their end-of-the-world strategy is indeed a very close knit group.
A doomsday cult leader will either advertise a special relationship to God or anoint himself to a God. This increases his dominance level within the group, and typically results in increased sexual access to the cult's females. This increased access also corresponds with a restriction of access by the subordinate males. The cult with a godlike leader functions very much like a chimpanzee troop where the high-ranking males maintain the majority of sexual rights to females.
Reinforcement of Religious Beliefs by Submissive Behavior in GroupsThe anointment of the cult leader to a god (or a special relationship to God) corresponds with a high level of submission among the cult membership. The practice of the public submission has a powerful influence on human belief systems. Public submission to the deity is a ubiquitous practice in the maintenance of religious beliefs in general.
From Doomsday Cult to Religion
Small groups living under stress pretty much defined the pre-historic human experience, and the cognitive demands of living in progressively larger social groups would tax the rapidly evolving hominid brain. Neocortex volume is highly correlated with group size in primates, and based upon the human neocortex volume, the predicted group size is 150--not far from the average actual group size in pre-agricultural societies.
The tightly organized cult provides a neurological reward for the participants, as both the dopaminergic and serotonergic systems are stimulated by the tight management of relationships and cognition within small groups. All modern-day religions were originally formed from cults with a small group of original members, but the widespread multi-generational propagation of cults into organized religions with millions of members are rare events indeed.
While the apocalyptic visions of the doomsday cult are instrumental in the maintenance of social bonds and the hierarchical dominance structure, it does not position the cult for continuity after the death of the cult leader. If a cult can circumvent this problem, it can indefinitely use its version of the apocalypse as a successful recruiting tool. Doomsday cults will typically experience inflows in membership prior to their advertised date for the end of the world. However, this is risky business, as once the doomsday passes, the cult will experience a sharp drop in membership (providing the end of the world doesn't actually happen).
Successful religions do well by avoiding the temptation for a calendar date approach to the apocalypse, and instead substitute a sequence of related apocalyptic events that were originally derived from contemporary social problems and conflicts. The curious religious commonality of the apocalypse is often accompanied with the religion's self-appointment of "chosen-by-God" status, which serves the functions of recruiting, membership retention, and just as importantly, managing the human propensity for reward-seeking.
Humans are reward-seeking machines, so much so that they even seek rewards after their own death. All successful religions achieve worldly behavioral inhibition by transferring this earthly propensity into heavenly reward-seeking. Earthly moral behavior is substantially rewarded in the afterlife. Inhibition of earthly reward-seeking is the most remarkable social development of religious belief.
The cult must also facilitate both reproductive rates and membership growth through recruitment. Cults and religions that turn their members into recruiters not only spur the increase in new members, they also increase the retention rates of the recruiters.
Successful cults borrow a lot of theological content from existing religions. Christianity adapted many elements of Judaism, and Islam adapted many elements of Christianity. However, successful cults invariably provide unique theological content which serves to improve recruitment rates, especially in areas with higher dissatisfaction rates with the local religions. Cult recruitment is more effective in areas with lower than average membership in indigenous religions.
The expanding cult must integrate the membership into the indigenous economy to some degree. However, this secular integration will result in elevated rates of membership attrition. Amish communities closest to secular populations will lose more members than Amish communities that are more isolated. But economic integration is mandatory if the cult is to obtain the economic advantages of secular society. Closed religious groups have very low rates of technological improvement, and run the risk of living impoverished lifestyles relative to the technologically dynamic secular economies.
To countervail this tendency of membership loss in the midst of secular societies, the emerging religion can facilitate an economic cooperative among its members, which practices economic endogamy, or the practice of making purchases from cult insiders while selling to both cult insiders and outsiders. Religions also get substantial membership boosts when they practice consumption smoothing, or the redistribution of membership income based on need, and serve the function of a social insurance mechanism. Cults that properly integrate into secular economies can become very wealthy, as they emulate the ordinary rules of collusion in zero-sum games.
Discussion
The human neurological wiring for small group formation is effectively managed by successful cults and religions. The neurological "reward" provided by religious or cult membership depends on how effectively it modulates the activity in the serotonergic and dopaminergic (and possibly noradrenergic) systems of the member. The temporal cortex plays a larger role than the prefrontal cortex in the social coordination of beliefs, and people with higher temporal activity (e.g. extroverts) are also more likely to organize into religious social groups.
The coordination of human beliefs provides a substantial neurological reward for humans, and emulates the primate tendency for allogrooming. While allogrooming occurs within close human family groups, it has been substantially replaced by affiliative verbal conversations, affiliative behaviors, the integration and proper placement of members into the dominance hierarchy, and the mutual submission to a common dominant entity, be it the group's alpha, or the alpha of alphas--God.
