Control, God and the University of Miami
December 31, 2008
Jewish Living
(2 comments)
by dcc
There was a very interesting piece in the New York Times Science section this week about religion. A researcher from the University of Miami found that true believers have better self-control. In keeping with the findings of this study, I will not re-write the article but only give you a taste; I am controlling my bombastic desire to be bearer of news and information.
[The researcher's] interest arose from a desire to understand why religion evolved and why it seems to help so many people. Researchers around the world have repeatedly found that devoutly religious people tend to do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and be generally happier.
These results have been ascribed to the rules imposed on believers and to the social support they receive from fellow worshipers, but these external factors didn't account for all the benefits. In the new paper, the Miami psychologists surveyed the literature to test the proposition that religion gives people internal strength.
"We simply asked if there was good evidence that people who are more religious have more self-control," Dr. McCullough. "For a long time it wasn't cool for social scientists to study religion, but some researchers were quietly chugging along for decades. When you add it all up, it turns out there are remarkably consistent findings that religiosity correlates with higher self-control."
If you ask me it is pretty cool. Read the rest here.
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I'm surprised this interesting post and the article behind it haven't occasioned any commentary from the Reform blogosphere. Can it be that self-control is the last thing on our minds as we observe the most Dionysian days of the secular year?
Might I suggest that the examples of self control among the "religious," and the outcomes the authors posit, relate to an underlying belief that there is something out there bigger than the individual? Whether we see religion as a structure for relating to the community or to the divine, the common thread is not living for ourselves alone.