LAUSR

Abstract Using an online survey, this study examined 101 Latter-day Saint (LDS, or Mormon) emerging adults’ (M = 21.63 years, SD = 2.20, 43 male) judgments of and justifications for prototypical moral and conventional rules, religious and non-religious gendered social conventions, and gendered religious practices and their associations with religiosity and gender essentialism. Participants evaluated prototypical moral rules as most wrong to violate, unchangeable, and generalizable, based on moral justifications, whereas they viewed religious and non-religious gendered social conventions as more flexible, arbitrary, and under personal jurisdiction. Gendered religious practices were justified based on God's will and were judged as changeable by religious leaders and God; all other gendered rules were seen primarily as under personal jurisdiction; they were justified with conventional reasons more by females than males. Religiosity was highly correlated with essentialism and had a greater effect on combined judgments of gendered rules over and above effects of justifications.