Indeed, a monotheistic religion may be better able to synchronize the beliefs and behaviors of a geographically diverse population than is a religion based on local gods. Religious conversion is highly correlated with territorial conquest.
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Brack and Zhang, October 2006
Email: Brack@neuropolitics.org
Zhang@neuropolitics.org
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The Behavioral Convergence of Moral Divergence
Conservatives, Liberals, and Charity
Conservatives and Liberals tend to organize their moral behavior around two different approaches--the Liberals rely more on right-hemispheric empathetic neural networks, and the Conservatives rely more on the left-hemispheric reward categorization and valuation networks. (See Conservatives, Liberals, and Behavioral Inhibition).
Both of these approaches facilitate pro-social behaviors. Oddly enough, these two approaches often result in similar behaviors. But the Conservative's reward categorization approach to morality is more complicated than the Liberal's empathetic approach, as illustrated by their divergence on capital punishment.
To the Liberals, capital punishment is murder. To the Conservatives, society has the right to kill murderers. Except for abortion, Conservatives seem to incorporate more "reward" and "punishment" variables in the evaluation of moral issues. Since these "reward" and "punishment" variables are frequently socially determined, the Conservatives are also more likely to align their behavior and moral attitudes to correspond to the prevailing beliefs in their social groups.
Behavioral Convergence
Sometimes the religious Conservatives and Liberals behave more like each other than they do with the secular Conservatives, Moderates, the Libertarians, or the Non-political. In our recent Ethnic and Religious Attitudes survey, we tested the phenomenon of behavioral convergence by asking the 2,844 respondents "Did you donate any money towards any of the 2004 Tsunami's disaster relief charities?". We further asked them to describe whether they donated money through religious or secular charities. The results are in the graph below.
Did you donate any money to the Tsunami disaster relief charities? (Grey=Non-religious Charities, Green=Religious Charities) (F=Female, M=Male) (NP=Non-political, VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, LB=Libertarian, M=Moderate, C=Conservative, VC=Very Conservative)Overall, among the males, the Very Liberals (49%), Moderates (46.9%), and the Liberals (45.6%) reported the highest rate of donating to the Tsunami relief funds. The Conservatives (41.4%), Very Conservatives, (42%), Libertarians (42.5%) were next, and the Non-political (37.1%) were at the bottom.
Among the females, the Liberals (61.1%) and Very Liberals (57.7%) reported the highest rates of donating, followed closely by the Conservatives (57.5%). The Moderates (53%) were next, followed by the Very Conservatives (52.9%). The Libertarians (47.4%) were next, and the Non-political (42.7%) were again at the bottom.
Overall, the Liberals reported the highest rates of donating across both genders (these results are not weighted for the amount of the donation). Females were consistently more charitable than males.
The Impact of Religiosity on Tsunami Donations
In the above results, the Liberals were much more likely to donate to non-religious charities, and the Conservatives were more likely to donate to religious charities. Let's take a look at the religious breakdown within our Conservative and Liberal cohorts and see the impact of religiosity on contributions to the Tsunami disaster.
Did you donate any money to the Tsunami disaster relief charities? (Grey=Non-religious Charities, Green=Religious Charities) (F=Female, M=Male) (C=Conservative, L=Liberal) (NR=Not Religious, LR=Little Religious, MR=Moderately Religious, VR=Very Religious)
As can be seen in the above graph, increasing religiosity increased the rate of Tsunami donations, in both Liberal and Conservative males and females. The Very Religious (VR) and Moderately Religious (MR) Liberal females reported the highest rate of overall giving, at 77.3% and 75%, respectively. The Little Religious (LR) and Not Religious (NR) Conservative males reported the lowest rate of Tsunami giving at 25.4% and 31.5% respectively.
Among the Conservatives, the highest rates of Tsunami giving were recorded by the Very Religious (VR) in both genders (males=59.5%, females=61.3%). The Not Religious (NR) and Little Religious (LR) Conservative females (46.7%, 50%) and males (31.5%, 25.4%) recorded the lowest rates of Tsunami giving.
The Very Religious (VR) Liberals recorded the highest rates of giving among the Liberals, in both genders (male=62.5%, females=77.3%). Just like the Conservatives, the Not Religious (NR) and Little Religious (LR) Liberal males (47.5%, 42.8%) and females (55.6%, 58.6%) recorded the lowest rates of Tsunami giving among the Liberals.
Discussion
Both Liberals and religious Conservatives were more likely to donate money to the Tsunami victims than were the secular Conservatives, Moderates, Libertarians, or the Non-political. This interesting convergence of behavior from these two adversaries was achieved despite the fact that they exhibit the greatest variance in their behavioral inhibition mechanisms (i.e. morality).
The Liberal propensity for empathy certainly fueled their higher rates of giving, while the Conservative's propensity for religious organization was quickly adapted into an effective disaster response mechanism. Organized religions function as effective social insurance mechanisms for just such disasters.
