Dr Piss Off

India Got Rich. God Got a Price List.

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR

As India got rich, the wealthy didn't start praying more — they started paying more, and devotion acquired a price tag.

Survey religiosity is flat across income and education, but religious spending rises faster than income does.
The standard instruments were built for congregational worship, so they can't see practice that is bought, elaborated and displayed.
Once access is priced, the one institution that ignored your rank becomes another queue money moves you up.

Your prayers didn't change. Your receipts did.

There is a counter at Tirupati where you can pay to skip the line to see God.

Sit with that. Not a metaphor, not an exaggeration — an actual, official, priced service. The poor stand for twelve hours. You pay, and you don't. Same deity. Same blessing, presumably. Different queue.

Nobody riots about this. It's normal. It's on the website.

And that, more than any statistic I'm about to throw at you, is the story.

India got rich. The temples got richer.

Here's what was supposed to happen to India.

Every theory of modernisation, from Weber onwards, predicted the same arc: countries get richer, people get educated, cities grow, and religion quietly loosens its grip. It happened in Britain. It happened across Western Europe. It happened, more slowly and messily, in America. Wealth buys you security, security kills the terror that religion was answering, and the temples empty out.

India got the wealth. The temples did not empty out.

"Donation Box, jagannath temple" by Abha S Pradhan, released into the public domain by the author.

The numbers behind the boom

Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams took in over ₹918 crore in direct donations in a single year. Digital donations overtook the physical counters for the first time — people are now tapping their phones to give to God. The temple trust's assets run into the lakhs of crores. India's religious and spiritual sector is a market that commercial analysts size in the tens of billions of dollars and project to double within a decade.

Meanwhile a single family wedding in 2024 carried cost estimates running from a few hundred million dollars into the billions, depending on which outlet you believed — most of that spend wrapped around ritual.

So: booming economy, booming religion. Weber was wrong about India, right?

Not quite. Because here's the part that breaks the story.

Rich Indians don't pray more — they pay more

When Pew surveyed nearly 30,000 Indians, they found something odd: the rich and educated aren't the ones driving India's religiosity.

What the surveys actually found

Religion is enormously important here — 84% say it's very important in their lives. But the rich and educated aren't the ones driving it. College graduates say religion is very important at 80%; people with less education, 85%. Basically flat. And the wealthiest, best-educated region — the South — is the least religious in the country: 69% versus 92% in central India.

So on every measure we normally use for religiousness — do you pray daily, do you visit a temple, does faith matter to you — getting richer in India does almost nothing. Sometimes slightly less.

But the money says something completely different.

Why economists call it a luxury good

Household data shows religious spending rising steadily with income. Economists who lump "social and religious obligations" into a basket of conspicuous consumption find that basket behaves like a luxury good — spending on it rises faster than income does. That's the technical signature of a Rolex, not a roti.

Want the receipts? The elasticity estimates, the sample sizes and the two caveats that cut against them are in Status-Redirected Religiosity.

Put the two findings side by side and the picture resolves.

Wealth in India doesn't make you pray more. It makes you spend more on being seen praying.

Our surveys were built for church, so they missed it

Part of why nobody caught this earlier is embarrassingly simple: our instruments were built for the wrong religion.

The Bihar experiment: 90% versus 16%

A political scientist ran a neat experiment in Bihar. Ask Hindus a multiple-choice question about temple attendance, and over 90% tick the box. Ask them open-endedly what they actually do as religious practice, and only 16% mention going to the temple at all. What they volunteer instead is puja at home, festivals, the thread on the wrist, the sindoor, what's eaten and what isn't, what's auspicious and what's polluting.

Our surveys were designed around Sunday church — attendance, belief, weekly worship. Hinduism doesn't run on belief and attendance. It runs on practice. And practice can be bought, elaborated, upgraded, and displayed in a way that private belief never can.

Which means a wealthy Indian can score identically to a farmer on every religiosity question ever written, while donating a hundred times more, flying to four pilgrimages a year, and retaining a personal priest. The survey sees two equally religious men. Reality sees something else entirely.

