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Source: The Conversation – UK – By Benjamin Gardner, Professor in Psychology, University of Surrey

Reaching for our phones upon waking, standing in the same point on the station
platform, sneaking in a sweet treat after the evening meal – we all have habits that shape our lives.

But you may underestimate the power habits have in your life. Our new study shows that the majority of actions people take in a day are carried out on autopilot.

Habitual behaviour is made up of the things that we do without thinking, prompted by our environment and learned through repeated enactment. Encountering a familiar trigger – such as a sound, a location or another person – can activate a learned association, which in turn prompts a non-conscious impulse to act. The sound of your alarm clock, for example, may be enough to prompt you to reach for your phone, without consciously deciding to.

Habits can influence our behaviour in two ways. We can habitually initiate something – selecting a behaviour without much thought – or habitually do something, where the steps involved in a sequence are carried out at least partly on autopilot.

But just how much of our day-to-day lives are shaped by habit?

Our new study aimed to find out. We recruited 105 people, aged 18-73 years old, and sent prompts to their phones six times a day over one week. Each prompt asked four questions: what were they doing when we interrupted them? To what extent was that action initiated without conscious thought? To what extent was it performed automatically? And how much had they wanted to do it?

The most commonly reported behaviour types were working or studying, domestic or childcare activities, and using a screen-based device. More importantly, 65% of all actions were initiated out of habit. People chose to do them without making a conscious decision. And 88% of actions were performed on autopilot.

This suggests that around two-thirds of the decisions we make each day are automated, instead of driven by conscious deliberation.

However, this does not mean that we simply act mindlessly, without awareness or free will.

Around one in three actions in our study were intentional but not habitual. People had consciously chosen to do them, probably because the action or setting was unfamiliar, or because their habits were not strong enough to exert influence.

Crucially, 76% of all actions – including 67% of those actions initiated or performed out of habit – were things people intended to do. Habits develop when we repeatedly do things in certain settings. Several studies suggest that, with once-daily repetition, it takes around two months to form a habit. This ranges considerably though. One 2021 study found habit formation to take anywhere from four to 335 days.

Only two people (2%) in our study said they always acted intentionally and never out of habit. The vast majority said they were acting in line with intentions or habits, or both, at least some of the time. For each of us, there appears to be variation, across time, in whether we act habitually or intentionally, probably due to the natural ebb and flow of our attention and motivation.

We would not exert the effort needed to repeatedly do these actions if they served no purpose. Our habits and goals are therefore often aligned. We may reach for our phones automatically, but that can help us stay informed. We might instinctively stand in the same spot on the platform, but that may help us find a seat on the train.

Habits are adaptive. We have limited mental resources at any one time. If we had to deliberate over all our mundane decisions each day – like when to have a shower – we would have less capacity to focus on more important matters, like preparing for that big presentation later in the day.

In fact, deliberating over actions that are usually done habitually can backfire. One 2017 paper showed that, when people were incentivised to perform effectively, they tended to eschew their habits and engage in more mindful performance. Ironically, participants who chose to deliberate gave a poorer quality performance than those who acted habitually.

Habits are not, therefore, the enemy of free will. In fact, they can make life easier.

The downside of habits appears when they stop serving our goals. Bad habits push us towards choices that undermine what we really want. People who are trying to lose weight, for example, often struggle against long-standing eating habits that favour unhealthy options. Staying on track in these moments often requires strong, sustained willpower to resist the pull of old habits. When we are distracted, stressed or fatigued it is harder to counteract our bad habits. Even brief dips in motivation can prompt lapses into our old ways, kickstarting a chain of negative emotions, denting our confidence in our ability to change, and so unravelling our efforts to change our behaviour.

Effective ways to break bad habits include identifying and avoiding triggers to unwanted habits, and making unwanted behaviour harder to automatically activate. A habitual evening snacker might, for example, avoid going to the kitchen in the evening so that they aren’t tempted by the snack cupboard.

Our findings show that habits play a huge role in shaping our everyday lives, often helping us act efficiently. Understanding how habits work provides a powerful tool for behaviour change. Whether you are making a new routine or breaking an old one, recognising the triggers that drive your actions – and how you respond to them – can help you stay in control.

