In the Jolly Heretic's video Why Mormons Are So Nice? he argues that nicer/kinder and more friendly and agreeable people are Mormon and choose LDS culture; while less agreeable and friendly people will choose to not be LDS or leave the LDS Church. He argues that many exmormons are likely less nice and agreeable compared to most Mormons. Here is the transcript provided by YouTube with my editing for ease of reading, starting about 6 minutes (words in bold for emphasis):
... one of the things that people always notice about Mormonism is that the people are so nice. They come across so nice and I wondered what is it, why would they be so nice ... such nice people. Well first of all it seems that they would be expected to be very high in the personality trait of openness. People who are high in openness tend to be trusting, ... in its early stages even when Joseph Smith was alive, Mormonism was highly evangelical and it sent lots and lots of missionaries over to the UK, to Wales, and Ireland and Scotts, and all kinds of port cities to convert people to Mormonism; and there was actually a point where there were considerably more Mormons in the UK than there were in America.
.... there's an element to which being trusting and thinking that other people are trusting is a part of being a nice person. So openness, the second thing that tends to predict migration is extraversion. So people that are prepared to take risks but also people who feel positive feelings strongly ... people who have a positive feeling strongly take risks and they take that risk in order to achieve the payoff; if you feel the positive feeling of your food or whatever it is strongly, you'll probably eat more food which is one of the reasons why extroverts tend to get fat and they have a lower life expectancy; but extroverts feel positive feelings strongly, they're amiable people and those would have been the kind of people that would have migrated from the UK. ... they would have been inclined to migrate again up to Utah, so they'll come across as nice people ... but even if they're not actually nice they'll come across as friendly engaging sort of people which Mormons do because they'll be high in extraversion as predicted by their ancestor's tendency to migrate ... remember these traits are somewhere in the region of at least 50% heritable if not perhaps as much as 70%.
So we've got so far people who are high in openness and thus trusting and kind on a certain level ... it's people who are high in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness; agreeableness is about empathy, about being kind to people, about wanting to be nice to people; that is the nature of religious people, there is a clear correlation with religious people who are more nice and Mormons are particularly religious; and there was a survey in I think about 2009 in the USA which asked people how religious they were and of the Mormons it was the highest category that stated they were very religious ... most Mormons in all these categories that said they were very religious. Most people in Utah said they were very religious, 61% I think, it was exceeded only by Mississippi. So they're very religious and this would predict being high in agreeableness, so again a nice person.
Then you have to ask, who leaves? And this is quite interesting because a lot of people are leaving Mormonism ... Utah was 75 percent Mormon, in the year 2000 it's now gone down to about 60% Mormon, and among Millennials it seems it's going to be about 44 percent; so it will lose its Mormon majority ... People are leaving the Mormon Church and they may well be leaving the Mormon Church because of the degree to which the Internet allows them to find out things about the Mormon Church ... So you can see how they're more likely to start doubting things and so Mormonism. This raises the question of who stays and who goes. Well we have interesting data on this [... it was] demonstrated that those who leave and those who stay in religious groups in which they're born, they are high in social competence; in other words they are high in agreeableness, those who convert to other religious groups those who have a conversion experience become religious, they are lower in agreeableness than those who are born into the religious group. So those who were born in, there's clearly a degree to which its genetic. Those who are born into it will be very high and agreeableness because they've never even had ancestors recently who weren't religious.
Those who aren't from Mormonism or some other religion and convert into it they are relatively high in agreeableness, but they're lower in agreeableness than those who were born into it. Those who are the lowest of all in agreeableness are those who are apostates. They are lower in agreeableness even than those who convert, they are the lowest in agreeableness of all. So it means that those who are coming into Mormonism are going to be relatively high in agreeableness, they're perhaps not as high as those who were born into it but those who are leaving are going to be low, they're gonna be low in agreeableness. In other words, nasty people leave. Every generation just by genetic chance, some Mormons will be born and there'll be not very nice people and those people are going to leave Mormonism. So this will again elevate the degree to which Mormons are nice people.
Then we have to look at who has children, now for a long time there was a lot of pressure among the Mormons, really until the 70s to not use contraception at all and a certain degree of that pressure remains. There are these ideas in Mormon teaching that you should have as many children as you can possibly afford, it's God's will for you to have massive families. Mormons are very family-oriented and in that way you can see why the religion would have been adaptive because the genes associated with being a Mormon would have spread throughout the country. In a context in which there is contraception in which contraception is increasingly allowed then we have data on this. ... [those] invested in nurture of course did better at nurture ... as you have to be a nicer person and once you then end up with groups that are competing with other groups then the group that is more internally cooperative but externally hostile [to outsiders and threats], we know from the computer models is the more likely to survive and so this is going to select for people who are basically increasingly nice ... Those are the people that have children because those who don't want to have children are those people that don't want to nurture, they just wanna have sex ... that concept means they can have all the sex they want and they don't have to have children they don't have to nurture ... it's gonna mean that the un-pleasant don't have so many children and the nicer Mormons have more children which will again elevate the level of agreeableness the level of niceness among the Mormons.