The money buys position, not salvation

Not salvation. Salvation was always free — that was the entire point.

What money buys is position.

Weber, who everyone quotes and almost nobody reads properly, drew a distinction that matters here. There's class — what your money gets you in the market. And there's status — the honour, the standing, the deference you command socially. He noticed that status communities are often hostile to raw money, precisely because they need something money can't obviously buy.

Religion in India has become a machine for converting the first into the second. Cash in, honour out. The donation plaque with your family name. The seat at the front. The guru who takes your call. The wedding ritual so elaborate it takes four days and an event manager. None of this makes you closer to God. All of it makes you closer to the top.

And there's a name for this from long before liberalisation. The sociologist M. N. Srinivas called it Sanskritisation — the pattern where a community that rises economically starts adopting stricter, more orthodox, more "pure" religious practice to convert that new wealth into social respectability. Give up meat. Give up alcohol. Take on the rituals of the castes above you.

Sanskritisation has been running for a century. The new money just gave it a bigger budget.

It is the oldest status machine India has, and liberalisation didn't invent it. It refinanced it.

This spending looks like insurance, not serenity

Here's the question I can't get past.

Prosperity in the West loosened religion's grip because it delivered something specific: security. When the state catches you, when medicine works, when your children reliably survive, the existential terror that faith was managing recedes, and the practice thins out.

India's elite got the prosperity. They did not, apparently, get the security.

Because look at what the spending actually resembles. It doesn't look like serenity. It looks like insurance. Escalating, competitive, publicly-visible insurance — against uncertainty, against status loss, against the suspicion that the money might vanish as quickly as it came. You don't buy priority access to the divine if you feel safe.

That's not a spiritual civilisation flourishing. That's an anxious one, with better credit.

A priced queue turns a levelling institution into a stratifying one

I'm not interested in whether any individual believer is sincere. I have no way of knowing and neither does anyone else, and the people claiming otherwise are usually selling something themselves.

What I'm condemning is a system — one that has learned to sell status back to us and call it devotion.

Because here's what a temple is supposed to be. It's supposed to be the one building in India where the queue doesn't care who your father is. Where the accountant and the auto driver stand in the same line for the same darshan, and the only currency is showing up. In a country that invented caste, that is not a small thing. That is arguably the most radical thing about the whole tradition.

And we sold it. For a convenience fee.

Every paid queue, every VIP entry, every donation tier that buys visibility, takes the one institution that flattened hierarchy and turns it into another instrument for enforcing it. We took the ladder out of the temple and then put a bigger one back in.

The society that holds itself back isn't the one that prays. It's the one that has quietly agreed that even God can be reached faster with money.

Want to check my work? The full theory — named, formalised, with the data, the competing explanations and the places I might be wrong — is written up in Status-Redirected Religiosity.

Image credits

Hero: "A View of Tirumala Venkateswara Temple" by Adityamadhav83, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized from the original; this adaptation is shared under the same licence.
Donation box: "Donation Box, jagannath temple" by Abha S Pradhan, released into the public domain by the author, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized from the original.
Kumbh Mela: "Kumbh Mela 2019, January 15 - March 4" by Ninara, licensed under CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized from the original.
Mumbai skyline: "Mumbai, India, Bombay, Mumbai city skyline at night" by Vyacheslav Argenberg (© Vyacheslav Argenberg), licensed under CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized from the original.

Status-Redirected Religiosity

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR

Where religion carries high social value and status is scarce relative to wealth, rising income doesn't extinguish religiosity — it redirects it from private observance into conspicuous, purchasable display.

India's flat religiosity gradient is partly artefactual — the standard instruments were built for congregational Abrahamic worship.
Change the measure to expenditure and the income gradient appears.
SRR is a claim about social function, not individual sincerity, and the sincerity question is empirically inaccessible.

A theoretical proposal, with evidence, competing explanations, and the conditions under which it should be rejected.

This is the technical companion to India Got Rich. God Got a Price List. — same argument, written for anyone who wants to check the work.