Amanda L. Rebar receives funding from the National Institute of Health (US), the Australian Research Council, and the National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia).

Benjamin Gardner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Most of your actions are driven by habit, not thought – here’s why that’s not a bad thing – https://theconversation.com/most-of-your-actions-are-driven-by-habit-not-thought-heres-why-thats-not-a-bad-thing-266277

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Johny Daniel, Associate Professor, School of Education, Durham University

Most pupils who go through the lengthy process of being identified with dyslexia, autism or another condition end up spending the bulk of their time supported not by a trained specialist teacher but by a teaching assistant.

Teaching assistants work with great dedication, but they are not equipped with the specialist training needed to teach children with special educational needs and disabilities effectively. The result is that pupils too often fall further behind, despite the system recognising their needs.

Later this year, the UK government will publish a long-awaited document on planned policy for schools and special educational needs in England. This is set to include the intention to establish more inclusive mainstream education – mainstream schools that are equipped to educate children with special educational needs. The way to do this is to ensure specialist support is available in mainstream schools.

The gaps are stark. By the end of primary school, children with special educational needs and disabilities are almost two years behind in writing, and about a year and a half behind in reading and maths. These are not inevitable outcomes. They reflect unmet needs and under-resourced classrooms.

Parents may value inclusion and want their children learning alongside peers. But studies consistently report parental frustration that schools are often not equipped with the specialist expertise needed to meet those needs.

True inclusion cannot mean simply placing pupils with educational needs and disabilities in the same room with their peers. Without expert teaching to adapt lessons, build literacy and support language and behaviour, inclusion risks becoming tokenistic.

Instead of prioritising investment in specialist teachers within schools, funding has increasingly been channelled into outsourced provision and tribunals. Research suggests that too much funding is tied up in a small minority of cases, when it could be used to strengthen special educational needs provision in every mainstream school.

A more useful approach treats inclusion and specialisation not as opposites but as partners. Specialist teachers bring the deep knowledge of how to support particular needs, while mainstream teachers provide the shared environment where all children can learn together. When these two are connected, pupils get the best of both worlds.

The cost of outsourcing

A central issue lies in how the special educational needs and disabilities system currently delivers support. Many families who can afford private assessments or are able to pursue tribunals succeed in securing additional help for their child, often through placements outside the local authority system. But this approach means only a small group of children gain access to specialist private or publicly funded provision, while many others with equally significant needs remain unsupported.

This reliance on outsourcing is also costly. Expensive independent placements and external assessments absorb government funds that could otherwise be invested in improving provision in mainstream schools. In effect, public resources are concentrated on the few rather than spread to benefit the many children in need.

A more sustainable model is to develop in-house expertise. If every school had specialist teachers able to identify needs early and provide targeted support, far fewer families would feel driven to seek help through tribunals or private routes. Bringing services into schools would ensure that specialist expertise is consistently available to all pupils who need it.

If the government is serious about meaningful reform, I believe it must fund new special education teacher training programmes to expand the supply of specialist teachers, ensuring every mainstream primary and secondary school has access to them.

It should make training in special educational needs and disabilities mandatory across the teaching profession, to reduce variation in identification and support. And it should replace policy ambivalence with a clear commitment: inclusion must be backed by specialist expertise and enforceable entitlements, not just rhetoric.

The special educational needs system is under intense strain, but this is also a moment of choice. England can continue to oscillate between rhetoric and retrenchment, or it can finally embed specialist expertise in the heart of mainstream education.

The government’s decision this autumn will shape the life chances of hundreds of thousands of children. We should not expect children to succeed without the specialist teachers they urgently need.

Johny Daniel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Specialised teachers can make mainstream schools better for children with special educational needs – https://theconversation.com/specialised-teachers-can-make-mainstream-schools-better-for-children-with-special-educational-needs-264312

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Pavan Mano, Lecturer in Global Cultures, King’s College London

Nationalism usually works on the basis that a nation should imagine itself as a “we”, with a common identity, history and culture. But it doesn’t always clearly say who the “we” are. Instead, it often works by saying who doesn’t belong – frequently by characterising these people in racialised ways.

