Maternal religiosity and social support to mothers: Helpers’ religious identity matters

Research demonstrates that religious people are trusted more, receiveand provide more cooperation, and have larger cooperative networks.This line of research also suggests, that religious prosociality is notalways parochial, and often extends to people outside of a religiousingroup. Here, we test whether the intensity of religious practiceassociates with received support from coreligionists and/or non-coreligionists among a sample of American mothers. Specifically, wetest the association between self-reported behavioral religiosity ofreligious (here Christian) and non-religious mothers from the GreaterPittsburgh area, USA, and the frequency of emotional support (Nmothers= 517, Nsupporters = 1999) and housework help (Nmothers = 447, Nsupporters= 997) they received from Christian and non-religious supporters. Wefound that maternal religiosity was positively associated with thefrequency of housework help received from Christian supporters, butnot from non-religious supporters. We did not find evidence for anassociation between maternal religiosity and emotional supportreceived from religious nor non-religious supporters. We interpret ourresults through the lens of religious signaling theory