Abstract

Modernisation theory predicts that rising socioeconomic status (SES) erodes religiosity. This holds across much of the West but fails in India, where prosperity has coincided with intensifying religious expression. I propose that the anomaly is partly artefactual and partly real. The artefactual component is measurement: standard religiosity instruments, derived from congregational Abrahamic traditions, index belief salience and attendance, and are largely insensitive to the orthopraxic and expenditure-based forms through which Hindu religiosity is enacted. The real component is functional: where religion carries high social value, rising SES does not extinguish religiosity but redirects it from private observance toward conspicuous, status-bearing expression. I term this Status-Redirected Religiosity (SRR). The Western secularisation gradient and the Indian non-gradient are, on this account, the same underlying process — the exchange of religious participation for existential security — operating in two different status economies. Critically, SRR is a claim about social function, not about individual sincerity, and I argue that the sincerity question is empirically inaccessible and should be abandoned.

1. Prosperity secularised the West but not India

Norris and Inglehart (2011) established that religiosity declines as existential security rises: populations insulated from material and physical threat participate less. The mechanism is security, not knowledge. This distinction matters, because the popular alternative — that education erodes faith through cognitive sophistication — is poorly supported.

Why the "education erodes faith" account doesn't hold

Glaeser and Sacerdote (2008) found that in the United States education raises attendance while lowering belief intensity; Schwadel (2011) reported education raising involvement while reducing literalism; and the flagship experimental demonstration that analytic thinking promotes disbelief (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012) failed a large preregistered direct replication (Sanchez, Sundermeier, Gray, & Calin-Jageman, 2017). Any theory resting on "enlightenment through learning" is resting on sand.

India presents the anomaly. Pew Research Center (2021), surveying 29,999 adults, found religiosity near-universal (84% rating religion very important) with a negligible education gradient (80% among college graduates versus 85% among the less educated). Meanwhile Nanda (2009) documented an intensification of middle-class and elite Hindu practice across the liberalisation period, and CSDS/Lokniti surveys have repeatedly recorded net self-reported increases in religiosity concentrated in urban and educated segments.

Prosperity arrived. Secularisation did not.

2. Standard instruments can't see how Hindu religiosity is enacted

The first component of the explanation is instrumental. Verghese (2020) randomised closed- versus open-ended religiosity questioning among Hindus in Bihar. Under closed-ended formats over 90% reported temple attendance; under open-ended questioning only 16% volunteered temple-going as a religious practice at all. What respondents named instead was domestic puja, festival observance, ritual dress, and purity and auspiciousness norms.

This is the orthopraxy–orthodoxy distinction (Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997, on the ethic of divinity). Hinduism is practice-centred and largely non-congregational. Instruments built around belief salience and weekly attendance therefore lack construct validity in this context, and cross-national religiosity comparisons involving India face an unresolved measurement-invariance problem.

The practical consequence is decisive for the present theory. If elite religiosity is enacted through expenditure and ritual elaboration rather than through prayer frequency, a flat self-report gradient is precisely what SRR predicts — it is confirmatory, not disconfirmatory.

3. Change the instrument and the income gradient appears

When the instrument changes, the gradient appears. Lakshmanasamy (2024), using NSSO 68th-round data (2011–12; N = 101,651 households, 9,914 reporting positive religious expenditure), found household income positively and significantly associated with religious expenditure across every religious and caste grouping, with education showing a small negative effect. Mitra and Mukherji (2024), using CMIE Consumer Pyramids data (approximately 204,000 households, 2014–2019), estimated an income elasticity of approximately 1.74 for a conspicuous-consumption basket that explicitly includes social and religious obligations — the signature of a luxury good, against 0.62 for food and 0.78 for education.

Institutional data corroborate. Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams recorded over ₹918 crore in direct donations in the year to October 2025, with digital channels overtaking physical counters. Priority-darshan schemes monetise access at major temples. Commercial estimates place India's religious and spiritual market in the tens of billions of dollars with sustained growth.

