Judgments of Religiosity following Minimal Interaction

Abstract

In the current study, unacquainted groups of both religious Christians and nonreligious atheists/agnostics rated themselves and each other on a number of attributes, including religiosity and morality. A Social Relations analysis revealed small, but statistically significant levels of consensus for impressions of religiosity. Subsequent correlations indicated that groups relied on the target's gender and race to reach consensus. Analyses of participants’ idiosyncratic ratings revealed similarity between religious and non-religious perceivers in terms of their association of high morality with religiousness. Religious identification did moderate the relationship between religiosity and emotional stability, as well as between religiosity and extraversion. These results indicate that group stereotypes for religiosity are largely shared among both adherents and non-adherents.

An Intellectually Humbling Experience: Changes in Interpersonal Perception and Cultural Reasoning across a Five-Week Course

“…In addition to rating others’ IH (intellectually humble, intellectually arrogant*), participants also provided ratings for the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann, 2003), assessing (a) extraversion (extroverted/enthusiastic, reserved/quiet*), (b) agreeableness (sympathetic/warm, critical/quarrelsome*), (c) conscientiousness (dependable/self-disciplined, disorganized/careless*), (d) neuroticism (anxious/easily upset, calm/emotionally stable*), and (e) openness (open to new experiences/complex, conventional/uncreative*), as well as (f) leadership (a good leader, prefers to follow others*, good at helping people work together), (g) self-esteem (has high self-esteem, self-confident, has a low opinion of him-/herself*), and (h) intelligence (intelligent, competent). These additional traits have been used in previous round-robin designs (e.g., Meagher, 2016; Meagher & Kenny, 2013; Meagher et al, 2015) and, if statistically significant target variance is found for IH, can be used to assess what other judgments covary with the groups’ consensus for IH.…”