Singapore is an interesting case study. Since independence in 1965, the small city-state has explicitly committed to a policy of multiracialism and multiculturalism. This principle is enshrined in its constitution, is widely accepted by Singaporeans and has become a firm pillar of national discourse.

Given this commitment, how does nationalism create exclusion in Singapore and what other forms could this take? In my March 2025 book, Straight Nation, I analyse Singapore’s version of a national identity to show how, while avoiding overtly racialised rhetoric and discrimination, it can define belonging in other ways.

Singaporean nationalism excludes some sections of society mainly through maintaining a set of heterosexual familial norms. This is one reason for the book’s title – it calls attention to how straightness sits at the heart of Singaporean identity. A certain kind of straight life is taken to be the model behaviour of a “normal” citizen.

Some of the things one is expected to do include starting a family – by meeting a member of the opposite sex, getting married and having children. This very specific version of heterosexuality is taken as the default in Singapore, and it ends up excluding a whole range of people.

Family and the nation

Heterosexuality being taken as normal and the expectations placed on the nuclear family are not uniquely Singaporean issues. But because of Singapore’s small size, the state has an outsize capacity to influence both how the “normal” Singaporean ought to live and the consequences that follow.

One of the most visible ways people are affected is through the public housing system. Almost 80% of Singaporean residents live in flats built by the country’s public housing authority, the Housing and Development Board (HDB). These flats are so ubiquitous that Singapore’s former prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, referred to them as “national housing” in 2018.

The catch is that, with some small exceptions, one has to be married to buy a HDB flat. And because same-sex marriage is not recognised in Singapore, heterosexual marriage becomes a condition of access to this national symbol.

This obviously affects LGBTQ+ people, limiting their ability to access public housing and live independently. But the link between heterosexual marriage and public housing affects a whole range of other people. These include single people and parents, those who choose not to get married and people who are divorced.

There are other examples that demonstrate how it is taken as common sense that one’s life revolves around the nuclear family in Singapore – even though this might not be the case for everyone.

The opening anecdote in Straight Nation shows how the state treats the heterosexual nuclear family as containing the most important set of social relations. Like many other countries at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Singaporean government imposed a lockdown from April to June 2020. When it ended, restrictions were lifted in stages.

Initially, only some in-person interactions were allowed. Singapore’s then-health minister and current deputy prime minister, Gan Kim Yong, said: “Children or grandchildren can visit their parents or grandparents”. He suggested this would “allow families to spend time and provide support to one another” after eight weeks of isolation.

Until the restrictions were further eased 17 days later, visiting one’s parents or grandparents was the only form of in-person social interaction permitted. There was no mention as to what people without a family or estranged from them were meant to do for support. The same applies to people reliant on extended family, such as those who have no have no surviving parents or grandparents, or even those who depend on a close friend.

Again, this assumption can produce exclusions that go beyond sexual difference. To be clear, not everyone will be affected in the same way. But reading Singapore as a straight nation and identifying how one particular kind of heterosexual expression is reified is helpful.

It allows onlookers to ask how these norms can place different kinds of pressure on different people. And perhaps identifying the way in which so many people are affected by this regime of straightness will also help Singapore imagine a future that is fairer and more liveable for everyone.

Pavan Mano does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Singapore’s national identity excludes those who don’t look like a ‘regular family’ – https://theconversation.com/singapores-national-identity-excludes-those-who-dont-look-like-a-regular-family-259427

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Aimee Grant, Associate Professor in Public Health and Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow, Swansea University

The phrases “autism spectrum” or “on the spectrum” have become part of everyday language. They are often used as different ways of referring to someone who is “neurodivergent”.

The term was coined in the 1980s by psychiatrist Dr Lorna Wing, whose work transformed how autism was understood in the UK. At the time, her “autism spectrum” concept was groundbreaking. Instead of seeing autism as a rare, narrowly defined condition, she recognised a wide range of traits and experiences.