Two caveats that cut against the expenditure evidence

Lakshmanasamy's specification regresses expenditure levels on log income, yielding a marginal effect rather than a clean elasticity; it establishes direction, not luxury status. And Mitra and Mukherji find that the religious sub-component of their basket takes a larger budget share among poorer quartiles, consistent with Banerjee and Duflo's documentation of heavy festival spending among the poor. Religious expenditure rises with income in absolute terms; it is not exclusively an elite phenomenon in proportional terms.

4. Where honour is scarce, religious spending converts wealth into standing

Why should prosperity redirect rather than extinguish religiosity in this setting? Five components, in short: status is a scarce good wealth cannot buy directly; visible religiosity pays best where religion is most valued; costly display is hard to fake; the pattern has a century-old precedent in Sanskritisation; and security, not wealth, is what secularises.

The mechanism in full: status, self-enhancement, signalling, Sanskritisation, security

Status versus class. Weber (1922/1946) distinguished class, determined by market position, from status group (Stand), constituted by social honour, lifestyle, and closure — and treated caste as the limiting case of status closure. Where honour is a scarce good not automatically conferred by wealth, actors require a conversion mechanism. Religious expenditure is such a mechanism: it converts liquid capital into publicly legible standing.

Self-enhancement conditioned on cultural value. Gebauer, Sedikides, and Neberich (2012) demonstrated that the self-esteem benefits of religiosity are moderated by the social value a culture places on religion, being strongest in highly religious contexts. India is among the most religious societies measured. The psychological return on visible religiosity is therefore high, and rises with the audience's capacity to recognise the display.

Costly signalling. Sosis and Alcorta (2003) established that hard-to-fake religious displays signal commitment and secure in-group standing. Large donations, elaborate ritual, and pilgrimage are costly precisely in proportion to their signalling value.

Sanskritisation. Srinivas (1966) described upwardly mobile groups adopting more orthodox practice — vegetarianism, teetotalism, Sanskritic deities — to convert economic ascent into ritual standing. SRR is, in one reading, Sanskritisation with a liberalisation-era budget and an individual rather than caste-level unit of analysis.

The security account, applied symmetrically. Norris and Inglehart's mechanism is not wealth but security. Indian elites acquired wealth within an environment of persistent volatility — institutional, economic, and positional. The prediction follows directly: where prosperity does not deliver security, it does not deliver secularisation, and the religiosity that remains will be oriented toward the insecurity that persists. In a status-competitive society, that insecurity is substantially positional. Hence redirection toward display.

5. Formal statement

Status-Redirected Religiosity (SRR). Where religion carries high cultural value and status is scarce relative to wealth, increases in SES produce no reduction in religiosity as conventionally measured, but a reallocation of religious behaviour from private observance toward conspicuous, expenditure-intensive, publicly legible forms. The magnitude of redirection is a function of (a) the social value placed on religiosity, (b) the availability of alternative status-conversion mechanisms, and (c) residual existential and positional insecurity.

The Western case is then not a contrast but a boundary condition: where religion's social value has fallen and secular status-conversion mechanisms are abundant, rising SES produces exit rather than redirection.

6. Five predictions, one of them decisive

Within India, SES will predict religious expenditure and ritual elaboration positively while predicting prayer frequency and belief salience negligibly. (Partially supported; Lakshmanasamy, 2024.)
Religious expenditure will be disproportionately allocated to observable forms (donation with attribution, public ritual, pilgrimage) over unobservable ones, and the ratio will rise with SES. Untested — this is the sharpest available test.
Measures of positional insecurity and status concern will predict conspicuous religious expenditure, controlling for devotional self-report.
Experimental manipulation of audience visibility will increase intended religious donation more strongly among high-SES Indian participants than low-SES or Western comparison samples.
Where secular status-conversion mechanisms are dense (e.g., professional credentialling in metropolitan South India), redirection will be weaker — consistent with the observed Southern gradient (69% versus 92%).

