Cross-cutting view
Marriage crosses family life, psychology, communication, religion, and personal commitments. This page preserves a useful Base view without competing with the canonical domain hierarchy.
Pinker’s Chapter 3 supplement — marriage, stable work, and desistance from crime
Pinker cites the long-running study by Robert Sampson and John Laub that followed about 1,000 low-income Boston boys for forty-five years. In his summary, roughly three-quarters of bachelors, versus one-third of husbands, continued offending. Because men who are already desisting may be more likely to marry, the researchers also used within-life comparisons and controls for factors associated with entry into marriage; Pinker reports that actual marriage was followed by lower offending. Stable work was the other major turning point.
The useful claim is not that a wedding ceremony mechanically reforms every man. Marriage can change routines, peer networks, supervision, obligations, identity, future stakes, and investment in children, while relationship quality and selection still matter. The evidence supports stable social bonds as one pathway to desistance, not a universal causal guarantee, a judgment of unmarried people, or proof that marriage should substitute for policing and opportunity.
Source boundary: this records Pinker’s 2011 summary of the Sampson–Laub–Wimer research; consult the underlying studies before reusing an effect size as a current estimate. Chapter 3 synthesis · Young-male concentration and frontier social ecology, PDF pp. 161–162 (file not included in this release) · Marriage, work, and later offending, PDF p. 163 (file not included in this release)
Henrich, Chapter 8 — monogamy changes a marriage market, not just a household
Henrich treats socially imposed monogamy as historically unusual. In his cross-cultural synthesis, most hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies permitted some polygyny; as inequality grew, high-status men could accumulate wives while some lower-status men remained unmarried. Aztec encounter and the cross-cultural marriage comparison, PDF pp. 261–268 (file not included in this release) · stylized marriage-market arithmetic, Figure 8.1, PDF p. 270 (file not included in this release)
His proposed mechanism is population-level: monogamy distributes marriage opportunities more broadly, redirects some status effort toward existing partners and children, and increases the share of men who experience the behavioral and hormonal shifts associated with pair-bonding and care. In a longitudinal Cebu cohort, testosterone fell most among men who married and became fathers. A study following 500 Massachusetts reform-school boys across adulthood found lower offending during marriage, especially good marriages, with offending rising after divorce or widowhood. These designs improve on simple married–unmarried comparisons but do not remove partner selection, relationship quality, or social context. Cebu testosterone trajectories, Figure 8.3, PDF pp. 276–278 (file not included in this release) · marriage and within-person desistance, PDF pp. 283–285 (file not included in this release)
The chapter is neither a claim that every unmarried man is dangerous nor a complete moral defense of enforced monogamy. Figure 8.1 is a stylized scenario; polygynous systems vary; testosterone calibrates status behavior rather than functioning as a crime switch; and adult choice, equality, consent, and harms within marriages require separate normative evaluation. variation and evidence qualifications, Chapter 8 endnotes, PDF pp. 562–570 (file not included in this release) · Chapter 8 source audit
Database View
Marriage.base (file not included in this release)