Paranormal beliefs, religious beliefs and personality correlates

1.2. RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND PERSONALITY

Paradoxically, while the major religions proclaim brotherly love, history has shown that religion has often been used as a justification for violence and prejudices – e.g. the Spanish Inquisition (1478 – 1834) in Europe² (Eliade, 1990). This, amongst other reasons, has been a spur for researchers to shed light on the personality-religiosity relationship.

Initial attempts to measure religiosity were performed by calculating the frequency of church attendance and the belief in the existence of a transcendent reality³. This has slowly made way towards more sophisticated measurement methods and the use of personality theories to inform the research.
Early research with regard to personality and religiosity used Eysenck’s three-dimensional model of personality, based on the underlying factors of Psychoticism, Extraversion and Neuroticism (PEN) (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1968, 1985). Eysenck and Eysenck (1968; 1985) confirmed that in a very limited way, different kinds of religiosity correspond to differences in personality traits, although some other studies failed to find any link between religious attitudes and personality (e.g. Chau, Johnson, Bowers, Darvill and Danko, 1990; D’Onofrio, Eaves, Murrelle, Maes and Spilka, 1995; Heaven, 1990; Robinson, 1990). However, in general a series of studies across cultures and denominations converged on the opinion that religious people tend to score lower on Psychoticism (Francis, 1992a, 1992b, 1993; Francis and Katz, 1992; Francis and Pearson, 1993; Lewis and Joseph, 1994; Lewis and Maltby, 1995, 1996; Maltby, 1999a, 1999b). As for the other two factors, different studies produced different results and these inconsistencies lead researchers to believe that these factors are unrelated to religiosity (Eysenck, 1998; Francis, 1992b).
Studies using the Five-Factor Model of personality produced a slightly different result. In many studies (Saroglou, 2002; Kosek, 1999, 2000; Taylor & McDonald, 1999), religiousness is positively related to Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, although these correlations are low (Saroglou, 2002) or sometimes even absent (Streyffeler & McNally, 1998; Saucier & Goldberg, 1998). This also confirms the hypothesis of the low correlation between Psychoticism and religion in the Three Factor Model. Although in most of the studies no significant relation between religion and other factors of the Five Factor Model (Saroglou, 2002) has been found, other studies suggest that religious people should be situated high on some of the other factors as well (Duriez, 2002; McCrae, 1999; Taylor & MacDonald, 1999). Religiosity was weakly correlated with Extraversion, and there was a small but significant effect size regarding Openness to Experience (Saroglou, 2002). Saroglou (2002) as well McCrae (1996; 1999) mentioned the complex but clear pattern of relation between religion and Openness to Experience. Participants who have high scores on Openness to Experience are associated with “open and mature religion” (Saroglou, 2002). Saroglou (2002) also mentioned the striking result that religious fundamentalists are associated with low Openness to Experience. This factor has to be examined in further research. However, one should take into consideration that most of the above-mentioned results have been found in studies in which researchers have been working with a uni-dimensional model. The innovative aspect of the Post-Critical Belief Scale is the proposed two-dimensional structure of religiosity. Although in line with previous research, where none of the five factors of personality correlate significantly with religiosity as it was measured by the Literal vs. Symbolic dimension, a significant correlation with Openness to Experience was found. This is in line with Duriez, Soenens, & Beyers (2003), McCrae (1996, 1999), McCrae, Zimmermann, Costa, & Bond, (1996), and Saroglou (2002) Duriez, Luyten, Snauwaert, Hutsebaut (2002), who expected Openness to Experience to be crucial in order to understand the relation between religiosity and personality.
In a similar approach to paranormal beliefs, Openness to Experience has been suggested as an important factor that might lead to a better understanding of religiosity (McCrae, 1999), as individuals high in this factor are thought to be characterised by a particularly permeable structure of consciousness. This has been supported by a study by Streyffeler and McNally (1998), who found liberal and fundamentalist Protestants to differ with respect to this factor, but not to any other factor of the FFM. This factor, given its definition, is hypothesised to be highly relevant for the way in which religious issues are interpreted and processed.
To this end, Wulff (1991, 1997) has recently constructed a comprehensive framework based on the theory of Paul Ricoeur to identify the various possible approaches to religion (Peeters, 2003a & 2003b, Ricoeur1970 & 1990, Wallace, 1990). It attempts to arrange the approaches in two orthogonal bipolar dimensions. The vertical axis -Exclusion versus Inclusion of Transcendence- specifies whether or not objects of religious interest are granted participation in a transcendent reality, and as such this gives an indication whether or not an individual is religious/spiritual. The horizontal axis -the Literal versus Symbolic dimension- refers to the ways of interpreting religious expression, i.e. an individual can interpret things in a literal or symbolic way. Thus, this dimension can be seen as a form of cognitive comprehension in the way that religious material is processed. As a result four quadrants can be formulated (Figure 1), each representing a differing approach to religion: Literal Affirmation, Literal Disaffirmation, Symbolic Affirmation (also called Reductive Interpretation) and finally Symbolic Disaffirmation (also called Restorative Interpretation).
Figure 1. Wulff’s two dimensional model of religiosity (1991, 1997)



Based on Wulff’s theory, Hutsebaut and his colleagues (Desimpelaere, Sulas, Duriez and Hutsebaut, 1999; Duriez and Hutsebaut, 2000; Hutsebaut, 1996, 1996, & 2000) constructed the Post Critical Belief Scale (PCBS) as an operationalisation of his heuristic model. Here, the four approaches to Christian religiosity of Orthodoxy, External Critique, Relativism and Second Naiveté map onto the four quadrants of Wulff’s model, respectively - Literal Affirmation, Literal Disaffirmation, Symbolic Affirmation and finally Symbolic Disaffirmation (Figure 2). Only recently however, thorough assessments have been performed with regard to the validity of the PCBS construct. Duriez, Fontaine and Hutsebaut (2000) reported that it provides accurate measures of Wulff’s four approaches to religion and that the two components can be interpreted in terms of the dimensions Exclusion versus Inclusion of Transcendence and Literal versus Symbolic (Fontaine, Duriez, Luyten and Hutsebaut, 2003).

Figure 2. Hutsebaut’s Model of religiosity (1991, 1999)

An important point of attention with regard to the previous studies (and results) in this area, such as those reported by Saroglou (2002) and by Peeters (2003a), is that prior to this new model, researchers were working with a uni-dimensional model of religion. The introduction of the innovative two-dimensional model should allow a further discrimination of the complex relationships between personality factors and religiosity-profiles (Peeters, 2003a). For example, nevertheless previous studies reported little or no significant correlations between Openness to Experience and religiosity, the PCBS, as measured by the Literal versus Symbolic dimension did report significant correlations corresponding with previous theories stating that the factor ought to be crucial in understanding the relation between personality and religiosity-profiles (Peeters, 2003a, Duriez, Soenens and Beyers, 2003; McCrae, 1996, 1999; Verhoeven and Hutsebaut, 1995, McCrae, Zimmerman, Costa and Bond, 1996; Saroglou, 2002; Duriez, Luyten, Snauwaert and Hutsebaut, 2002).