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Fundamentalism and forgiveness
Personality and Individual Differences 43 (2007) 1437–1447 www.elsevier.com/locate/paid
Fundamentalism and forgiveness Ryan P. Brown *, Collin D. Barnes, Nicole Judice Campbell Department of Psychology, The University of Oklahoma, 455 W. Lindsey, DHT 705, Norman, OK 73019, United States Received 18 August 2006; received in revised form 26 February 2007; accepted 12 April 2007 Available online 15 June 2007
Abstract Two studies investigated the associations between religious fundamentalism (RF) and aspects of dispositional forgiveness: pro-forgiveness attitudes and the tendency to forgive others. In Study 1, a direct selfreport measure of RF was significantly associated with pro-forgiveness attitudes, but not with the tendency to forgive. In Study 2, we conceptually replicated these results by combining a measure of religiosity and a measure of need for structure, a cognitive style variable related to rigid, categorical thinking. A significant interaction between religiosity and need for structure revealed that the positive association between religiosity and pro-forgiveness attitudes was higher among respondents who were also high in need for structure. As expected, this pattern did not occur with the tendency to forgive, which was positively related to religiosity but negatively related to need for structure. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Forgiveness; Fundamentalism; Religiosity; Need for structure; Cognitive style
1. Fundamentalism and forgiveness Over the course of the last several decades, researchers have suggested that interpersonal forgiveness ought to be associated with religiosity (for reviews, see McCullough, Bono, & Root, 2005; McCullough & Worthington, 1999). Given the high moral value that many religions place on forgiveness, the occurrence of forgiving exemplars within various religions, and the occurrence *
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of theological connections between forgiving others and being forgiven by God (particularly in the Christian religion), the assumption of a religiosity–forgiveness link seems well reasoned, and some research finds empirical support for this assumption. For example, early studies by Allport and Ross (1967) and by Shoemaker and Bolt (1977) showed that highly religious individuals ranked forgiveness higher in importance than most other values, and this emphasis on forgiveness distinguished highly religious from less religious individuals. More recently, some studies report significant correlations between religiosity and self-reported forgiveness (e.g., Berry, Worthington, Parrott, O’Connor, & Wade, 2001; Edwards et al., 2002), whereas other studies find virtually no such relationship (e.g., Subkoviak, Enright, Ching-Ru, & Gassin, 1995). Others have also noted that certain statistical considerations can moderate the size of this association (Tsang, McCullough, & Hoyt, 2005). Summarizing the existing empirical studies on the religion–forgiveness association, McCullough et al. (2005) have concluded that ‘‘religious individuals are, in general, slightly more forgiving than are less religious people, although this association is rather small’’ (p. 399). The present study extends previous research on religiosity and forgiveness in several ways. First, we argue that the relation between religiosity and forgiveness might depend, in part, on how forgiveness is conceptualized. Specifically, whether researchers construe dispositional forgiveness in terms of typical behavioral/experiential tendencies or in terms of pro-forgiveness attitudes and values might change the degree to which a measure of forgiveness relates to religiosity. As recent research by Brown and colleagues has demonstrated, the tendency to forgive and proforgiveness attitudes are positively associated, but also empirically distinguishable (Brown, 2003; Brown & Phillips, 2005), just as attitudes and behaviors in general are related but distinct. Consistent with prior research (e.g., Rokeach, 1969), we expect that more religious people are likely to value forgiveness to a greater extent than are less religious people. However, what we claim to value and what we do often diverge. In the case of forgiveness, valuing is much easier than doing, and simply being very religious may not be enough to facilitate the latter. Second, we also propose that how researchers conceptualize religiosity could make an important difference in the degree of association between religiosity and forgiveness. Indeed, across the handful of studies that have reported on the religiosity–forgiveness link over the last several decades, religiosity has been assessed variously as a categorical variable, as degrees of intrinsic or extrinsic religious orientation, and as frequency or depth of religious involvement. Although such indices of religiosity might overlap substantially, they, too, are not necessarily interchangeable. Furthermore, one manifestation of religiosity that has yet to be assessed in this literature is fundamentalism, which is the type of religiosity on which we focus in the current research. The construct of fundamentalism has been defined in a variety of ways including, but not limited to, a boundary maintenance phenomenon (Ethridge & Feagin, 1979; Hood, Morris, & Watson, 1986), an attitude toward the beliefs one endorses (Altemeyer, 1996), and a closed belief system (Kirkpatrick, Hood, & Hartz, 1991; Rokeach, 1960). Each of these definitions has worthwhile contributions to make toward understanding the fundamentalist mindset, and research derived from these various perspectives has demonstrated a host of attitudinal and social–relational correlates of fundamentalism (e.g., Altemeyer, 2003; Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992; Hunsberger, Owusu, & Duck, 2000; Kirkpatrick, 1993; Kirkpatrick et al., 1991; Laythe, Finkel, & Kirkpatrick, 1999). Our reading of the literature to date leads us to adopt the view that fundamentalism may best be conceived as a joint function of deeply held convictions about one’s beliefs and a rigid cognitive
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orientation, similar to the mentality exhibited by individuals high in need for structure. The personal need for structure scale (PNS; Neuberg & Newsom, 1993) was designed to capture an individual difference in cognitive style exemplified by a preference for rigid, well-bounded, simple cognitive structures. There is a rich history of measures created to capture just such a rigid cognitive style, although many such measures are heavily laden with political or even religious content (e.g., right-wing authoritarianism [RWA], dogmatism). PNS correlates with such measures (e.g., RWA, r = .37, p < 0.001; Thompson, Naccarato, & Parker, 2001) but captures the essence of a rigid and closed cognitive style without specific references to political, social, or religious beliefs. Thus, the PNS scale seems ideally suited for distinguishing the content of beliefs (e.g., belief in God) from how they are represented cognitively. Research on religious fundamentalism leads us to expect that religious fundamentalists will be especially likely to have positive attitudes toward forgiveness. In essence, if their religious tradition extols the virtues of forgiveness, then people will tend to accept and internalize the value of forgiveness to the extent that they are high in need for structure. However, we also hypothesized that this same rigid cognitive style might inhibit people’s ability to experience actual forgiveness. As research has shown, need for structure is associated with a host of potential barriers to forgiving, including simplistic thinking, intolerance of ambiguity, and negative affectivity (e.g., Moskowitz, 1993; Neuberg & Newsom, 1993; Schaller, Boyd, & Yohannes, 1995). Consequently, people high in need for structure who feel they have been wronged may often fail to engage in perspective taking, may have a tendency to place their offenders in simple, negative categories, and may view their offenders with particular hostility. Combining this rigid cognitive style with intense religiosity might further enhance the barriers to forgiveness, insofar as religious beliefs could provide or legitimate simple socio-moral categorizations that could easily be mis-applied by individuals high in need for structure (e.g., ‘‘those who mistreat me are evil and should be punished’’). In this way, the inflexible cognitive style purported to underlie fundamentalism could counteract any motivational benefits to forgive that might derive from certain religious ideals and teachings, resulting in a weak or even non-existent association between fundamentalism and forgiveness. In two studies, we examined the hypothesis that religious fundamentalism would be positively related to pro-forgiveness attitudes but not to forgiveness behaviors. In the first study, we measured religious fundamentalism directly with a self-report scale. In the second study, we took a novel approach to fundamentalism by combining a measure of intrinsic religiosity with a measure of need for structure and examining their interaction with respect to pro-forgiveness attitudes and forgiveness tendencies. Consistent with our reasoning about the nature of fundamentalism, need for structure was expected to enhance the association between religiosity and forgiveness attitudes, but not between religiosity and forgiveness behaviors.
