Revising working models across time: Relationship situations that enhance attachment security

We propose the Attachment Security Enhancement Model (ASEM) to suggest how romantic relationships can promote chronic attachment security. One part of the ASEM examines partner responses that protect relationships from the erosive effects of immediate insecurity, but such responses may not necessarily address underlying insecurities in a person’s mental models. Therefore, a second part of the ASEM examines relationship situations that foster more secure mental models. Both parts may work in tandem. We posit that attachment anxiety should decline most in situations that foster greater personal confidence and more secure mental models of the self. In contrast, attachment avoidance should decline most in situations that involve positive dependence and foster more secure models of close others. The ASEM integrates research and theory, suggests novel directions for future research, and has practical implications, all of which center on the idea that adult attachment orientations are an emergent property of close relationships

Religion, parochialism and intuitive cooperation

Religions promote cooperation, but they can also be divisive. Is religious cooperation intuitively parochial against atheists? Evidence supporting the social heuristics hypothesis (SHH) suggests that cooperation is intuitive, independent of religious group identity. We tested this prediction in a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game, where 1,280 practising Christian believers were paired with either a coreligionist or an atheist and where time limits were used to increase reliance on either intuitive or deliberated decisions. We explored another dual-process account of cooperation, the self-control account (SCA), which suggests that visceral reactions tend to be selfish and that cooperation requires deliberation. We found evidence for religious parochialism but no support for SHH’s prediction of intuitive cooperation. Consistent with SCA but requiring confirmation in future studies, exploratory analyses showed that religious parochialism involves decision conflict and concern for strong reciprocity and that deliberation promotes cooperation independent of religious group identity