Does religion make people more self-controlled? A review of research from the lab and life

Religion is associated with a wide range of socially desirable behaviors and outcomes (particularly among adolescents), including lower rates of crime and delinquency, better school performance, and abstinence from risky sexual practices and substance use. What should we make of these associations? Are they causal? And if so, what are the intermediate psychological processes through which religion obtains its effects on such outcomes? With regard to this third question, we describe a decade's worth of research into a hypothesis that religion obtains its behavioral effects through its intermediate effects on self-control. In this review, we focus on evidence from experiments and longitudinal studies, which provide more rigorous tests of cause-and-effect relationships than simple cross-sectional correlational studies can. We find little convincing evidence for the idea that implicit and explicit activations of religious cognition in the laboratory exert a robust influence on self-control on the scale of minutes and hours. We do find evidence, however, that rituals (most notably, prayer), along with exposure to religious environments and institutions in the real world (e.g. religious schooling) influence self-control on the scale of weeks, months, and years - a conclusion that is also supported by rigorous longitudinal research.