2. Study 1 In this study, we investigated the association between religious fundamentalism, pro-forgiveness attitudes, and self-reported forgiveness tendencies. Because fundamentalists are likely to score high in orthodoxy, but not everyone who scores high in orthodoxy is necessarily a fundamentalist, we controlled for Christian orthodoxy in our assessment of the fundamentalism–forgiveness
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relationship (Fullerton & Hunsberger, 1982; Kirkpatrick, 1993). We also controlled for gender in both Studies 1 and 2, as gender has been shown in previous research to relate not only to religiosity (Spilka, Hood, Hunsberger, & Gorsuch, 2003), but also to forgiveness (e.g., Brown, 2003; Brown & Phillips, 2005).
3. Method 3.1. Participants Six hundred eighty-one undergraduates (435 females, 246 males) at the University of Oklahoma participated in exchange for credit toward a research exposure requirement in their introductory psychology course. Although our use of a Christian orthodoxy scale as a control variable in this study might make the inclusion of non-Christian participants seem problematic, excluding the 136 non-Christian participants had little impact on the results we report below. Thus, to make samples across studies optimally comparable, we did not exclude non-Christians. 3.2. Measures and procedure The following scales were included with a variety of other questionnaires in a large, online survey that participants completed at the beginning of the semester. Participants responded to the scales in the order they are presented below. All scales exhibited acceptable levels of internal consistency (all as > 0.68). Tendency to forgive (TTF). The TTF is a brief, 4-item scale that assesses the degree to which individuals are generally forgiving of people who have offended them (e.g., ‘‘When people wrong me, my approach is just to forgive and forget’’, and ‘‘I have a tendency to harbor grudges’’ [reversed]). The TTF has been shown in previous studies (e.g., Brown, 2003; Brown & Phillips, 2005) to predict the accessibility of past offense experiences, state forgiveness for specific offenses, and levels of mental health and well-being. Attitudes toward forgiveness (ATF). The ATF (Brown, 2003) is a 6-item scale designed to capture the extent to which individuals endorse pro-forgiveness attitudes (e.g., ‘‘I believe that forgiveness is a moral virtue’’, and ‘‘It is admirable to be a forgiving person’’). Thus, the ATF assesses the extent to which respondents believe that forgiveness is virtuous and good, whereas the TTF assesses the occurrence of forgiveness in the life of the respondent; like attitudes and behaviors in general, these constructs are related but clearly distinguishable. On the ATF and TTF participants reported how much they agreed with the statements included in each questionnaire on a 7point Likert scale ranging from 1 (‘‘strongly disagree’’) to 7 (‘‘strongly agree’’). Both scales were scored such that higher scores indicate more forgiveness (attitudes or tendencies). Shortened Christian orthodoxy scale (SCO). Created by Hunsberger (1989), the SCO is a 6-item version of Fullerton and Hunsberger’s (1982) original 24-item scale. The SCO is designed to assess respondents’ beliefs in the central, historical doctrines of the Christian faith with items such as, ‘‘Jesus Christ is the Divine Son of God’’, and ‘‘Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried, but on the third day He rose from the dead’’, without tapping strongly into other attitudinal elements that tend to characterize the fundamentalist belief system (McFarland, 1989).
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Religious fundamentalism scale (RF). Altemeyer and Hunsberger’s (1992) RF scale includes 12 items that assess individuals’ defensive attitudes toward their religious beliefs and has little to do with any particular religious system. Sample items include, ‘‘When you get right down to it, there are only two kinds of people in the world: the Righteous, who will be rewarded by God, and the rest who will not’’, and ‘‘The fundamentals of God’s religion should never be tampered with or compromised with others’ beliefs’’. Participants responded to both the RF and SCO on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (‘‘strongly disagree’’) to 5 (‘‘strongly agree’’).