But the idea of a single spectrum, which stretches from “mild” to “severe”, may be misleading. And some autism experts, including me, argue the term has outlived its usefulness.

When most people hear the word “spectrum”, they may picture a straight line, like colours arranged from red to violet. Applied to autism, this suggests autistic people can be ranked from “more autistic” to “less autistic”. But that’s not how autism works.

Autism is made up of many different traits and needs, which show up in unique combinations. Some autistic people rely heavily on routine, while others find comfort in repetitive movements known as “stimming”. And some have an intense focus on particular topics, a concept researchers call “monotropism”.

There are also known links with physical conditions such as hypermobility. Because autism is made up of all these different elements, there can be no single line on which every autistic person is placed.

Read more:
Why the autism jigsaw puzzle piece is such a problematic symbol

Attempts to draw boundaries still persist, however. The American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual divides autism into three “levels” based on the amount of support a person is judged to need. They run from level 1 “requiring support”, to level 2 “requiring substantial support” and level 3 “requiring very substantial support”.

But there is research that argues these levels are vague and inconsistently applied. They don’t always reflect someone’s real-world experiences.

Life circumstances can also change a person’s needs. An autistic person who usually copes well may experience “burnout” and have an accompanying increase in support needs, if their needs have been unmet for a long time.

In a recent research article, my colleagues and I show that life stages such as menopause can increase support needs. A static “level” cannot capture this evolving nature.

More recently, the label “profound autism” has been suggested by the Lancet commission – an international group of experts – for autistic people with learning disabilities or high support needs. But other experts say the phrase is unhelpful because it tells us nothing about a person’s particular challenges or the type of support they require.

The legacy of Asperger’s

Dr Lorna Wing also introduced the term “Asperger’s syndrome” to the UK. Like the concept “profound autism”, using this term also divided autistic people into those with higher support needs and those with Asperger’s syndrome (lower support needs).

However, the label was drawn from the name of Austrian physician Hans Asperger, who in the 1940s identified a subgroup of children he called “autistic psychopaths”. During the Nazi period, Asperger was associated with a genocide of autistic people with higher support needs. For this reason, many autistic people don’t use the term any more, even if that is what they were originally diagnosed with.

Underlying all these debates is a deeper concern that dividing autistic people into categories, or arranging them on a spectrum, can slip into judgments about their value to society. In the most extreme form, such hierarchies risk dehumanising those with higher support needs. It’s something some autistic campaigners warn could fuel harmful political agendas.

In the worst case, those judged as less useful for society become vulnerable to future genocides. This may seem far fetched, but the political direction in the US, for example, is very worrying to many autistic people.

Recently, US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior, said that he was going to “confront the nation’s (autism) epidemic”. So far, this has included strongly refuted claims that paracetamol use in pregnancy is linked to autism in children, urging pregnant women to avoid the painkiller.

Read more:
Paracetamol use during pregnancy not linked to autism, our study of 2.5 million children shows

Often people use the term “autism spectrum” or “on the spectrum” as a way of avoiding saying that somebody is autistic. While this is often well meaning, it is rooted in the idea that to be autistic is a negative thing. Many autistic adults prefer the words “autism” and “autistic” directly. Autism is not a scale of severity but a way of being. It’s a difference rather than a defect.

Language will never capture every nuance, but words shape how society treats autistic people. Moving away from the idea of a single spectrum could be a step towards recognising autism in all its diversity, and valuing autistic people as they are.

Aimee Grant receives funding from the Wellcome Trust and UKRI.

– ref. Why it’s time to rethink the notion of an autism ‘spectrum’ – https://theconversation.com/why-its-time-to-rethink-the-notion-of-an-autism-spectrum-263243

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Yael Benn, Senior Lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University

Numbers are all around us. In the morning, we wake up to an alarm that tells us it’s time to get out of bed. When deciding what to wear, we often check the temperature outside. We count out the vitamins or prescription pills we need to take while eating our breakfast, we estimate how long it will take to get to the station and then check what platform we need to be on catch the train to work.

Every single one of these examples involves using and understanding numbers. Being able to carry out such small calculations and estimations makes our life possible.

