Theorizing and Measuring Religiosity Across Cultures.

For almost 50 years, psychologists have been theorizing about and measuring religiosity essentially the way Gordon Allport did, when he distinguished between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. However, there is a historical debate regarding what this scale actually measures, which items should be included, and how many factors or subscales exist. To provide more definitive answers, we estimated a series of confirmatory factor analysis models comparing four competing theories for how to score Gorsuch and McPherson's commonly used measure of intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. We then formally investigated measurement invariance across U.S. Protestants, Irish Catholics, and Turkish Muslims and across U.S. Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims. We provide evidence that a five-item version of intrinsic religiosity is invariant across the U.S. samples and predicts less warmth toward atheists and gay men/lesbians, validating the scale. Our results suggest that a variation of Gorsuch and McPherson's measure may be appropriate for some but not all uses in cross-cultural research.

Religion and intergroup conflict: findings from the Global Group Relations Project.

How might religion shape intergroup conflict? We tested whether religious infusion-the extent to which religious rituals and discourse permeate the everyday activities of groups and their members-moderated the effects of two factors known to increase intergroup conflict: competition for limited resources and incompatibility of values held by potentially conflicting groups. We used data from the Global Group Relations Project to investigate 194 groups (e.g., ethnic, religious, national) at 97 sites around the world. When religion was infused in group life, groups were especially prejudiced against those groups that held incompatible values, and they were likely to discriminate against such groups. Moreover, whereas disadvantaged groups with low levels of religious infusion typically avoided directing aggression against their resource-rich and powerful counterparts, disadvantaged groups with high levels of religious infusion directed significant aggression against them-despite the significant tangible costs to the disadvantaged groups potentially posed by enacting such aggression. This research suggests mechanisms through which religion may increase intergroup conflict and introduces an innovative method for performing nuanced, cross-societal research.