4. Results and discussion To test the hypothesis that fundamentalism, as indexed by the RF scale, predicts favorable attitudes toward forgiveness, respondents’ gender (coded as 0 for females and 1 for males), RF, and SCO scores were simultaneously entered into a regression equation predicting scores on the ATF. Controlling for RF and SCO, gender was a significant predictor (b = 0.09) of pro-forgiveness attitudes, t(677) = 2.49, p = 0.01, such that males (M = 4.12) scored lower on the ATF than did females (M = 4.27). Christian orthodoxy was also a significant predictor of ATF scores, b = 0.22, t(677) = 4.07, p < 0.001. Of particular importance, however, was that RF scores were positively and significantly related to pro-forgiveness attitudes above and beyond gender and orthodoxy, as we expected, b = 0.22, t(677) = 4.20, p < 0.001. In contrast, only gender was a significant predictor of scores on the TTF, b = 0.18, t(677) = 4.65, p < 0.001, such that males (M = 3.42) scored higher than females (M = 3.02). Neither Christian orthodoxy, b = 0.05, t < 1.0, nor religious fundamentalism, b = 0.07, t(677) = 1.26, ns, significantly predicted scores on the TTF. Likewise, regressing RF on gender, SCO, the ATF, and the TTF revealed that only SCO (b = 0.71) and the ATF (b = 0.12) accounted for significant variance in fundamentalism, t(677) = 25.69 and 4.0, respectively, ps < 0.001. Neither gender (b = 0.03) nor the TTF (b = 0.00) were even marginally significant predictors, t(677) = 1.14 and 0.01, respectively, ps > 0.25. Consistent with prior research (e.g., Rokeach, 1969; Shoemaker & Bolt, 1977), participants in Study 1 appeared to value forgiveness more highly if they were also high in religious fundamentalism. However, the results of Study 1 also suggest that although fundamentalism was a significant predictor of pro-forgiveness attitudes, it was not a significant predictor of the tendency to forgive, as expected. Study 2 was designed to provide converging evidence for the distinction between pro-forgiveness attitudes and forgiveness behaviors and to extend the results of Study 1 by using a less direct measure of religious fundamentalism.
5. Study 2 5.1. Method 5.1.1. Participants and procedure All measures described below were administered to 734 undergraduates (269 men and 465 women) at the University of Oklahoma, who participated in exchange for credit toward a research
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exposure requirement in introductory psychology. Participants completed these measures in a large, online survey at the beginning of the semester. All measures once again demonstrated adequate internal consistencies (all as > 0.68). 5.1.2. Measures Forgiveness. As in Study 1, participants completed the TTF and the ATF to measure the tendency to forgive others and attitudes toward forgiveness, respectively. Religiosity. In addition to the TTF and ATF, we also administered the internal religiosity subscale of Batson, Schoenrade, and Ventis’s (1993) IEQ. This subscale has been shown to correlate very highly (r > .80) with the intrinsic dimension of Allport and Ross’s (1967) religious orientations scale. Example religiosity items from this measure include ‘‘God’s will should shape my life’’, and ‘‘I find it impossible to conceive of myself not being religious’’. Participants responded to this religiosity measure on a Likert scale with endpoints labeled ‘‘strongly disagree’’ (1) and ‘‘strongly agree’’ (7). This measure has demonstrated good discriminant and convergent validity in prior studies (for a review, see Batson et al., 1993). Need for Structure. Example items from the personal need for structure scale include ‘‘It upsets me to go into a situation without knowing what I can expect from it’’, and ‘‘I enjoy having a clear and structured mode of life’’. Participants responded to the PNS items on a Likert scale with endpoints labeled ‘‘strongly disagree’’ (1) and ‘‘strongly agree’’ (6). This scale has also demonstrated good discriminant and convergent validity in prior studies of cognitive style (for a review, see Thompson et al., 2001).
6. Results and discussion Data were analyzed in a series of hierarchical multiple regressions in which both need for structure and religiosity were first mean-centered prior to the creation of the interaction term (Aiken & West, 1991). On the first step of each regression analysis, gender, need for structure, and religiosity were entered. On the second step of the regression analyses, the interaction between PNS and religiosity was entered. Zero-order correlations between all the predictor variables are shown in Table 1. The regression model predicting ATF scores revealed a significant association between the ATF and gender (coded as 0 for females and 1 for males), b = 0.15, t(729) = 4.69, p < 0.001, as Table 1 Zero-order correlations among predictor variables in Study 2 TTF Gender TTF ATF PNS
0.14
ATF 0.19 0.28
PNS 0.14 0.26 0.00
Rel 0.10 0.15 0.47 0.07
Note: TTF = tendency to forgive; ATF = attitudes toward forgiveness; PNS = personal need for structure; and Rel = religiosity; all correlations greater than 0.09 are significant at a = 0.05. Gender is coded as 0 for females and 1 for males.
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well as between the ATF and religiosity, b = .45, t(729) = 13.73, p < 0.001. Thus, females (M = 4.23, SD = 0.83) scored higher on the ATF than did males (M = 3.89, SD = 0.92), as did more religious individuals. PNS was not a significant predictor of the ATF, b = 0.05, ns. As predicted, though, a significant PNS · religiosity interaction also emerged, b = 0.12, t(729) = 3.56, p < 0.001. The pattern of this interaction is shown in Fig. 1, graphed at high (1 SD above the mean) and low (1 SD below the mean) values of PNS and religiosity. As can be seen in this figure, religiosity was positively related to scores on the ATF at low levels of PNS, b = .34, p < 0.001. However, the interaction between PNS and religiosity shows that the religiosity-ATF relation was significantly more pronounced at high levels of PNS, b = .55, p < 0.001. Thus, high PNS increased the association between religiosity and the ATF. When the same regression analysis was performed on the TTF, significant associations were found for gender, b = 0.12, t(729) = 3.33, p < 0.01, religiosity, b = .17, t(729) = 4.87, p < 0.001, and PNS, b = 0.25, t(729) = 7.15, p < 0.001. Thus, males (M = 3.27, SD = 1.20) scored somewhat higher on the TTF than did females (M = 2.92, SD = 1.24), as did more religious individuals. However, participants high on PNS scored relatively low on the TTF. The significant negative association between PNS and the TTF stands in contrast to the complete lack of an association between PNS and the ATF. Contrary to results for the ATF, PNS and religiosity did not interact to predict scores on the TTF, b = 0.001, ns. The independent, additive associations between these variables and the TTF are displayed in Fig. 2, which shows that participants who reported being the most forgiving were those who were high in religiosity and low in need for structure. In support of this conclusion, simple slopes tests revealed that PNS was negatively related to scores on the TTF at both high (b = 0.26, p < 0.001) and low (b = 0.25, p < 0.001) levels of religiosity, and also that religiosity was positively related to the TTF at both high and low levels of PNS (bs = .19, ps < 0.001). In the context of multiple regression analyses with
5
Pro-Forgiveness Values
4.5
4
Low PNS 3.5
High PNS 3
2.5
Low Religiosity
High Religiosity
Fig. 1. Pro-forgiveness values as a function of religiosity and personal need for structure (PNS). High and low values are calculated at +1 SD and 1 SD (respectively) from each scale mean.
