Morality Play or Playing Morality?: Intrinsic Religious Orientation and Socially Desirable Responding

Abstract

The link between intrinsic religious orientation and socially desirable responding suggests that religiously devout individuals are concerned with maintaining a positive self-image in their own eyes (self-deception) and in others' (impression management). Measures of socially desirable responding may, however, penalize intrinsically religious persons for accurate self-reports of conscientiousness. Seventy-four undergraduates completed measures of religious orientation and socially desirable responding, then made either a negative or a positive self-disclosure. Socially desirable responding was again measured. Intrinsic religious orientation was positively correlated with self-deception change in the Negative Disclosure condition. This ® nding, in combination with corroborative behavioral evidence among high Intrinsic scorers, appeared consistent with a self-protective interpretation, rather than a content bias interpretation, of the intrinsic religious orientation=socially desirable responding relationship.

The selective relationship between religious dimensions and social desirability among Polish students

“…Research carried out with the application of the Religious Orientation Scale by Allport and Ross (1967) confirmed the presence of statistically significant correlations between the Internal Religious Orientation and both BIDR subscales -IM and S-D (Burris & Navara, 2002;Leak & Fish, 1989), another research (Gillings & Joseph, 1996) -only between IR and S-D, or lack of any statistically significant correlations (Lewis, 2000). Research carried out employing the Francis Scale of Attitude towards Christianity (Francis & Stubbs, 1987) confirmed only correlation between religiosity and the IM (Gillings & Joseph, 1996).…”

“…The M-C SDS, which was employed in the research mentioned above, treats social desirability as a homogeneous entity mirroring the tendency towards presenting oneself in a socially desirable way. It seems that the relationships between IR and SD might be the result of a conscious management of own image or of not fully realised forms of self-deception (Burris & Navara, 2002;Leak & Fish, 1989). The M-C SDS does not differentiate these two effects.…”

Like a camera in the sky? Thinking about God increases public self-awareness and socially desirable responding

“…Although previous research demonstrates a positive association between religiosity and socially desirable responding (e.g. Burris & Navara, 2002), we are unaware of any experiments demonstrating a causal relationship. We hypothesized that, because perceived social surveillance increases socially desirable responding (e.g., Sproull et al, 1996), implicitly priming God concepts would also increase socially desirable responding.…”

Humble Self-Enhancement

“…Metaanalyses of studies from several countries have established that impression management scores consistently tend to be higher among the devoutly religious (Trimble, 1997;Sedikides & Gebauer, 2010). The debate on how to interpret this finding is still ongoing, but we think there is compelling support for at least some of the effect being due to a tendency among religious people to enhance their self-descriptions (Burris & Navara, 2002;Sedikides & Gebauer, 2010).…”