7. SRR says nothing about sincerity — and controlling for status would break the test

It makes no claim about sincerity. The proposition that high-SES religiosity is "only" status-driven and "not spiritual" is empirically inaccessible. Aggregate behavioural and expenditure data cannot adjudicate interior states, and function does not imply insincerity: a practice may deliver status returns to a wholly sincere practitioner. SRR is a claim about what religiosity does socially, not about what believers feel.

The over-controlling trap, and why prediction 3 can't be tested yet

A tempting analysis that must be avoided. One might propose to regress religiosity on SES while controlling for insecurity and reputational motive, and interpret an attenuated coefficient as revealing "true" residual religiosity — with the Western pattern as the counterfactual. This is invalid. If status and insecurity are the mediating mechanism, conditioning on them removes the very pathway under investigation; the resulting estimate is not a counterfactual but a mis-specified direct effect, and inference from it would be a textbook case of over-controlling for a mediator. The appropriate design is mediation analysis with the mediators measured, not partialled out — and no Indian dataset currently measures status motive and religiosity jointly. Prediction 3 above cannot presently be tested. This is a gap to be stated, not filled by assertion.

8. Four rival explanations SRR does not yet beat

SRR must outcompete at least four alternatives, and does not yet clearly do so: religious nationalism, urbanisation, supply-side professionalisation, and simple co-occurrence.

The four competing explanations in full

Religious nationalism. Intensified Hindu practice coincides with Hindutva's political ascendancy. Nanda (2009) herself frames the phenomenon as a state–temple–corporate formation. Period effects are confounded with SES effects.
Urbanisation and anomie. Migration to cities generates demand for community and identity anchors independent of income.
Supply-side professionalisation. Religious organisations have marketed systematically to a middle-class consumer base; observed demand may be partly manufactured.
Simple co-occurrence. Religiosity rose during a period in which SES rose. Absent individual-level panel data, "rises with SES" is not established over "rose alongside SES."

The decisive missing evidence: no panel, cohort, or natural-experiment study tracks individual Indians' religiosity as their SES changes. The India Human Development Survey is a genuine panel but contains no religiosity-intensity measure — only affiliation and a single religious-group-membership item. The temporal claim is therefore plausible and multiply consistent, but not causally established, and should be stated as such.

9. The critique targets the apparatus, not the believers

The analytical claim is descriptive; the critique it supports is not.

A tradition whose ritual centres historically flattened social distinction — where the queue for darshan was indifferent to lineage — has developed institutional mechanisms for reintroducing that distinction at a price. Priority access, tiered donation visibility, and the ritual arms race in life-cycle ceremony convert a levelling institution into a stratifying one. The object of criticism is the institutional apparatus that monetises religious standing, not the believers who navigate it, and certainly not the tradition itself. Where devotion becomes purchasable, the poor lose the one arena in which their standing was not a function of their means.

References

Banerjee, A. V., & Duflo, E. (2007). The economic lives of the poor. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21(1), 141–167. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.21.1.141

Gebauer, J. E., Sedikides, C., & Neberich, W. (2012). Religiosity, social self-esteem, and psychological adjustment: On the cross-cultural specificity of the psychological benefits of religiosity. Psychological Science, 23(12), 1500–1507. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611427045

Gervais, W. M., & Norenzayan, A. (2012). Analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief. Science, 336(6080), 493–496. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1215647

Glaeser, E. L., & Sacerdote, B. I. (2008). Education and religion. Journal of Human Capital, 2(2), 188–215. https://doi.org/10.1086/590413

Lakshmanasamy, T. (2024). Religiosity in India: Censored regression estimation of household religious expenditure. Society and Culture Development in India, 4(1), 205–221.

Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98(2), 224–253. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.98.2.224

Mitra, S., & Mukherji, A. (2024). Class, caste and conspicuous consumption in India (MPRA Paper No. 121824). Munich Personal RePEc Archive.

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Nanda, M. (2009). The God market: How globalization is making India more Hindu. Random House India.

Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2011). Sacred and secular: Religion and politics worldwide (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

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Sanchez, C., Sundermeier, B., Gray, K., & Calin-Jageman, R. J. (2017). Direct replication of Gervais & Norenzayan (2012): No evidence that analytic thinking decreases religious belief. PLoS ONE, 12(2), e0172636. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0172636

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Shweder, R. A., Much, N. C., Mahapatra, M., & Park, L. (1997). The "big three" of morality (autonomy, community, divinity) and the "big three" explanations of suffering. In A. M. Brandt & P. Rozin (Eds.), Morality and health (pp. 119–169). Routledge.

Sosis, R., & Alcorta, C. (2003). Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: The evolution of religious behavior. Evolutionary Anthropology, 12(6), 264–274. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.10120

Srinivas, M. N. (1966). Social change in modern India. University of California Press.

Vail, K. E., III, Rothschild, Z. K., Weise, D. R., Solomon, S., Pyszczynski, T., & Greenberg, J. (2010). A terror management analysis of the psychological functions of religion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(1), 84–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868309351165

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Image credit

Hero: "Max Weber, 1918" by Ernst Gottmann (1874–1932). Public domain — the author died in 1932 and the work was published before 1931 — via Wikimedia Commons. Reproduced unmodified.

About the author

Psychology enthusiast and human-condition student, obsessed with the science behind why people do what they do — in love, culture, and everywhere in between.

Every theory on this blog is 100% mine — gaps in the research I've found through my ongoing formal study of Psychology, built on the back of prominent, published theories, not invented from thin air. AI helps me draft, refine and research these ideas further, but the theories themselves are entirely my own.

The goal: make you more self-aware, call out the misconceptions your culture and upbringing sold you as "just how things are," and remind you that whatever you're wrestling with, it's the shared human condition — you're not the only one in it. No BS, just the research.

Outside this blog, I'm an entrepreneur and co-founder of Nexist, where our mission is simple: guard the dream, because no founder building something real should have to do it alone.

Bollywood Has Been Telling You the Truth About Love — But With a Twist…

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR

Bollywood's over-the-top romance isn't bad taste — it's a commitment signal, turned up loud for an audience whose real relationships rarely allow it.

Passionate love intensifies where partners are easy to lose — researchers call that relational mobility.
A 39-country study ties the pattern to social structure, not wealth, values or geography.
Where family and community shape real life, the screen is where autonomy-driven love gets to exist at full volume.

Every rain-drenched confession, every airport sprint, every three-minute ballad about love that "cannot be controlled" — turns out it's not just melodrama. It's a survival strategy, and researchers can show their work.

Read the full post →

Why We Love Differently: What Psychology Says About Culture, Commitment, and the Meaning of "Passionate"

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR

How loudly a culture expects love to be proved tracks how easily people can leave a relationship — not whether the culture is individualist or collectivist.

People in high-mobility societies report more passionate love, not less — the opposite of what the values account predicts.
Passionate love works as a costly, hard-to-fake commitment signal in a market where partners are replaceable.
Self-construal and ideal affect then decide what that signal looks like — declared and high-arousal, or quiet and anticipatory.

Picture two ordinary scenes.

In Mumbai, a Bollywood hero stands in the rain, professing his love with the kind of unfiltered, all-consuming intensity that would look almost deranged in a real living room. The film sells out. In Melbourne, a young couple argues — not because either of them has done anything wrong, but because one of them keeps buying surprise gifts and saying "I love you" three times a day, and the other can't understand why that's necessary when they already do the dishes without being asked.

Different continents, different conflicts, same underlying question: what actually counts as love, and why does it look so different depending on where you're standing?

For a long time, psychology's answer was cultural values — the old individualism-versus-collectivism story. Western cultures prize the self; Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern cultures prize the group. Case closed.

Except the data doesn't cooperate. Repeatedly, cross-cultural studies have found that people in "individualistic" societies like the United States and Australia report more passionate love, more self-disclosure, and more active emotional investment in their relationships than people in "collectivistic" societies — the ones supposedly built around connection and belonging. That's backwards. If collectivist cultures are the relationship-oriented ones, why are individualists the ones falling head over heels?

The answer isn't about values at all. It's about math — specifically, the math of how easy it is to lose someone.