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Low PNS
Tendency to Forgive
4
High PNS
3.5
3
2.5
2
Low Religiosity
High Religiosity
Fig. 2. Tendency to forgive as a function of religiosity and personal need for structure (PNS). High and low values are calculated at +1 SD and 1 SD (respectively) from each scale mean.
continuous predictors, these simple slopes tests are analogous to simple effects tests on means in an ANOVA.
7. General discussion In this research, we show that the oft-asserted, and sometimes demonstrated, link between forgiveness and religiosity might be more complicated than has been previously assumed. Our data show that religiosity and dispositional forgiveness are positively correlated, depending on what is meant by religiosity, and what is meant by forgiveness. To summarize, the present results reveal that pro-forgiveness attitudes and the tendency to forgive diverge in their associations with religious fundamentalism. Whereas pro-forgiveness attitudes were related significantly with both a direct self-report measure of fundamentalist ideology and with a statistical combination of religiosity and need for structure, the tendency to forgive was not. Further, not only was the relation between religiosity and the ATF more than twice the size of the relation between religiosity and the TTF in Study 2 (and significantly larger: Z = 6.92, p < 0.001), but personal need for structure was also negatively associated with the TTF and unrelated to the ATF. More importantly, Study 2 revealed an interaction between religiosity and need for structure with respect to pro-forgiveness attitudes, such that the positive association between religiosity and the ATF was especially strong among individuals who were also high in need for structure, a pattern that was not found for the TTF. We submit that this combination of strong religiosity and the rigid, closed cognitive style associated with a high need for structure represents the essence of religious fundamentalism. Study 2 is particularly noteworthy insofar as it demonstrates an interaction between religiosity and a completely non-religious measure of cognitive style in relation to pro-forgiveness attitudes. Together, the results of both studies suggest that
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religious fundamentalism relates differently to forgiveness tendencies and attitudes about forgiveness, underscoring previous arguments that these dimensions of dispositional forgiveness are not interchangeable (Brown, 2003; Brown & Phillips, 2005). Our reliance on self-reports in the present study is clearly a limitation to our data, and future research could enhance our understanding of the religiosity–forgiveness association by finding creative ways to get around this limitation. Because religious fundamentalism (according to the present conceptualization) appears to be positively associated with the desirability of forgiveness, if not the actual experience of forgiveness, developing forgiveness measures that do not rely on self-report might be particularly valuable in examinations of this sort. Future research in this area could also expand upon the present work by examining state forgiveness for experimentally manipulated offenses, rather than self-reported general attitudes and tendencies. In doing so, researchers might also be able to delineate whether certain classes of offenses might be more or less likely to be forgiven by individuals high versus low in religious fundamentalism. Furthermore, our conceptualization of religious fundamentalism in Study 2, though based upon previous theorizing in the psychology of religion, lacks independent empirical support beyond the internal consistencies across the two studies concerning distinctions between valuing and experiencing forgiveness. This lack of external validation evidence for our operationalization of religious fundamentalism in Study 2 means that any conclusions derived from the present work must be viewed with caution. Further research designed specifically to test the validity of this religiosity X cognitive style conceptualization of fundamentalism is clearly needed (see Saroglou, 2002). Indeed, our joint assessment of religiosity and need for structure may be one of the most unique contributions of the present research. Although the impetus behind our assessing these constructs independently is well grounded in decades of research on authoritarianism, dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, and the like, ours is the first study that we know of to assess a non-religious variable (cognitive style) and combine it with an overtly religious one as a conceptual proxy for religious fundamentalism. The success of this approach suggests an interesting avenue for future research on fundamentalism. If, as previous researchers have suggested, fundamentalism can come in many forms, religious and otherwise (e.g., Altemeyer, 1996; Ethridge & Feagin, 1979; Rokeach, 1960; cf. Hood, Hill, & Williamson, 2005), then perhaps researchers might assess personal commitment to non-religious belief systems along with need for structure to measure different manifestations of fundamentalism, such as political fundamentalism, environmental fundamentalism, dietary-supplement fundamentalism, and even atheistic fundamentalism. Such an approach would allow researchers to examine empirically the dimensions along which various types of fundamentalists show similarities and differences without all of the excess psychometric and ideological baggage that has accompanied many attempts to measure related constructs in the past. Despite the limitations of these studies, the present results extend previous research by underscoring the importance of construct specificity with regard to both religiosity and forgiveness. Not all measures of religiosity are the same, nor are all measures of dispositional forgiveness. Our data suggest that religiosity measures that assess fundamentalism may be less likely to predict actual forgiveness than they are to predict attitudes about forgiveness. Likewise, dispositional forgiveness measures that draw heavily upon forgiveness values, such as measures that require respondents to predict how forgiving they would be in response to hypothetical offenses (e.g., Berry et al., 2001), could likely overstate the religiosity–forgiveness association. We hope that the
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present work will encourage researchers in the future to pioneer new approaches to advance our understanding of the nature and consequences of fundamentalism in its various forms as well as to develop our understanding of the multiple facets of forgiveness.
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Fundamentalism and forgiveness Ryan P. Brown *, Collin D. Barnes, Nicole Judice Campbell Department of Psychology, The University of Oklahoma, 455 W. Lindsey, DHT 705, Norman, OK 73019, United States Received 18 August 2006; received in revised form 26 February 2007; accepted 12 April 2007 Available online 15 June 2007
Abstract Two studies investigated the associations between religious fundamentalism (RF) and aspects of dispositional forgiveness: pro-forgiveness attitudes and the tendency to forgive others. In Study 1, a direct selfreport measure of RF was significantly associated with pro-forgiveness attitudes, but not with the tendency to forgive. In Study 2, we conceptually replicated these results by combining a measure of religiosity and a measure of need for structure, a cognitive style variable related to rigid, categorical thinking. A significant interaction between religiosity and need for structure revealed that the positive association between religiosity and pro-forgiveness attitudes was higher among respondents who were also high in need for structure. As expected, this pattern did not occur with the tendency to forgive, which was positively related to religiosity but negatively related to need for structure. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Forgiveness; Fundamentalism; Religiosity; Need for structure; Cognitive style
1. Fundamentalism and forgiveness Over the course of the last several decades, researchers have suggested that interpersonal forgiveness ought to be associated with religiosity (for reviews, see McCullough, Bono, & Root, 2005; McCullough & Worthington, 1999). Given the high moral value that many religions place on forgiveness, the occurrence of forgiving exemplars within various religions, and the occurrence *
Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 405 325 4526; fax: +1 405 325 4737. E-mail address: [email protected] (R.P. Brown).
0191-8869/$ - see front matter 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2007.04.025
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of theological connections between forgiving others and being forgiven by God (particularly in the Christian religion), the assumption of a religiosity–forgiveness link seems well reasoned, and some research finds empirical support for this assumption. For example, early studies by Allport and Ross (1967) and by Shoemaker and Bolt (1977) showed that highly religious individuals ranked forgiveness higher in importance than most other values, and this emphasis on forgiveness distinguished highly religious from less religious individuals. More recently, some studies report significant correlations between religiosity and self-reported forgiveness (e.g., Berry, Worthington, Parrott, O’Connor, & Wade, 2001; Edwards et al., 2002), whereas other studies find virtually no such relationship (e.g., Subkoviak, Enright, Ching-Ru, & Gassin, 1995). Others have also noted that certain statistical considerations can moderate the size of this association (Tsang, McCullough, & Hoyt, 2005). Summarizing the existing empirical studies on the religion–forgiveness association, McCullough et al. (2005) have concluded that ‘‘religious individuals are, in general, slightly more forgiving than are less religious people, although this association is rather small’’ (p. 399). The present study extends previous research on religiosity and forgiveness in several ways. First, we argue that the relation between religiosity and forgiveness might depend, in part, on how forgiveness is conceptualized. Specifically, whether researchers construe dispositional forgiveness in terms of typical behavioral/experiential tendencies or in terms of pro-forgiveness attitudes and values might change the degree to which a measure of forgiveness relates to religiosity. As recent research by Brown and colleagues has demonstrated, the tendency to forgive and proforgiveness attitudes are positively associated, but also empirically distinguishable (Brown, 2003; Brown & Phillips, 2005), just as attitudes and behaviors in general are related but distinct. Consistent with prior research (e.g., Rokeach, 1969), we expect that more religious people are likely to value forgiveness to a greater extent than are less religious people. However, what we claim to value and what we do often diverge. In the case of forgiveness, valuing is much easier than doing, and simply being very religious may not be enough to facilitate the latter. Second, we also propose that how researchers conceptualize religiosity could make an important difference in the degree of association between religiosity and forgiveness. Indeed, across the handful of studies that have reported on the religiosity–forgiveness link over the last several decades, religiosity has been assessed variously as a categorical variable, as degrees of intrinsic or extrinsic religious orientation, and as frequency or depth of religious involvement. Although such indices of religiosity might overlap substantially, they, too, are not necessarily interchangeable. Furthermore, one manifestation of religiosity that has yet to be assessed in this literature is fundamentalism, which is the type of religiosity on which we focus in the current research. The construct of fundamentalism has been defined in a variety of ways including, but not limited to, a boundary maintenance phenomenon (Ethridge & Feagin, 1979; Hood, Morris, & Watson, 1986), an attitude toward the beliefs one endorses (Altemeyer, 1996), and a closed belief system (Kirkpatrick, Hood, & Hartz, 1991; Rokeach, 1960). Each of these definitions has worthwhile contributions to make toward understanding the fundamentalist mindset, and research derived from these various perspectives has demonstrated a host of attitudinal and social–relational correlates of fundamentalism (e.g., Altemeyer, 2003; Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992; Hunsberger, Owusu, & Duck, 2000; Kirkpatrick, 1993; Kirkpatrick et al., 1991; Laythe, Finkel, & Kirkpatrick, 1999). Our reading of the literature to date leads us to adopt the view that fundamentalism may best be conceived as a joint function of deeply held convictions about one’s beliefs and a rigid cognitive
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orientation, similar to the mentality exhibited by individuals high in need for structure. The personal need for structure scale (PNS; Neuberg & Newsom, 1993) was designed to capture an individual difference in cognitive style exemplified by a preference for rigid, well-bounded, simple cognitive structures. There is a rich history of measures created to capture just such a rigid cognitive style, although many such measures are heavily laden with political or even religious content (e.g., right-wing authoritarianism [RWA], dogmatism). PNS correlates with such measures (e.g., RWA, r = .37, p < 0.001; Thompson, Naccarato, & Parker, 2001) but captures the essence of a rigid and closed cognitive style without specific references to political, social, or religious beliefs. Thus, the PNS scale seems ideally suited for distinguishing the content of beliefs (e.g., belief in God) from how they are represented cognitively. Research on religious fundamentalism leads us to expect that religious fundamentalists will be especially likely to have positive attitudes toward forgiveness. In essence, if their religious tradition extols the virtues of forgiveness, then people will tend to accept and internalize the value of forgiveness to the extent that they are high in need for structure. However, we also hypothesized that this same rigid cognitive style might inhibit people’s ability to experience actual forgiveness. As research has shown, need for structure is associated with a host of potential barriers to forgiving, including simplistic thinking, intolerance of ambiguity, and negative affectivity (e.g., Moskowitz, 1993; Neuberg & Newsom, 1993; Schaller, Boyd, & Yohannes, 1995). Consequently, people high in need for structure who feel they have been wronged may often fail to engage in perspective taking, may have a tendency to place their offenders in simple, negative categories, and may view their offenders with particular hostility. Combining this rigid cognitive style with intense religiosity might further enhance the barriers to forgiveness, insofar as religious beliefs could provide or legitimate simple socio-moral categorizations that could easily be mis-applied by individuals high in need for structure (e.g., ‘‘those who mistreat me are evil and should be punished’’). In this way, the inflexible cognitive style purported to underlie fundamentalism could counteract any motivational benefits to forgive that might derive from certain religious ideals and teachings, resulting in a weak or even non-existent association between fundamentalism and forgiveness. In two studies, we examined the hypothesis that religious fundamentalism would be positively related to pro-forgiveness attitudes but not to forgiveness behaviors. In the first study, we measured religious fundamentalism directly with a self-report scale. In the second study, we took a novel approach to fundamentalism by combining a measure of intrinsic religiosity with a measure of need for structure and examining their interaction with respect to pro-forgiveness attitudes and forgiveness tendencies. Consistent with our reasoning about the nature of fundamentalism, need for structure was expected to enhance the association between religiosity and forgiveness attitudes, but not between religiosity and forgiveness behaviors.
2. Study 1 In this study, we investigated the association between religious fundamentalism, pro-forgiveness attitudes, and self-reported forgiveness tendencies. Because fundamentalists are likely to score high in orthodoxy, but not everyone who scores high in orthodoxy is necessarily a fundamentalist, we controlled for Christian orthodoxy in our assessment of the fundamentalism–forgiveness
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relationship (Fullerton & Hunsberger, 1982; Kirkpatrick, 1993). We also controlled for gender in both Studies 1 and 2, as gender has been shown in previous research to relate not only to religiosity (Spilka, Hood, Hunsberger, & Gorsuch, 2003), but also to forgiveness (e.g., Brown, 2003; Brown & Phillips, 2005).
3. Method 3.1. Participants Six hundred eighty-one undergraduates (435 females, 246 males) at the University of Oklahoma participated in exchange for credit toward a research exposure requirement in their introductory psychology course. Although our use of a Christian orthodoxy scale as a control variable in this study might make the inclusion of non-Christian participants seem problematic, excluding the 136 non-Christian participants had little impact on the results we report below. Thus, to make samples across studies optimally comparable, we did not exclude non-Christians. 3.2. Measures and procedure The following scales were included with a variety of other questionnaires in a large, online survey that participants completed at the beginning of the semester. Participants responded to the scales in the order they are presented below. All scales exhibited acceptable levels of internal consistency (all as > 0.68). Tendency to forgive (TTF). The TTF is a brief, 4-item scale that assesses the degree to which individuals are generally forgiving of people who have offended them (e.g., ‘‘When people wrong me, my approach is just to forgive and forget’’, and ‘‘I have a tendency to harbor grudges’’ [reversed]). The TTF has been shown in previous studies (e.g., Brown, 2003; Brown & Phillips, 2005) to predict the accessibility of past offense experiences, state forgiveness for specific offenses, and levels of mental health and well-being. Attitudes toward forgiveness (ATF). The ATF (Brown, 2003) is a 6-item scale designed to capture the extent to which individuals endorse pro-forgiveness attitudes (e.g., ‘‘I believe that forgiveness is a moral virtue’’, and ‘‘It is admirable to be a forgiving person’’). Thus, the ATF assesses the extent to which respondents believe that forgiveness is virtuous and good, whereas the TTF assesses the occurrence of forgiveness in the life of the respondent; like attitudes and behaviors in general, these constructs are related but clearly distinguishable. On the ATF and TTF participants reported how much they agreed with the statements included in each questionnaire on a 7point Likert scale ranging from 1 (‘‘strongly disagree’’) to 7 (‘‘strongly agree’’). Both scales were scored such that higher scores indicate more forgiveness (attitudes or tendencies). Shortened Christian orthodoxy scale (SCO). Created by Hunsberger (1989), the SCO is a 6-item version of Fullerton and Hunsberger’s (1982) original 24-item scale. The SCO is designed to assess respondents’ beliefs in the central, historical doctrines of the Christian faith with items such as, ‘‘Jesus Christ is the Divine Son of God’’, and ‘‘Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried, but on the third day He rose from the dead’’, without tapping strongly into other attitudinal elements that tend to characterize the fundamentalist belief system (McFarland, 1989).
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Religious fundamentalism scale (RF). Altemeyer and Hunsberger’s (1992) RF scale includes 12 items that assess individuals’ defensive attitudes toward their religious beliefs and has little to do with any particular religious system. Sample items include, ‘‘When you get right down to it, there are only two kinds of people in the world: the Righteous, who will be rewarded by God, and the rest who will not’’, and ‘‘The fundamentals of God’s religion should never be tampered with or compromised with others’ beliefs’’. Participants responded to both the RF and SCO on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (‘‘strongly disagree’’) to 5 (‘‘strongly agree’’).
4. Results and discussion To test the hypothesis that fundamentalism, as indexed by the RF scale, predicts favorable attitudes toward forgiveness, respondents’ gender (coded as 0 for females and 1 for males), RF, and SCO scores were simultaneously entered into a regression equation predicting scores on the ATF. Controlling for RF and SCO, gender was a significant predictor (b = 0.09) of pro-forgiveness attitudes, t(677) = 2.49, p = 0.01, such that males (M = 4.12) scored lower on the ATF than did females (M = 4.27). Christian orthodoxy was also a significant predictor of ATF scores, b = 0.22, t(677) = 4.07, p < 0.001. Of particular importance, however, was that RF scores were positively and significantly related to pro-forgiveness attitudes above and beyond gender and orthodoxy, as we expected, b = 0.22, t(677) = 4.20, p < 0.001. In contrast, only gender was a significant predictor of scores on the TTF, b = 0.18, t(677) = 4.65, p < 0.001, such that males (M = 3.42) scored higher than females (M = 3.02). Neither Christian orthodoxy, b = 0.05, t < 1.0, nor religious fundamentalism, b = 0.07, t(677) = 1.26, ns, significantly predicted scores on the TTF. Likewise, regressing RF on gender, SCO, the ATF, and the TTF revealed that only SCO (b = 0.71) and the ATF (b = 0.12) accounted for significant variance in fundamentalism, t(677) = 25.69 and 4.0, respectively, ps < 0.001. Neither gender (b = 0.03) nor the TTF (b = 0.00) were even marginally significant predictors, t(677) = 1.14 and 0.01, respectively, ps > 0.25. Consistent with prior research (e.g., Rokeach, 1969; Shoemaker & Bolt, 1977), participants in Study 1 appeared to value forgiveness more highly if they were also high in religious fundamentalism. However, the results of Study 1 also suggest that although fundamentalism was a significant predictor of pro-forgiveness attitudes, it was not a significant predictor of the tendency to forgive, as expected. Study 2 was designed to provide converging evidence for the distinction between pro-forgiveness attitudes and forgiveness behaviors and to extend the results of Study 1 by using a less direct measure of religious fundamentalism.
5. Study 2 5.1. Method 5.1.1. Participants and procedure All measures described below were administered to 734 undergraduates (269 men and 465 women) at the University of Oklahoma, who participated in exchange for credit toward a research
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exposure requirement in introductory psychology. Participants completed these measures in a large, online survey at the beginning of the semester. All measures once again demonstrated adequate internal consistencies (all as > 0.68). 5.1.2. Measures Forgiveness. As in Study 1, participants completed the TTF and the ATF to measure the tendency to forgive others and attitudes toward forgiveness, respectively. Religiosity. In addition to the TTF and ATF, we also administered the internal religiosity subscale of Batson, Schoenrade, and Ventis’s (1993) IEQ. This subscale has been shown to correlate very highly (r > .80) with the intrinsic dimension of Allport and Ross’s (1967) religious orientations scale. Example religiosity items from this measure include ‘‘God’s will should shape my life’’, and ‘‘I find it impossible to conceive of myself not being religious’’. Participants responded to this religiosity measure on a Likert scale with endpoints labeled ‘‘strongly disagree’’ (1) and ‘‘strongly agree’’ (7). This measure has demonstrated good discriminant and convergent validity in prior studies (for a review, see Batson et al., 1993). Need for Structure. Example items from the personal need for structure scale include ‘‘It upsets me to go into a situation without knowing what I can expect from it’’, and ‘‘I enjoy having a clear and structured mode of life’’. Participants responded to the PNS items on a Likert scale with endpoints labeled ‘‘strongly disagree’’ (1) and ‘‘strongly agree’’ (6). This scale has also demonstrated good discriminant and convergent validity in prior studies of cognitive style (for a review, see Thompson et al., 2001).
6. Results and discussion Data were analyzed in a series of hierarchical multiple regressions in which both need for structure and religiosity were first mean-centered prior to the creation of the interaction term (Aiken & West, 1991). On the first step of each regression analysis, gender, need for structure, and religiosity were entered. On the second step of the regression analyses, the interaction between PNS and religiosity was entered. Zero-order correlations between all the predictor variables are shown in Table 1. The regression model predicting ATF scores revealed a significant association between the ATF and gender (coded as 0 for females and 1 for males), b = 0.15, t(729) = 4.69, p < 0.001, as Table 1 Zero-order correlations among predictor variables in Study 2 TTF Gender TTF ATF PNS
0.14
ATF 0.19 0.28
PNS 0.14 0.26 0.00
Rel 0.10 0.15 0.47 0.07
Note: TTF = tendency to forgive; ATF = attitudes toward forgiveness; PNS = personal need for structure; and Rel = religiosity; all correlations greater than 0.09 are significant at a = 0.05. Gender is coded as 0 for females and 1 for males.
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well as between the ATF and religiosity, b = .45, t(729) = 13.73, p < 0.001. Thus, females (M = 4.23, SD = 0.83) scored higher on the ATF than did males (M = 3.89, SD = 0.92), as did more religious individuals. PNS was not a significant predictor of the ATF, b = 0.05, ns. As predicted, though, a significant PNS · religiosity interaction also emerged, b = 0.12, t(729) = 3.56, p < 0.001. The pattern of this interaction is shown in Fig. 1, graphed at high (1 SD above the mean) and low (1 SD below the mean) values of PNS and religiosity. As can be seen in this figure, religiosity was positively related to scores on the ATF at low levels of PNS, b = .34, p < 0.001. However, the interaction between PNS and religiosity shows that the religiosity-ATF relation was significantly more pronounced at high levels of PNS, b = .55, p < 0.001. Thus, high PNS increased the association between religiosity and the ATF. When the same regression analysis was performed on the TTF, significant associations were found for gender, b = 0.12, t(729) = 3.33, p < 0.01, religiosity, b = .17, t(729) = 4.87, p < 0.001, and PNS, b = 0.25, t(729) = 7.15, p < 0.001. Thus, males (M = 3.27, SD = 1.20) scored somewhat higher on the TTF than did females (M = 2.92, SD = 1.24), as did more religious individuals. However, participants high on PNS scored relatively low on the TTF. The significant negative association between PNS and the TTF stands in contrast to the complete lack of an association between PNS and the ATF. Contrary to results for the ATF, PNS and religiosity did not interact to predict scores on the TTF, b = 0.001, ns. The independent, additive associations between these variables and the TTF are displayed in Fig. 2, which shows that participants who reported being the most forgiving were those who were high in religiosity and low in need for structure. In support of this conclusion, simple slopes tests revealed that PNS was negatively related to scores on the TTF at both high (b = 0.26, p < 0.001) and low (b = 0.25, p < 0.001) levels of religiosity, and also that religiosity was positively related to the TTF at both high and low levels of PNS (bs = .19, ps < 0.001). In the context of multiple regression analyses with
5
Pro-Forgiveness Values
4.5
4
Low PNS 3.5
High PNS 3
2.5
Low Religiosity
High Religiosity
Fig. 1. Pro-forgiveness values as a function of religiosity and personal need for structure (PNS). High and low values are calculated at +1 SD and 1 SD (respectively) from each scale mean.