Neither the Moderates, Libertarians, or the Non-political have the empathetic propensities of the Liberals or the organized religious propensities of the Conservatives, and had correspondingly lower rates of charitable responses to the Tsunami disaster.
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Conservatives, Liberals, and Social Networks
Differences in Conservative and Liberal behaviors can be hard to detect in small groups. But in large groups, the small-group behavioral and attitudinal symmetry of Conservatives and Liberals breaks down quickly. The idea that Conservatives and Liberals may prefer different patterns of social group behavior has been discussed in several articles on this web site.
Modern secular economies increase the rate of formation and termination of social groups, such as business organizations, and a correspondingly greater rate of formation and termination of non-family and family-based social groups. One can participate in a wide variety of groups, or simply avoid unnecessary social relationships, other than the workplace, the extended family, and a small circle of friends.
Are Conservatives and Liberals maintaining similar sets of social networks?
Love Thy Neighbor
We asked 1,682 participants to a recent survey, "How well do you know your next door neighbors?". Those replying that they DO NOT know their neighbors well are displayed in the graph below.
Percent Reporting That They Do Not Know Their Next Door Neighbors Well (F=Female, M=Male) (VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, C=Conservative, VC=Very Conservative)As we see in the above graph, the Liberals and Moderates are more likely to NOT know their next door neighbors. The Very Conservatives of both genders had the highest neighbor awareness. Our results do not control for the number of children in the family or community size, which are very active in determining the level of neighbor awareness.
What's in Your Wallet?
We also asked the same 1,682 survey respondents "How many pictures of different people do you keep in your wallet?". In the table below, we see the average number of photos by political and gender cohorts.
Female Very Liberal Liberal Moderate Conservative Very Conservative Male Very Liberal Liberal Moderate Conservative Very Conservative Mean Number of Photos of Different People Carried in Wallet Two notable trends of the above table are that females carry more photos than males, and that the number of photos one carries is nearly a linear function as one goes from left to right on the political scale. Conservatives are more likely to be involved in pair-bond relationships and to have more children, and these results are reflective of that tendency.
You Say It's Your Birthday
In our continuing queries of how much personal relationship information that our political cohorts keep track of, we asked "how many birthdays of friends and family do you remember?" The results of this question are in the table below.
Female Very Liberal Liberal Moderate Conservative Very Conservative Male Very Liberal Liberal Moderate Conservative Very Conservative Mean Number of Remembered Birth Dates of Friends/Family To no one's surprise, males remembered substantially fewer birth dates than did females. But among females, the Conservatives remembered more birth dates of friends and family than did the Liberals. The males were pretty consistent across the political cohorts, with the Liberals slightly less diligent than the Conservatives. Again, this statistic is highly influenced by the number of children, which was not controlled for in this survey.
Membership in Social Organizations
We also asked our survey respondents to provide the number of professional, charitable, special interest, social, and religious organizations they belong to. The results of this query are in the table below.
Female Very Liberal Liberal Moderate Conservative Very Conservative Male Very Liberal Liberal Moderate Conservative Very Conservative Mean Number of Organizations/Clubs One Belongs To The ends of the political spectrum, the Very Liberals and the Very Conservatives, report the highest rates of social group membership across both genders. As expected, the Conservatives and the Very Conservatives are more likely to be members of religious organizations than the Liberals. Let's look at their social group membership when we control for religious belief. (In the table below, we combined the Very Conservatives with the Conservatives, and the Very Liberals with the Liberals).
Political Affiliation
Mean Number of Organizations/Clubs One Belongs To By Religiosity The above table certainly implicates that church is the primary social organization that religious people belong to (outside of their own families and their workplace). We also see that Liberals were actually more likely to belong to secular social organizations than either the Moderates and Conservatives, in both genders.
Discussion
The female Conservatives are especially tuned into their local social relationships, such as their family and their local neighborhood, which are obviously related to reproduction and child-rearing. The Conservative females seem to be maintaining more personal social information on the people around them, which better supports the demands of child-rearing, and not so coincidentally they show the lowest interest in participating in secular social organizations.
The Conservative males also seem to be more tuned to local social relationships, which again is related to their greater reproductive rates. However, from what we can infer from our data, they are more likely to participate in secular social organizations than are the Conservative females.
Conversely, the Liberal females scored the highest among all the political cohorts in their participation in secular social organizations, followed by the Liberal males. The Liberals maintain fewer local social contacts than do the Conservatives, which again is linked to their lower reproductive rates.
Overall, the Conservatives belong to more social organizations than the Liberals, which are more likely to be slanted towards religion. The Liberals belong to more secular organizations than the Conservatives. The Conservatives are more integrated into "local" or "neighborhood" social groups.
