Attribution of Religious Commitment: Differences Between the Religious and the Nonreligious

Abstract

Investigators of linguistic devices such as minimal responses have assumed their function, neglecting to examine the matter empirically. This study introduces a technique enabling the identification of the function of such responses. With stereophonic recordings of conversation between two people, it was possible to delete minimal responses from an original recording. Eighty British students heard either an original recording or an edited version in which minimal responses had been deleted and were asked to make judgments about various aspects of the interaction. Results indicate minimal responses served to denote agreement and to suggest a context of informality.     

Dishonesty in the Classroom: The Effect of Cognitive Dissonance and the Mitigating Influence of Religious Commitment

A controlled experiment was conducted with a cohort of graduate accounting students, which involved a mild form of deception during a class ethics quiz. One of the answers to a difficult question was inadvertently revealed by a visiting scholar, which allowed students an opportunity to use the answer in order to maximise test scores and qualify for a reward. Despite an attempt to sensitize students prior to the test to the importance of moral codes of conduct, a high incidence of cheating was reported. Students who took the opportunity to cheat were more condoning of the behaviour compared to control group members and this difference in attitudes was consistent regardless of the intensity of the issue specified in the survey. The cognitive dissonance associated with the academic dishonesty is believed to reveal behavioural orientations that reflect conscious and unconscious desires to alleviate the discomfort associated with the behaviour by attempting to condone it. This inappropriate behaviour appears to attract students professing no religious faith and is significantly influenced by the reported level of religious commitment.     

Adolescent Identity Formation: Religious Exploration and Commitment

Two studies investigated links between adolescents' attempts to deal with religious issues, in particular, religious doubt and identity development. Identity status was measured by the Objective Measure of Ego Identity Status (Adams, Bennion, & Huh, 1989; Adams, Shea, & Fitch, 1979), which is based on crisis-exploration and commitment. Study 1 involved 132 university students, and Study 2 included 937 senior high school students. Identity achievement scores were linked to seeking out both belief-confirming consultation (BCC) and belief-threatening consultation (BTC) for religious doubts. Moratorium scores were modestly related to more religious doubting and lack of religious commitment, and also with avoidance of BCC. More foreclosed people were more religiously committed and less doubtful of religious teachings. Doubt consultation for the foreclosed tended to involve belief-confirming sources and avoidance of belief-threatening resources. More diffused individuals tended to experience more religious doubts, be religiously uncommitted, disagree with religious teachings, and avoid both BCC and BTC. Also, identity achievement was positively related to healthy personal adjustment, whereas diffusion was negatively related to healthy personal adjustment. Discussion focuses on the ways in which the concurrent and longitudinal patterns of identity-religion links in these studies support the conceptualization of identity formation and the role that religion plays in the identity process.     

The Commitment Process in a Religious Commune: The Shakers

Focusing on the Shakers and using census data, this paper quantitatively examines influences on religious commitment and the way these influences differed between new and veteran members. Whereas personal characteristics (age, sex, nativity, and occupation) were the primary sources of influence on the commitment of veteran members, new recruits were also influenced by interpersonal and organizational factors (kinship ties, social bonds, and membership in leading groups). The differential effect of influences on commitment illustrates the nature of the commitment process in a religious commune.     

Conflict Between Religious Commitment and Same-Sex Attraction: Possibilities for a Virtuous Response

This article addresses the treatment of individuals who experience conflict between their religious convictions and their same-sex attraction. Recently, attention has been drawn to the ethical issues involved in the practice of sexual reorientation therapy (SRT) with such conflicted individuals. This article reviews the ethical arguments for and against SRT through the lens of the general ethical principles of the American Psychological Association's (2002) ethics code. Practitioners are then challenged to think about how they might respond virtuously (Meara, Schmidt, & Day, 1996) when presented with such a client. Thought questions are presented to assist therapists to develop in virtue while working with religious clients who are conflicted about same-sex desire.     

Cognitive Diversity in the Global Academy: Why the Voices of Persons with Cognitive Disabilities are Vital to Intellectual Diversity

In asking scholars to reflect on the “structures and practices of academic knowledge that render alternative knowledge traditions irrelevant and invisible,” as well as on the ways these must change for the academy to cease “functioning as an instrument of westernization rather than as an authentically global and diverse intellectual commons,” the editor of this special issue of the Journal of Academic Ethics is envisaging a world much needed and much resisted. A great deal of the conversation about diversity in higher education emphasizes, rightly, the need for an international and ethnically diverse population of scholars and students. Less attention is paid to the value of cognitive diversity—the diversity of cognition generated by cognitive disabilities. As one aspect of intellectual diversity, cognitive diversity promises novel ways of thinking and new understandings of what knowledge is, who makes it, and how it is made. The unique value of cognitive diversity is its insistence on a radical shift in our conception of who can know and who can produce knowledge. Insisting on the inclusion, as scholars, of persons with minds labelled disabled, an epistemology of disability pushes us to reform the much criticized but still dominant notion of the expert and scholar as able-bodied and hyper-rational.     

