HOW COULD ANYONE BELIEVE THAT?

PERSONALITY TRAITS AND THINKING DISPOSITIONS AS PREDICTORS OF RELIGIOUS ATTITUDES

Igor Mikloui, Boris Mlai & Goran Milas Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar Zagreb, Croatia
SUMMARY
In the light of the misunderstanding between the religious and the non-religious, and the misconceptions about the origins of religious beliefs, our study aims to examine the predictive value of thinking dispositions and personality in determining religiosity.

METHODOLOGY
The study included a sample of undergraduate college students from Croatia (N=307). Of these, 271 (88.3%) were female and 36 (11.7%) were male, with the mean age of 21,86 (SD = 2,5). Personality was assessed via 50item IPIP measure of Costa and McCrae's (1992) Five Factor Moldel. Thinking dispositions were assessed with the 41 item Actively Open-minded Thinking scale (AOMT, Stanovich & West, 1997) (= .78) conceptualized as the tendency of people to engage in flexible, and avoid dogmatic, thinking, and the 18 item Need for Cognition scale (NFC, Cacioppo et al., 1996) (= .81), aimed to assess the tendency of an individual to engage in and enjoy thinking. Religiosity was assessed by applying the 33 item Post-Critical Belief Scale (Duriez, Fontaine & Hutsebaut, 2000) aimed to capture the two orthogonal dimensions of the religiosity, namely Exclusion vs. Inclusion of Transcendence and Literal vs. Symbolic interpretation, from which we extracted three distinct dimensions of religious belief Religiosity, Skepticism and Orthodoxy.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Table 1. Correlations between the religiosity dimensions, thinking disposition scores and the Five Factor Model of personality AOMT Religiosity Skepticism Dogmatism Actively Open-Minded Thinking Need for Cognition
* p < .05; ** p < .01

As the recently more prominent New Atheist authors (i.e. Dawkins, 2006) often imply, religious beliefs are highly irrational, and should therefore be a product of, if not cognitive deficit, than at least an impairment of the rational thinking ability. While there has been selective evidence in favor of this proposition (e.g. Hergovich, Shott & Arendasy; 2005), it has never been thoroughly explored. Furthermore, there is now ample evidence to prove that the propensity towards religious belief is, in addition to cognitive determinants, to an extent rooted in personality (Saroglou, 2002). Finally, most researchers treat religiosity as a complex and multidimensional concept (e.g. Wulff, 1997), and both thinking dispositions and personality might be differentially related to different aspects of religiosity. In this study we aimed to explore relative contribution of the Big Five personality factors and thinking dispositions related to critical thinking on predicting various modalities of religious and non religious beliefs and attitudes

NFC -.055 .141* -.228** .275**

EXT .012 -.050 -.008 -.024 .123*

NEUR -.009 .130* .141* -.146* -.160**

CONSC .070 .114* .257** -.255** .158**

AGREE .233** .006 -.052 .139* .056

OPEN -.119* .260** -.367** .331** .591**

-.238** .013 -.536**

Table 2. Hierarchical regression analyses of religiosity dimensions on thinking dispositions and Five Factor Model personality dimensions Variables Level 1 Actively Open-Minded thinking Need for Cognition Level 2 Extaversion Neuroticism Conscientiousness Agreeableness Openness R2
* p < .05; ** p < .01

Religiosity -.276** .022 .003 -.046 -.004 .270** -.040 .112**

Skepticism -.034 -.001 -.051 .125* .106 .011 .272** .080**

Orthodoxy -.412** .021 -.020 -.084 .149* .004 -.243** .341**

DISCUSSION

The study shows that the personality dimensions of Openness and Conscientiousness are related to critical and open-minded thinking dispositions, and that relation is also reflected to the relation with specific dimensions of religiosity (Table 1.) While thinking dispositions, assessed by the Actively Open-Minded Thinking Scale (Stanovich & West, 2007) and the Need for Cognition Scale (Cacioppo et al., 1996), proved to be a good way to discriminate between the Skeptical non-believers and believers in general, they were not useful in discriminating Religiosity as a more open and symbolical interpretation of religious beliefs. Rather, personality dimension of Agreeableness proved to be the best specific predictor of Religiosity, whereas Conscientiousness and Openness contributed most to predicting Orthodoxy., thus putting less importance on specific thinking dispositions in predicting individual religious orientation. (Table 2.) Finally, contrary to popular belief, Skepticism, as a form of non religious orientation, was not predicted by either thinking disposition scales (Table 2.).

REFERENCES

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