This is why acalculia, a neurological condition that impairs the ability to process and understand numbers, can have a devastating effect on a person’s life. The condition commonly afflicts people who have had a stroke or suffered a brain injury. It’s estimated that it affects between 30%-60% of stroke survivors.

The brain is a complex organ that controls both our movements and senses. It enables us to receive signals from the environment, process information and execute motor actions.

But a stroke or brain injury interrupts blood supply to the brain. If this stroke or injury happens on the left side of the brain, it can cause problems with language processing and other cognitive functions, such as memory. It can also affect movement on the right side of the body.

If it happens on the right side of the brain, movement on the left side of the body will be affected. There may also be cognitive deficits – typically those involved with processing visual information.

But acalculia can occur regardless of which area of the brain has been damaged. This is because processing numbers and performing calculations are done using many different areas of the brain.

This includes the left hemisphere, which helps us process language; the right hemisphere, which is involved in visuo-spatial processing; the posterior part of the brain, which is involved in comprehending magnitude (which of two numbers is smaller or bigger); and the front of the brain, which control executive function.

Lesions or damage to any of these areas can cause problems in how a person processes numbers.

For people with acalculia, sometimes the processing problem can just be surface level. They may feel that they know a number but can’t say it out loud. Or, a person may mean to say or write one number and instead another comes out.

In severe cases, a patient can altogether lose the meaning of numbers. So they may know a number has been mentioned or is written down, but they just can’t figure out what it actually means or how to make sense of it.

Effect on daily life

To understand the impacts of acalculia, my colleagues and I interviewed people with the condition alongside some of their carers to learn how it affected their lives and what support they received.

Stroke and brain injury survivors with acalculia reported being unable to manage their money. Some interviewees spoke of needing to depend on their carer to handle their money or having trouble accessing their internet banking because they struggled with common login questions such as “enter the third character of your pin”.

Worryingly, many participants reported difficulties managing their medications – with several totally relying on their pharmacist.

Simply managing their everyday lives was also made more difficult by the condition. Telling the time was difficult because of the digits. Even using the microwave was difficult because cooking times “are a jumble with numbers,” as one participant put it.

Importantly, acalculia had a detrimental effect on independence and wellbeing. As one participant said: “I feel dumb, embarrassed and frustrated.”

Overall, our findings highlighted just how substantial an effect acalculia had on stroke and brain injury survivors’ independence and quality of life. Acalculia left some unable to return to work, and many unable to live independently or manage their everyday lives, leaving them vulnerable. Our research also pointed out important gaps in how the condition is currently assessed and treated.

Acalculia awareness

One in four adults over the age of 25 are at risk of experiencing a stroke in their lifetime. Although we’re getting better equipped to help people recover from a stroke, acalculia remains overlooked in stroke rehabilitation guidelines. It’s not routinely tested for after a stroke (despite several dedicated assessments available) and there are currently no clinically-tested treatments for the condition.

The condition doesn’t appear to be taught in clinical training at present. One patient we interviewed in our study recalled asking their therapists for help with acalculia, saying: “What can you do to help me with my maths? Every therapist I’ve met says ‘I can’t help you’. Why? Because it’s not part of their training.”

This means healthcare workers aren’t able to recognise the problem – let alone be able to support patients who have it.

People with acalculia are currently left to support themselves. Many may not even know there’s a name for their condition. It’s clear more needs to be done to raise awareness so that it can be better assessed – and so patients can receive the help and support they need in overcoming acalculia.

Yael Benn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Acalculia: why many stroke survivors struggle with numbers – https://theconversation.com/acalculia-why-many-stroke-survivors-struggle-with-numbers-265643

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Catia Nicodemo, Professor of Health Economics, Brunel University of London

The UK government has launched NHS league tables for every trust in England, promising transparency and an incentive for improvement. The idea is simple: rank providers of health care and reward the best.

But national health care is not a simple thing. And trying to convert something so complex into a single ladder of winners and losers could end up distorting medical priorities and resources.

For example, the way waiting times are measured for elective (non-emergency) surgery is (and needs to be) different to how they are measured for cancer treatment and A&E. Mixing these into one overall “score” for waiting times could encourage NHS trusts to focus on the most rank-sensitive elements of healthcare, even when bottlenecks exist elsewhere (such as diagnostics or community care).

This can lead to a kind of tunnel vision, where what’s measured is considered to be what matters most. Previous research on rating shows how rankings can shift hospital managers’ attention from broad quality to narrow score keeping.

Another challenge is that different NHS trusts operate in very different contexts. Patient populations vary in age, and in levels of affluence and deprivation – factors which can directly influence demand on a hospital and its clinical outcomes.

A hospital serving an older and poorer population may find it much harder to meet targets than one that serves a younger and healthier area. And while league tables are supposed to be compiled in such a way that they account for these kinds of differences, the adjustment calculations are never perfect.

If league tables fail to account for these realities, they risk labelling overstretched hospitals as “poor performers” when they may in fact be delivering strongly against difficult odds.

Evidence also shows that when patients are given more choice about where they receive their healthcare, some do explore their options. But distance and the availability of transport make a huge difference.

If you can’t get to the hospital you want, the choice is not really there. And “competition” between different trusts falls sharply outside dense urban markets. In practice, many patients simply take their GP’s recommendation and use the nearest viable hospital.

So while league tables designed to encourage choice and stimulate competition may help to raise quality, they also carry risks – most notably amplifying regional inequalities. Such rankings could then become magnets, drawing both patients and staff toward “elite” hospitals.

If rankings trigger “patient outflows” (people choosing to go elsewhere for care) and health professionals being reluctant to work in lower-ranked hospitals, a vicious circle develops, making that low ranking even more difficult to shake off.

And moves towards greater transparency require greater support as well, with extra staffing and diagnostics capacity, as well as targeted recruitment and retention schemes in hard-pressed areas. Otherwise, the policy risks deepening geographical inequalities.

For emergency care, for rural areas, or for people with limited mobility, improvement will depend on better coordination and sufficient capacity, such as ensuring that ambulance services are well linked to hospitals with intensive care beds.

Scoring points

League tables can shine a light. But light without lenses can distort. (The NHS itself acknowledges the risk of crude comparisons that league tables can bring.)

To avoid perverse incentives and widening gaps, rankings should be used as a starting point for deeper analysis, not treated as a final verdict. They need to adjust for differences in patient populations so that hospitals treating sicker or more challenging patients are not penalised.

They need to be designed to minimise gaming the system (by preventing hospitals from prioritising easy cases just to hit targets for example). They need to give GPs the tools and authority to direct patients to the most appropriate services, and pair transparency with extra support for areas of highest need.

Done badly, rankings reward already-advantaged hospitals and shift efforts towards chasing the scoreboard. Done well (using risk-adjusted, specialised dashboards) they can help tackle the real causes of long waits and uneven care.

Performance data needs to be used with caution, linked to GP referral systems where patients actually make choices, and accompanied by targeted support for those areas serving the most complex populations. Without these safeguards, league tables risk distorting behaviour, encouraging tunnel vision and amplifying existing inequalities in the NHS, rather than solving them.

Catia Nicodemo is affiliated with University of Oxford

– ref. NHS league tables are back – but turning rankings into better care is harder than it looks – https://theconversation.com/nhs-league-tables-are-back-but-turning-rankings-into-better-care-is-harder-than-it-looks-265688

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Leanne Calvert, Assistant Professor in Irish History, University of Limerick

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Presbyterians from Ulster in Northern Ireland had a somewhat surprising reputation for being especially – if not excessively – concerned with sex.

As the Ordnance Survey Memoirs Observer for the parish of Rashee in County Antrim candidly put it in 1835, while the Presbyterians of the north of Ireland “unhesitatingly” claimed for themselves a general character of “extreme morality”, they were “not the pious race so generally imagined”.

The records of the Presbyterian church in this period certainly give the impression of a community with a vibrant sexual culture – though one that was also strictly policed. It is this tension between piety and promiscuity that I explore in my new book, Pious and Promiscuous: Life, Love and Family in Presbyterian Ulster – revealing for the first time personal stories that shaped the rhythms and rituals of Presbyterian family life in 18th- and 19th-century Ulster.

