Among humans, paternal investment has been shown to enhance both fertility and offspring survival. While psychological and ecological influences on human paternal investment are relatively well documented, cultural influences remain less well understood. It has been proposed that religion can be an important socio-cultural factor shaping paternal investment. First, religions often instill pro-family values in fathers, potentially increasing their investment. Second, if religions promote pro-family values in mothers, these values may be communicated through religious behaviours, encouraging greater paternal investment. Alternatively, fathers may use maternal religiosity as a strategic cue of maternal pro-family commitment to reduce their own investment, shifting responsibility to mothers. To evaluate these hypotheses, we analyse data from 1238 children under 17 years old across 822 households in India and Bangladesh. Our findings suggest that in India, paternal religiosity is positively associated with fathers' housework assistance and emotional support to mothers. In Bangladesh, maternal religiosity is positively associated with paternal emotional support to mothers and child provisioning. In both countries, maternal religiosity positively associates with paternal investment among the most religious fathers. These findings indicate that religion plays a complex role in paternal investment, shaped by the interplay of parental religiosity and socio-ecological context.

• Klíčová slova
• Bangladesh, India, allomaternal care, parental religiosity, paternal investment,
• MeSH
• dítě MeSH
• dospělí MeSH
• kojenec MeSH
• lidé MeSH
• mladiství MeSH
• náboženství * MeSH
• otcové * psychologie   MeSH
• předškolní dítě MeSH
• Check Tag
• dítě MeSH
• dospělí MeSH
• kojenec MeSH
• lidé MeSH
• mladiství MeSH
• mužské pohlaví MeSH
• předškolní dítě MeSH
• ženské pohlaví MeSH
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH
• Geografické názvy
• Bangladéš MeSH
• Indie MeSH

OBJECTIVES: Human childrearing is cooperative, with women often able to achieve relatively high fertility through help from many individuals. Previous work has documented tremendous socioecological variation in who supports women in childrearing, but less is known about the intracultural correlates of variation in allomaternal support. In the highly religious, high-fertility setting of The Gambia, we studied whether religious mothers have more children and receive more support with their children. METHODS: We randomly sampled 395 mothers and 745 focal children enrolled in the Kiang West (The Gambia) Longitudinal Population Study cohort. Structured interviews asked mothers who and how often people invest in their children, and about their religious practices. Data were collected at participants' homes on electronic tablet-based long-form surveys and analyzed using the Bayesian hierarchical models. RESULTS: Religiosity was weakly associated with women's higher age-adjusted fertility. Maternal religiosity was negatively related to maternal investment in focal children, but positively associated with total allomaternal support. Specifically, a woman's religiosity was positively associated with allomaternal support from matrilineal kin, other offspring, and affinal kin, but unrelated to paternal, patrilineal, and non-kin investment. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that higher fertility among religious mothers may be supported by high levels of investment from biological and affinal kin. Matrilineal kin, other siblings, and affinal kin seem to be the most responsive to a woman's religiosity. Our findings cast doubt on interpretations of women's religious behaviors as signals of fidelity, and instead suggest they may be part of strategies to enable collective allomaternal resources and higher relative fertility.

• Klíčová slova
• Alloparenting, The Gambia, fertility, parental investment, religion,
• MeSH
• dospělí MeSH
• fertilita * MeSH
• lidé MeSH
• longitudinální studie MeSH
• matky * statistika a číselné údaje   psychologie   MeSH
• mladiství MeSH
• mladý dospělý MeSH
• náboženství MeSH
• předškolní dítě MeSH
• rodičovství MeSH
• Check Tag
• dospělí MeSH
• lidé MeSH
• mladiství MeSH
• mladý dospělý MeSH
• mužské pohlaví MeSH
• předškolní dítě MeSH
• ženské pohlaví MeSH
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH
• Geografické názvy
• Gambie MeSH

Around the world, people engage in practices that involve self-inflicted pain and apparently wasted resources. Researchers theorized that these practices help stabilize within-group cooperation by assorting individuals committed to collective action. While this proposition was previously studied using existing religious practices, we provide a controlled framework for an experimental investigation of various predictions derived from this theory. We recruited 372 university students in the Czech Republic who were randomly assigned into either a high-cost or low-cost condition and then chose to play a public goods game (PGG) either in a group that wastes money to signal commitment to high contributions in the game or to play in the group without such signals. We predicted that cooperators would assort in the high-cost revealed group and that, despite these costs, they would contribute more to the common pool and earn larger individual rewards over five iterations of PGG compared with the concealed group and participants in the low-cost condition. The results showed that the assortment of cooperators was more effective in the high-cost condition and translated into larger contributions of the remaining endowment to the common pool, but participants in the low-cost revealed group earned the most. We conclude that costly signals can serve as an imperfect assorting mechanism, but the size of the costs needs to be carefully balanced with potential benefits to be profitable.

• Klíčová slova
• costly signalling theory, evolution of cooperation, public goods game, strategic choice model,
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH