Suchergebnisse

The whats and whys of religious belief -- A history of thanatocentric theories of religion -- Measuring faith and fear -- Are people afraid of death? -- The religious correlates of death anxiety -- Death anxiety and religion: causes and consequences -- The future of immortality, literal, and symbolic

Abstract. Beliefs in conspiracy theories, generally considered to be a unidimensional construct, are associated with negative outcomes. The existing measures of conspiracy theory beliefs have number of shortcomings. We present the development of a novel measure of the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories and report the discovery of a second factor that reflects rational skepticism. In Study 1 ( N = 500) we use item response theory to devise the final items. In Study 2 ( N = 202) we demonstrate the predictive validity of the two factors for different types of conspiracies. In Study 3 ( N = 308) we demonstrate convergent/divergent validity. In Study 4 ( N = 800) we demonstrate construct validity in three countries. Implications for the concept of conspiracy theory and conspiracy theory beliefs are discussed.

We propose that hypodescent-the assignment of mixed-race individuals to a minority group-is an emergent feature of basic cognitive processes of learning and categorization. According to attention theory, minority groups are learned by attending to the features that distinguish them from previously learned majority groups. Selective attention creates a strong association between minority groups and their distinctive features, producing a tendency to see individuals who possess a mixture of majority- and minority-group traits as minority-group members. Two experiments on face categorization, using both naturally occurring and manipulated minority groups, support this view, suggesting that hypodescent need not be the product of racist or political motivations, but can be sufficiently explained by an individual's learning history.

Abstract
Scientific interest in religion often focusses on the "puzzle of belief": how people develop and maintain religious beliefs despite a lack of evidence and the significant costs that those beliefs incur. A number of researchers have suggested that humans are predisposed towards supernatural thinking, with innate cognitive biases engendering, for example, the misattribution of intentional agency. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that nonbelievers often act "as if" they believe. For example, atheists are reluctant to sell the very souls they deny having, or to angrily provoke the God they explicitly state does not exist. In our own recent work, participants who claimed not to believe in the afterlife nevertheless demonstrated a physiological fear response when informed that there was a ghost in the room. Such findings are often interpreted as evidence for an "implicit" belief in the supernatural that operates alongside (and even in contradiction to) an individual's conscious ("explicit") religious belief. In this article, we investigate these arguably tenuous constructs more deeply and suggest some possible empirical directions for further disentangling implicit and explicit reasoning.

Objective: Previous research has shown contradictory evidence for the relationship between religiosity and trauma; exposure to traumatic life events has been associated with both increases and decreases in religiosity over time. On the basis of a long theoretical tradition of linking death and religious belief and recent empirical evidence that thoughts of death may increase religiosity, we tested whether one determinant of trauma's influence on religion is the degree to which it makes death salient. Method: Using longitudinal data from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, a unique population-representative birth cohort, we tested whether the relationship between trauma and religiosity depends on whether the trauma involves death. Participants reported their private, ceremonial, and public religious behaviors at ages 26 and 32 and, at age 32, whether they had experienced any of 23 traumatic life events since age 26. Results: Experiencing the death of a loved one (but not an equally traumatic event not involving death) predicted a future increase in private religious behavior (e.g., prayer) among those already practicing such behaviors, and an increase in the importance of religious ceremonies among those with relatively little prior interest in them. On the other hand, experiencing a death-unrelated trauma predicted a future reduction in public displays of religiosity among those previously so inclined. Conclusion: The study represents a significant step in understanding religious responses to trauma, and emphasizes the importance of considering not only the nature of a trauma, but also the dimensions and practices of a victim's religiosity prior to it.

We present three datasets from a project about the relationship between death anxiety and religiosity. These include data from 1,838 individuals in the United States (n = 813), Brazil (n = 800), Russia (n = 800), the Philippines (n = 200), South Korea (n = 200), and Japan (n = 219). Measures were largely consistent across samples: they include measures of death anxiety, experience of and exposure to death, religious belief, religious behaviour, religious experience, and demographic information. Responses have also been back-translated into English where necessary, though original untranslated data are also included.

Despite claims about the universality of religious belief, whether religiosity scales have the same meaning when administered inter-subjectively - or translated and applied cross-culturally - is currently unknown. Using the recent "Supernatural Belief Scale" (SBS), we present a primer on how to verify the strong assumptions of measurement invariance required in research on religion. A comparison of two independent samples, Croatians and New Zealanders, showed that, despite a sophisticated psychometric model, measurement invariance could be demonstrated for the SBS except for two noninvariant intercepts. We present a new approach for inspecting measurement invariance across self- and peer-reports as two dependent samples. Although supernatural beliefs may be hard to observe in others, the measurement model was fully invariant for Croatians and their nominated peers. The results not only establish, for the first time, a valid measure of religious supernatural belief across two groups of different language and culture, but also demonstrate a general invariance test for distinguishable dyad members nested within the same targets. More effort needs to be made to design and validate cross-culturally applicable measures of religiosity.

Religion has long been speculated to function as a strategy to ameliorate our fear of death. Terror management theory provides two possible causal pathways through which religious beliefs can fulfil this function. According to the "worldview defence" account of terror management, worldviews reduce death anxiety by offering symbolic immortality: on this view, only people who accept the religious worldview in question should benefit from religious beliefs. Alternatively, religious worldviews also offer literal immortality, and may do so independently of individuals' worldviews. Both strands of thought appear in the terror management theory literature. In this paper, we attempt to resolve this issue experimentally by manipulating religious belief and measuring explicit (Study 1) and implicit (Study 2) death anxiety. In Study 1, we found that the effect of religious belief on explicit death anxiety depends critically on participants' own religious worldviews, such that believers and non-believers reported greater death anxiety when their worldview is threatened. In Study 2, however, we find that religious belief alleviates implicit death anxiety amongst both believers and non-believers. These findings suggest that religious beliefs can alleviate death anxiety at two different levels, by offering symbolic and literal immortality, respectively.

The 10-item scale measures the tendency to believe in supernatural entities such as immaterial agents, afterlife/otherworld places, and miraculous earthly events. The scale is intended to be a valid indicator of the cognitive component of religiosity, capturing ten cross-cultural beliefs that appear as religious themes in various religious contexts in the world. The scale was first tested in English by Jong, Bluemke, & Halberstadt (2013). The SBS aims to be applicable to people of different religious standing (atheists and believers alike), across various countries, with a multitude of religious backgrounds, if necessary by adapting the labels pertaining to the supernatural entities, while not altering the essence of the item content or response format. After its seminal application in New Zealand, and later in Croatia, among student samples with mostly a Christian cultural background, it was applied in Germany, yielding good reliability, a replicable factor structure, and cross-cultural measurement invariance (strict invariance across Germans and New Zealanders). The scale showed signs of construct validity and criterion validity in all samples (NZ, CRO, GER).

Prejudiced attitudes and political nationalism vary widely around the world, but there has been little research on what predicts this variation. Here we examine the ecological and cultural factors underlying the worldwide distribution of prejudice. We suggest that cultures grow more prejudiced when they tighten cultural norms in response to destabilizing ecological threats. A set of seven archival analyses, surveys, and experiments (∑N = 3,986,402) find that nations, American states, and pre-industrial societies with tighter cultural norms show the most prejudice based on skin color, religion, nationality, and sexuality, and that tightness predicts why prejudice is often highest in areas of the world with histories of ecological threat. People's support for cultural tightness also mediates the link between perceived ecological threat and intentions to vote for nationalist politicians. Results replicate when controlling for economic development, inequality, conservatism, residential mobility, and shared cultural heritage. These findings offer a cultural evolutionary perspective on prejudice, with implications for immigration, intercultural conflict, and radicalization. ; publishedVersion