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Low PNS
Tendency to Forgive
4
High PNS
3.5
3
2.5
2
Low Religiosity
High Religiosity
Fig. 2. Tendency to forgive as a function of religiosity and personal need for structure (PNS). High and low values are calculated at +1 SD and 1 SD (respectively) from each scale mean.
continuous predictors, these simple slopes tests are analogous to simple effects tests on means in an ANOVA.
7. General discussion In this research, we show that the oft-asserted, and sometimes demonstrated, link between forgiveness and religiosity might be more complicated than has been previously assumed. Our data show that religiosity and dispositional forgiveness are positively correlated, depending on what is meant by religiosity, and what is meant by forgiveness. To summarize, the present results reveal that pro-forgiveness attitudes and the tendency to forgive diverge in their associations with religious fundamentalism. Whereas pro-forgiveness attitudes were related significantly with both a direct self-report measure of fundamentalist ideology and with a statistical combination of religiosity and need for structure, the tendency to forgive was not. Further, not only was the relation between religiosity and the ATF more than twice the size of the relation between religiosity and the TTF in Study 2 (and significantly larger: Z = 6.92, p < 0.001), but personal need for structure was also negatively associated with the TTF and unrelated to the ATF. More importantly, Study 2 revealed an interaction between religiosity and need for structure with respect to pro-forgiveness attitudes, such that the positive association between religiosity and the ATF was especially strong among individuals who were also high in need for structure, a pattern that was not found for the TTF. We submit that this combination of strong religiosity and the rigid, closed cognitive style associated with a high need for structure represents the essence of religious fundamentalism. Study 2 is particularly noteworthy insofar as it demonstrates an interaction between religiosity and a completely non-religious measure of cognitive style in relation to pro-forgiveness attitudes. Together, the results of both studies suggest that
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religious fundamentalism relates differently to forgiveness tendencies and attitudes about forgiveness, underscoring previous arguments that these dimensions of dispositional forgiveness are not interchangeable (Brown, 2003; Brown & Phillips, 2005). Our reliance on self-reports in the present study is clearly a limitation to our data, and future research could enhance our understanding of the religiosity–forgiveness association by finding creative ways to get around this limitation. Because religious fundamentalism (according to the present conceptualization) appears to be positively associated with the desirability of forgiveness, if not the actual experience of forgiveness, developing forgiveness measures that do not rely on self-report might be particularly valuable in examinations of this sort. Future research in this area could also expand upon the present work by examining state forgiveness for experimentally manipulated offenses, rather than self-reported general attitudes and tendencies. In doing so, researchers might also be able to delineate whether certain classes of offenses might be more or less likely to be forgiven by individuals high versus low in religious fundamentalism. Furthermore, our conceptualization of religious fundamentalism in Study 2, though based upon previous theorizing in the psychology of religion, lacks independent empirical support beyond the internal consistencies across the two studies concerning distinctions between valuing and experiencing forgiveness. This lack of external validation evidence for our operationalization of religious fundamentalism in Study 2 means that any conclusions derived from the present work must be viewed with caution. Further research designed specifically to test the validity of this religiosity X cognitive style conceptualization of fundamentalism is clearly needed (see Saroglou, 2002). Indeed, our joint assessment of religiosity and need for structure may be one of the most unique contributions of the present research. Although the impetus behind our assessing these constructs independently is well grounded in decades of research on authoritarianism, dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, and the like, ours is the first study that we know of to assess a non-religious variable (cognitive style) and combine it with an overtly religious one as a conceptual proxy for religious fundamentalism. The success of this approach suggests an interesting avenue for future research on fundamentalism. If, as previous researchers have suggested, fundamentalism can come in many forms, religious and otherwise (e.g., Altemeyer, 1996; Ethridge & Feagin, 1979; Rokeach, 1960; cf. Hood, Hill, & Williamson, 2005), then perhaps researchers might assess personal commitment to non-religious belief systems along with need for structure to measure different manifestations of fundamentalism, such as political fundamentalism, environmental fundamentalism, dietary-supplement fundamentalism, and even atheistic fundamentalism. Such an approach would allow researchers to examine empirically the dimensions along which various types of fundamentalists show similarities and differences without all of the excess psychometric and ideological baggage that has accompanied many attempts to measure related constructs in the past. Despite the limitations of these studies, the present results extend previous research by underscoring the importance of construct specificity with regard to both religiosity and forgiveness. Not all measures of religiosity are the same, nor are all measures of dispositional forgiveness. Our data suggest that religiosity measures that assess fundamentalism may be less likely to predict actual forgiveness than they are to predict attitudes about forgiveness. Likewise, dispositional forgiveness measures that draw heavily upon forgiveness values, such as measures that require respondents to predict how forgiving they would be in response to hypothetical offenses (e.g., Berry et al., 2001), could likely overstate the religiosity–forgiveness association. We hope that the
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present work will encourage researchers in the future to pioneer new approaches to advance our understanding of the nature and consequences of fundamentalism in its various forms as well as to develop our understanding of the multiple facets of forgiveness.
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