Internal Realism and the Problem of Religious Diversity

This article applies Hilary Putnam’s theory of internal realism to the issue of religious plurality. The result of this application – ‘internalist pluralism’ – constitutes a paradigm shift within the Philosophy of Religion. Moreover, internalist pluralism succeeds in avoiding the major difficulties faced by John Hick’s famous theory of religious pluralism, which views God, or ‘the Real,’ as the noumenon lying behind diverse religious phenomena. In side-stepping the difficulties besetting Hick’s revolutionary Kantian approach, without succumbing to William Alston’s critique of conceptual-scheme dependence, internalist pluralism provides a solution to significant theoretical problems, while doing so in a manner that is respectful of cultural diversity and religious sensitivities.

Measuring Religious Commitment Among Catholics and Protestants: A New Approach

Researchers using survey data to study religious commitment often create additive indices in which respondents receive a "point" on the scale for each behavior in which they engage, implicitly assuming that each activity is equally normative in each religious tradition. This has led some scholars to suggest that these scales can be "biased" in favor of evangelicals. In this paper, we introduce a unique series of survey questions asking respondents how important various activities are "for people of your religion". We use these new measures to generate tradition-specific weights for each component of a religious commitment scale according to the activity's perceived importance. We then present a method for constructing scales when such "importance" items are not available, using the frequency of behavior within each religious tradition as a surrogate for importance. We find that constructing religious commitment scales that take into account the normative differences across religious traditions produces statistically significant differences in the levels of commitment by religious tradition, especially among Roman Catholics. However, the substantive significance is less evident. When various measures of religious commitment are included as independent variables in multivariate models of political attitudes, their performance is remarkably similar. It appears that the standard additive indices of religious commitment commonly utilized by scholars of religion and politics are adequate for most analyses of social and political attitudes.     

Locus of Control and Academic Engagement: Mediating Role of Religious Commitment

Earlier studies have shown that locus of control is related to academic processes and outcomes. However, the nature of the relationship between locus of control, religious commitment, and academic engagement is unclear. This study examined the mediating role of religious commitment in linking locus of control with academic engagement, as well as the engagement dimensions - vigour, dedication, and absorption. Four hundred and eight university students completed the Locus of Control Behaviour Scale, Religious Commitment Inventory and Utrecht Work Engagement Scale – Student version. Locus of control was found to be positively related to the outcome variables. Intrapersonal religious commitment was positively related to the outcome variables. Interpersonal religious commitment did not have a significant relationship with vigour and absorption but it was significantly related to dedication and the total scores of academic engagement. Structural equation modelling analyses indicated significant paths from locus of control to academic engagement through both intrapersonal religious commitment and interpersonal religious commitment. Locus of control and religious commitment are suggested to be relevant in programmes and interventions to enhance academic engagement.     

An Internalist Pluralist Solution to the Problem of Religious and Ethical Diversity

In our increasingly multicultural society there is an urgent need for a theory that is capable of making sense of the various philosophical difficulties presented by ethical and religious diversity—difficulties that, at first sight, seem to be remarkably similar. Given this similarity, a theory that successfully accounted for the difficulties raised by one form of plurality might also be of help in addressing those raised by the other, especially as ethical belief systems are often inextricably linked with religious belief systems. This article adumbrates a theory that is suitably sensitive to the challenge posed by cultural diversity, and that is respectful of ethical and religious differences. The theory, called “internalist pluralism,” provides a philosophical account of the widely differing claims made by religious believers resulting from the tremendous diversity of belief systems, while simultaneously yielding a novel perspective on ethical plurality. Internalist pluralism is based on Hilary Putnam’s theory of internal realism. This article is not concerned to defend internal realism against its critics, although such defense is clearly required if the theory is to be adopted. Its more modest aim is to show that internal realism has a distinctive voice to add to the current debate about how best to understand religious and ethical diversity.     

Religious Coping and Cancer: Proposing an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Approach

A cancer diagnosis is one of the most difficult diagnoses for any person to receive and cope with. Numerous individuals turn to religion or their spiritual beliefs to find meaning through the process of coping with such a serious illness. Therefore, in recent years research on religious coping has received increased attention. The aim of the present paper is to examine the area of religious coping, along with its dimensions and ways to assess it, as it relates to cancer. Moreover, this paper presents a relatively new approach to the psychological treatment of individuals with cancer. Namely, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a spiritually and religiously sensitive treatment. This approach aims to first explore a person's values (including spiritual and religious values), to subsequently help the person accept any experience that the person has no control over in light of these values, and to then commit and take actions consistent with these values. Recent evidence providing initial support for this approach is discussed. Finally, a case example is presented to illustrate how ACT may be carried out to address religious coping in outpatient clinical practice with cancer patients.