The Presbyterian church closely regulated the intimate lives of its members through a system of church court discipline. Misbehaving members could find themselves before the Kirk Session (the church’s local court) for a wide range of offences including bigamy, drunkenness, slander, fist fights and skipping Sabbath services. But it was sexual misbehaviour that sent most to these courts.

Of the 375 cases considered by First Dromara Kirk Session in County Down between 1780 and 1805, 230 concerned sexual misbehaviour. Similarly, more than half of all cases heard by Carnmoney Kirk Session in County Antrim between 1786 and 1821 were of a sexual nature.

Sexual offences was a broad category that included sex between unmarried and about-to-be-married persons (known as fornication or pre-marital fornication), sex with someone who was not your spouse (adultery), and “scandalous carriage” – intimate acts that stopped short of full sexual intercourse, such as kissing or heavy petting.

Conduct which raised suspicions that sex had taken place also fell under this heading. Couples who spent time together alone and unchaperoned could be cited, as well as those who were caught in compromising situations.

This is what happened to John Woodend, a married man and member of the Aghadowey Presbyterian congregation in County Londonderry. His bedsharing practices roused suspicions that he had been guilty of adultery. In October 1704, Woodend was told off by the Kirk Session after he was seen lying “in naked bed” with his servant maid, Margaret.

A man named John Boil reported seeing the pair in bed together, then watching as Woodend got up and began “pulling on his cloths”. Since Woodend’s wife was also in the room at the time – she was sitting on a chair next to the bed – the session ruled it was unlikely the bedsharing pair had committed adultery. But Woodend’s conduct was still considered “unseemly and offensive”, resulting in his censure for “unseemly carriage”.

Sex first, marriage second?

The sheer volume of sexual misbehaviour cases heard by the church courts appears to suggest that Presbyterians were relatively permissive in their attitudes to sex outside marriage.

Fornication and pre-marital fornication were, after all, the most numerous sexual offences. Indeed, historians used to believe that Presbyterians were different from other religious communities in Ireland because of their perceived tolerance of extra-marital sex. But that impression is misleading.

Records of the church courts show that Ulster Presbyterians were far from “promiscuous” in their attitude to sexual morality. Kirk Session minute books reveal how Presbyterian women and men engaged in sexual intercourse as part of the rituals of courtship and marriage.

In Ulster, many Presbyterian couples entered a form of marriage known as verba de futuro – a promise to marry in the future that was then sealed with sexual intercourse.

This is how the marriage of Benjamin Green and Elizabeth Bell, members of Cahans Presbyterian church in County Monaghan, came about. In March 1753, the couple told Cahans Kirk Session they had sworn secretly to each other that they would marry “some [time] before actual marriage” – and then confirmed their promises to marry in the future by having sex.

More than 20 years later, Margaret Cunningham shared a similar story about her marriage to Robert Jackson. According to Cunningham, she and Jackson exchanged marriage vows on the “last Friday of March”, then “bedded” together “the following Monday”. Like many other Presbyterians, these couples may not have considered their sexual behaviour as sinful because they had every intention of progressing to marriage.

The stories contained in the Presbyterian archive – a term I use to describe records produced by and about members of Ulster’s Presbyterian community – provide a tantalising glimpse into the intimate worlds of women and men in Ulster, centuries ago.

Their stories remind us how individual experiences could both conform to, and deviate from, societal expectations. Presbyterians did indeed have colourful sex lives – just as they also valued marriage.

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Research for my book has received funding from: Arts and Humanities Research Council Postgraduate funding, the R.J. Hunter Bursary from the Royal Irish Academy, the Anna-Parnell Travel Grant from the Women’s History Association of Ireland and internal funding from the University of Hertfordshire.

– ref. The sex lives of Presbyterians in 18th- and 19th-century Ulster were surprisingly colourful – https://theconversation.com/the-sex-lives-of-presbyterians-in-18th-and-19th-century-ulster-were-surprisingly-colourful-266078