Relational mobility, not values, resolves the paradox

The theory that resolves this puzzle is called relational mobility (Yuki & Schug, 2020; Thomson et al., 2018), and once you see it, you can't unsee it in your own relationships.

Relational mobility describes how much freedom a society gives people to choose, and walk away from, their relationships. In high-mobility societies — North America, Western Europe, Australasia, Latin America — people meet new people constantly, relationships are voluntary, and if a friendship or romance stops working, you leave and find another one. It's an open market.

In low-mobility societies — East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East — relationships are far more fixed. You keep the same social circle for years, often for life. Family, community, and workplace ties are sticky, not swappable. You don't audition new best friends the way you might in a large Western city; you work with the people you're already connected to.

Here's the twist: these two environments don't just produce different relationship styles. They produce entirely different adaptive problems, and completely different tools for solving them — including apparently universal emotions like love.

Passionate love is a costly commitment signal

In a high relational-mobility environment, your biggest relational risk is that someone better will come along and take your partner. Economists would call this a liquid market with lots of competing buyers. So what's the adaptive move? You signal, loudly and unmistakably, that you are committed — so your partner doesn't wander, and so rivals know the position is filled.

The study behind the commitment-signal claim

This is where a study by Yamada, Kito, and Yuki (2017) gets interesting. They found that passionate love — the all-consuming, can't-think-about-anything-else kind — is more intensely felt in high-mobility societies, and that the intensity tracks how replaceable people perceive their relationships to be. Passionate love isn't just an emotion that happens to you. Following economist Robert Frank's classic theory of commitment (1988), it functions as a costly, hard-to-fake signal: it directs your attention and your helping behavior exclusively toward one partner, which is exactly the kind of signal a partner needs to feel secure when better options are, in principle, one swipe away.

The gift-giving evidence

A companion study on gift-giving (Komiya et al., 2019) found the same logic playing out in something as mundane as presents. Married couples in the United States — a high-mobility country with a comparatively high divorce rate — gave each other gifts more frequently than couples in Japan. And within Japan, people who had more varied social opportunities (more chances to meet new people) also gave more gifts. Gift-giving, like passionate declarations of love, is a proactive proof-of-commitment strategy for a world where partners can leave.

Flip the environment, and the whole logic inverts. In low-mobility societies, your partner isn't going anywhere — and neither are you, easily. The risk isn't abandonment; it's being stuck in a low-quality relationship, or damaging your standing within a social network you can't exit. So the adaptive strategy shifts from loud proof of commitment to quiet avoidance of harm: don't rock the boat, don't over-disclose, maintain harmony. Not because people there feel less deeply, but because the environment is rewarding an entirely different behavior.

This is the theory behind that Bollywood rain scene, too, if you want to push it further: in societies where relationships are otherwise fixed and constrained by family and community expectation, wildly passionate, autonomy-driven love in film and pop culture can function as escapism — a vicarious taste of a freedom of choice that the real social world doesn't actually offer. The same theory that explains why Americans report more passionate love than Japanese couples also offers a lens on why passionate love is such compelling entertainment precisely in places where it's hardest to enact.

(Curious how this plays out specifically in Bollywood? We wrote a whole piece on that.)

Self-construal and ideal affect decide what the signal looks like

Relational mobility explains how much commitment-signaling a culture rewards. It doesn't fully explain what form that signal takes — and this is where a second body of research fills the gap, and where a lot of real intercultural relationship friction actually lives.

Self-construal theory (Markus & Kitayama, 1991) is the foundational idea here. People raised in independent, individualist cultural contexts tend to construe themselves as separate, bounded agents whose traits and choices define them; commitment gets expressed through explicit, individual acts — saying it out loud, buying the gift, planning the surprise. People raised in interdependent contexts construe themselves more relationally — defined through their roles and connections to others; commitment gets expressed through attentiveness, anticipating needs, and quietly fulfilling one's role, without needing to announce it.

