Religious belief alignment: The structure of cultural beliefs from adolescence to emerging adulthood

Abstract

This article presents an alignment model of cultural formation, arguing that belief systems become increasingly constrained from earlier periods of life-course to adulthood. I show that the pairwise correlations between cultural beliefs increase and the structure of personal culture becomes relatively more aligned before entering adulthood. Moreover, the rate of personal change slows down with each year of age, suggesting that the alignment process is most prevalent in specific socialization periods. Using four waves of data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, I test these propositions through an analysis of religious belief networks. I find that the results are robust to sampling variability, population heterogeneity, and item selection.

Change in Personal Culture over the Life Course

“…Finally, the current study ignored the interrelatedness of different aspects of personal culture. Recent literature highlights how different aspects of individuals’ personal culture relate to each other and how this web of relations may condition changes in personal culture (Keskintürk 2022; Rawlings 2020).…”

The Heterarchy of Occupational Status: Evidence for Diverse Logics of Prestige in the United States*

“…Social learning mechanisms likely play a key role in the formation of these worldviews. Given the elements of class membership which predict logics in the American population, I expect that class- (Lareau 2011;Stephens et al 2014), race- (Brown and Lesane-Brown 2006), gender- (Stockard 2006), and religious-based (Keskinturk 2021) socialization, as well as cohort replacement (Kiley and Vaisey 2020;Vaisey and Lizardo 2016) play key roles. Furthermore, media effects may amplify and reinforce these sources of socialization, particularly when it comes to messages about the meaning of occupations, social standing, and moral worth derived from work (cf.…”

Linking Religious Upbringing to Young Adult Moral Formation

“…It is also worth noting that family religious practices, though measured during adolescence, will tend to be indicative of processes that began much earlier, as parents increase religious practice when their children reach school age (Schleifer and Chaves 2017). Furthermore, research in both psychology and sociology finds high levels of cognitive plasticity, and hence fluctuation in beliefs and attitudes, earlier in the life course, followed by greater stability from young adulthood onward (Keskintürk 2022;Kiley and Vaisey 2020;Nelson et al 2005). Cultural theorists similarly emphasize the role of developmental processes in which durable cognitive traits are formed early in life and solidify later on (Lizardo 2017).…”

“…Lizardo (2017) argues that dispositional traits form as a result of long‐term patterns of experience, which will be most influential when operating in multiple modes or life domains (see also Guhin, Calarco, and Miller‐Idriss 2021). Recent studies in culture and cognition emphasize that cognitive dispositions are relatively unsettled until young adulthood (Keskintürk 2022; Kiley and Vaisey 2020), meaning the most influential formative experiences should be those occurring during childhood and adolescence. An understanding of how moral traits take shape, and by extension how moral differences at the population level form, thus requires a greater focus on the formative role of early‐life experiences.…”