Sex differences in costly signaling in rural Western China

• DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2023.02.009
• Publication Date: 2023-02-20T20:40:56Z
• Authors: CaiRangDongZhi; Erhao Ge; Juan Du; Ruth Mace
• Keywords: Social and Cultural Anthropology; 0106 biological sciences; Other Social and Behavioral Sciences; Social Statistics; signaling theory; 05 social sciences; Gender; Life Sciences; Social and Behavioral Sciences; 01 natural sciences; Reputation.; Religious practices; Anthropology; 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences; Costly; Biology

Costly rituals convey the commitment to communities and advertise trustworthiness and cooperativeness to peers, which might explain why humans perform costly religious rituals. Here, we compare the efficacy of occasional public displays versus regular but less public acts for prestige enhancement. We collected data on religious practices ranging from daily routine practices to infrequently elaborate distant pilgrimages among residents of an agricultural Tibetan village, as well as their reputational standings. We find that religious practices are mediated by demographic factors such as wealth, age and gender. Women are more inclined to daily religious activities, but men are more predisposed to distant pilgrimages. Distant pilgrimages increase the perception of all prosocial characteristics. In contrast, daily practices are positively associated with nominations of devoutness but not with other qualities. Devoutness sometimes negatively relates to other reputational qualities, limiting the interpretation of religiosity as only about signaling prosociality.