Another factor that you have in the Mormon Church is the correlation between education level and fertility, you don't get this normally. The more educated a person is the fewer children they tend to have, in Mormonism this is reversed; and it seems that the reason for this is that Mormonism preaches that you need to be self-sufficient, it preaches that you shouldn't rely on anybody else; it preaches that you shouldn't rely on the community and so if you were a genuinely believing Mormon then you will only have as many children as you can afford. In America if you are wealthier and and Mormon you are consequently able to afford more children. You'll want to have more children because God is telling you to have more children and it's considered a blessing from God. So you have this relationship between education and fertility, now what predicts education level or one of those things is intelligence, its IQ, IQ predicts education level at about 0.5 something like that overall education level.
Another predictor, it's actually a slightly higher predictor is conscientiousness, so having self-control (being the kind of person doesn't lose their temper and whatever), basically to a degree correlates to being a nice person. So it can be argued that the whole system again will elevate niceness among Mormons, [while] the less nice people as long as they are accepting of the religion and do as the religion dictates will have fewer children.
Another issue is people marry people who are genetically similar to them ... they're also psychologically very similar. Consider that ... we've got data on the high heritability of these different personality traits and it's on these that people that marry tend to be more similar. So what this means is they'll tend to get on very well. ... These people who get along really really well have really strong marriages. Now what this will give people at the environmental level of personality is a very safe background, of everything's gonna be okay, a background where you can trust, a background of love, a background that sets you up for a slow life history strategy that sets you up to trust people and be kind and basically just be a nice person.
As a Mormon you're not allowed to drink alcohol, you're not allowed to drink coffee, you're not allowed to drink tea, you're not allowed to have sex before marriage and there's so many other strictures, you're expected to tithe, you're expected to give huge amounts of time over to the church. There's lots and lots of social pressure to be extremely cooperative. Indeed it's absolutely fascinating, this will of course select out people who are not you know particularly high in conscientiousness, agreeableness. Though you'd imagine that if they simply wouldn't be able to cope with it they would become Jack Mormons. These are Mormons that are brought up in it but they don't tithe and they don't keep to the rules of the church and so they're not allowed to enter the temple because Mormons have these temples that you can get married in but you're only allowed to go there with a temple recommend which you can only get if you're considered a Mormon in good standing. So that would select out these disagreeable, less "nice" people, it will just remove them. So again it would elevate the degree to which Mormons are these very nice people because you have this signaling based religion.
There was some research ... which found some evidence that Mormons can kind of look identical and Mormons as well can identify other Mormons just from the face, a degree to which it would be impossible by chance. Now part of this could be genetic similarity as I said, I mean most of Utah is the most English state in the Union. There would be genetic signals of that and perhaps people would be able to kind of identify it but another factor apparently was the quality of the skin Mormons seem to have nicer skin than non-Mormons, healthier skin than non-Mormons, and so there's a degree to which you can't really fake it, if you drink coffee and drink alcohol in private people will kind of unconsciously know it and you will be kind of treated accordingly. So again this helps to explain and push out people who are less agreeable.
Another issue is the issue of what's called group selection ....the group which is more likely to survive is the group that is high in cooperation and impulse control, positive ethnocentrism, ... Mormons are high in positive ethnocentrism ... high ethnocentrism, in much the same way that the Japanese come across as very very nice people, very kind people, a bit suspicious of change, a bit suspicious; but they'll be very nice to you, they'll be very nice to you but if you trigger them to think they're under threat then they will go for you and you see this in the way that the Japanese treated enemy soldiers during World War 2. ...
Here are the sources and the data he draws from:
Sources
Apostate and Convert Personality: [What Drives Apostates and Converters? The Social and Familial Antecedents of Religious Change among Adolescents by Gregory S. Longo and Jungmeen Kim-Spoon]
Religion and Personality: Religion, Personality, and Social Behavior 1st Editionby Vassilis Saroglou
Hills, P., Francis, L. J., Argyle, M. & Jackson, C. (2004). Primary personality trait correlates of religious practice and orientation. Personality and Individual Differences, 36: 61-73.
Who breeds? Slow and Steady Wins the Race: K Positively Predicts Fertility in the USA and Sweden June 2017 Evolutionary Psychological Science 3(2) DOI:10.1007/s40806-016-0077-1.
Blume, M. (2009). The reproductive benefits of religious affiliation. In E. Voland & W. Schiefenhövel (Eds). The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior. New York: Springer.
Mormon Religiousness: Gallup. (2009): Mormons most conservative major religious group in the US.
Stark, R. (2005). The Rise of Mormonism. New York: Columbia University Press.
From this perspective, LDS culture seems to retain within it the more altruistic “nice” traits, the Christian attributes of civility, kindness and charity, etc.
Also see Jacob Hansen's Is the Church Good? - Fruits of the Gospel, where Hansen relies on several polls and studies showing that LDS culture is a healthy culture and Mormonism is good.