Layer on affect valuation theory (Tsai, 2007) and the picture sharpens further. Tsai's research shows that cultures don't just differ in which emotions they value — they differ in the ideal intensity of positive emotion itself. Western, independent cultural contexts tend to idealize high-arousal positive states: excitement, enthusiasm, exuberance. East Asian, interdependent cultural contexts more often idealize low-arousal positive states: calm, contentment, peacefulness. Neither is "more positive" than the other — they're different targets.

Put these two theories together and you get a strikingly precise explanation for exactly the kind of conflict in that Melbourne apartment. One partner expresses commitment through verbal enthusiasm and grand, explicit gestures — an independent, high-arousal script. The other expresses it through quiet, competent, anticipatory care — an interdependent, low-arousal script. Both are demonstrating real commitment. Neither is lying, withholding, or under-invested. They are simply running different cultural software for what "proof of love" is supposed to look like — and without a name for the mismatch, it's easy for the demonstrative partner to read quiet care as coldness, and for the quiet partner to read repeated verbal reassurance-seeking as insecurity or performative excess.

The mismatch is a script difference, not an incompatibility

It would be easy to file all this under "interesting trivia about love." But the practical stakes are broader than romance — and in each case the fix is recognition, not conversion.

Where this shows up outside romance

For intercultural couples and families, simply having language for the mismatch — "we're not incompatible, we're running different commitment scripts" — tends to defuse a huge amount of unnecessary conflict. The fix usually isn't for one partner to become the other; it's for both to learn to recognize the other's signal as sincere, even when it doesn't match their own instinctive read of what love should look like.

For anyone living, working, or building relationships across cultures — expats, exchange students, international teams — the same logic extends past romance into friendship and even professional trust-building. Someone from a high-mobility background may read reserved, businesslike interactions as a lack of interest in becoming friends, when the actual local norm is "we don't over-disclose until real trust is earned, because unlike where you're from, we can't just quietly drift apart if it goes badly."

For anyone building products, brands, or messaging across markets, the same principle applies at a less personal level: what reads as sincere, trustworthy commitment in one cultural context (explicit, frequent, enthusiastic communication) can read as excessive or suspicious in another (where understated reliability is the trust signal), and vice versa.

Love is an adaptive strategy shaped by how easily you can lose someone

Love, it turns out, isn't one universal feeling wearing different cultural costumes. It's an adaptive strategy that gets shaped by a very concrete, very measurable feature of your social environment: how easy it is, in practice, to lose the people you care about — and how loudly your culture has taught you that commitment needs to be proven once you have them.

That's a more useful idea than it sounds. It means the next time someone's way of showing they care looks nothing like your own, the right question probably isn't "do they really love me?" It's "what environment taught them that this is what love looks like?"

References

Yuki, M., & Schug, J. (2020). Psychological consequences of relational mobility. Current Opinion in Psychology, 32, 129–132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.07.029
Yamada, J., Kito, M., & Yuki, M. (2017). Passion, relational mobility, and proof of commitment: A comparative socio-ecological analysis of an adaptive emotion in a sexual market. Evolutionary Psychology, 15(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/1474704917746056
Frank, R. H. (1988). Passions within reason: The strategic role of the emotions. W. W. Norton.
Komiya, A., Ohtsubo, Y., Nakanishi, D., & Oishi, S. (2019). Gift-giving in romantic couples serves as a commitment signal: Relational mobility is associated with more frequent gift-giving. Evolution and Human Behavior, 40(2), 160–166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.10.003
Thomson, R., Yuki, M., Talhelm, T., Schug, J., Kito, M., Ayanian, A. H., et al. (2018). Relational mobility predicts social behaviors in 39 countries and is tied to historical farming and threat. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(29), 7521–7526. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1713191115
Kito, M., Yuki, M., & Thomson, R. (2017). Relational mobility and close relationships: A socioecological approach to explain cross-cultural differences. Personal Relationships, 24(1), 114–130. https://doi.org/10.1111/pere.12174
Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98(2), 224–253.
Tsai, J. L. (2007). Ideal affect: Cultural causes and behavioral consequences. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(3), 242–259.