The Marrying Kind: Born or Made?

Photo by two stout monks

WOMEN have long been saddled with the onus of “civilizing men.”

According to studies of varying reliability, once under the womanly wing of matrimony, men work more, make more money, go to church more, eat more healthily and drink less unhealthily. Sociologists refer to this as “the marriage effect.”

But there has long been a niggling question: Is marriage responsible for turning the beastly male into a well-behaved husband? Or are the upstanding men the ones who marry in the first place? The debate is between selection bias (men who marry are not misbehavers) and causation (married men don’t misbehave). According to a new study from Michigan State University, the answer is a bit of both.

Read more about it in the NYT here.