Brain freeze of the day
I just came up with that title for certain blog posts. The criterion? If the teaser title or abstract makes me utter, “Whaaaaaaaaat?!” it qualifies as a brain freeze. (By the way, I’m open to other suggestions instead of “brain freeze”, but I trust you get my point.)
The original post I came across cited an article in Psychology Today. I haven’t read either article yet, but this abstract is, er, interesting:
It has been presumed that religiosity has an influence on mating behavior, but here we experimentally investigate the possibility that mating behavior might also influence religiosity. In Experiment 1, people reported higher religiosity after looking at mating pools consisting of attractive people of their own sex compared to attractive opposite sex targets. Experiment 2 replicated the effect with an added control group, and suggested that both men and women become more religious when seeing same-sex competitors. We discuss several possible explanations for these effects. Most broadly, the findings contribute to an emerging literature on how cultural phenomena such as religiosity respond to ecological cues in potentially functional ways.
Citation:
“Mating competitors increase religious beliefs”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2009
Yexin Jessica Li, Adam B. Cohen, Jason Weeden, Douglas T. Kenrick
(Fortunately it is only 4 pages long.)