Exceptionalism or Chinamerica: Measuring Religious Change in the Globalizing World Today

Religion is changing fast in this era of globalization. Major global trends include the growth of Muslims, the shrinking percentage of unaffiliated, and the rapid rise of Christianity in global China. By 2030, China is likely to become the largest Christian country in the world while retaining large numbers of Buddhists, Muslims, and folk religious believers. To capture religious changes more accurately, social scientists of religion must sharpen their measurement tools regarding religiosity; pay more attention to the reality of nonalignment among religious identity, belief, and practice; and acknowledge the reality of nonexclusive/multiple religious beliefs, practices, and identities. Scholars must also take responsibility for developing a clear and nuanced definition of religion, abandon exceptionalist thinking, and seek to discover common patterns of religious change across societies. Conceptual and measurement tools at the disposal of social scientists of religion should enable us to perceive and understand the converging changes of religion in China, the United States, and other societies, without ignoring their historical differences and contemporary particularities.     

Nesselroade and Molenaar's Measurement Concerns and Proposals: An Introduction

In this special section Nesselroade and Molenaar (N & M) propose a provocative new approach to measurement invariance. When measures are collected repeatedly over time (e.g., daily diary studies), a potentially unique measurement model relating the items to the underlying construct can be created for each individual. If hypothesized causal paths specified between constructs (e.g., frustration → aggression) can be constrained to be equal across the individuals, a model with idiographic measurement of the constructs, but with nomothetic structural relationships can be specified. Three commentaries react to N & M's proposal. Revelle and Wilt challenge the priority given by N & M to unique individual measurement structures, arguing that between subjects differences in structural relationships are empirically important and meaningful. Markus's uses David Hume's framework to raise philosophy of science challenges for N & M's approach. Maydeu-Olivares challenges the incremental validity of N & M's approach, arguing that N & M's approach is unlikely to improve the prediction of between subjects criteria. Finally, N & M present a rejoinder to the three commentaries.     

Skepticism: Genuine unbelief or implicit beliefs in the supernatural?

We examined whether skeptics hold implicit supernatural beliefs or implicit cognitive underpinnings of the beliefs. In study 1 (N = 57), participants read a biological or a religious story about death. The story content had no effect on skeptics’ (or believers’) afterlife beliefs. Study 2 examined the relationships between religious and non-religious paranormal beliefs and implicit views about whether supernatural and religious phenomena are imaginary or real (n1 = 33, n2 = 31). The less supernatural beliefs were endorsed the easier it was to connect “supernatural” with “imaginary”. Study 3 (N = 63) investigated whether participants’ supernatural beliefs and ontological confusions differ between speeded and non-speeded response conditions. Only non-analytical skeptics’ ontological confusions increased in speeded conditions. The results indicate that skeptics overall do not hold implicit supernatural beliefs, but that non-analytically thinking skeptics may, under supporting conditions, be prone to biases that predispose to supernatural beliefs.     

Quantification of human confidence in functional relations

What makes people infer that two continuous-valued entities are functionally related? Involving factors influencing human confidence in the existence of a functional link between two supposed variables has not so far been discussed in function learning literature. By examining this problem and based on relevant results from cognitive psychology, I propose a hypothesis according to which human confidence in a link between cue and criterion is affected by three factors: The difficulty of functions, the level of noise in observed data, and the sample size. Here, the formalization of this hypothesis forms a novel mathematical model of function learning which can also be used for predictions; so the resulting model receives cue-criterion pairs of a supposed relation and produces two outputs: Confidence and predicting function. In an experiment, the performance of a computational implementation of the model is compared with human data. The results show that the model is successful in tracking changes in human confidence. A close correspondence between the predictions of the model and humans was also achieved.     

Double dissociation between implicit and explicit affiliative motives: A closer look at socializing behavior in dyadic interactions

In the present research, we followed two objectives. First, we aimed to replicate the classic finding by McAdams, Jackson, and Kirshnit (1984) that strong implicit affiliative motives predict high levels of nonverbal socializing behavior (eye contact, laughing, smiling) in dyadic interactions with an unacquainted person. Second, we applied a dual-motives perspective and hypothesized a double dissociation between implicit and explicit motives. Whereas implicit motives were supposed to predict nonverbal socializing, the corresponding explicit motives were supposed to predict verbal socializing (i.e., self-disclosure). Using observational data from 123 university students in ostensibly casual conversations, the findings by McAdams et al. were replicated, and the double-dissociation hypothesis was confirmed. These results corroborate dual-motives theory in the domain of affiliative motivation.     

Statistical Learning Is Not Affected by a Prior Bout of Physical Exercise

This study examined the effect of a prior bout of exercise on implicit cognition. Specifically, we examined whether a prior bout of moderate intensity exercise affected performance on a statistical learning task in healthy adults. A total of 42 participants were allocated to one of three conditions—a control group, a group that exercised for 15 min prior to the statistical learning task, and a group that exercised for 30 min prior to the statistical learning task. The participants in the exercise groups cycled at 60% of their respective O₂max. Each group demonstrated significant statistical learning, with similar levels of learning among the three groups. Contrary to previous research that has shown that a prior bout of exercise can affect performance on explicit cognitive tasks, the results of the current study suggest that the physiological stress induced by moderate‐intensity exercise does not affect implicit cognition as measured by statistical learning.     

Predicting Self‐Confident Behaviour with Implicit and Explicit Self‐Esteem Measures

The present research compared the validity of popular direct and indirect measures of self‐esteem in predicting self‐confident behaviour in different social situations. In line with behavioural dual‐process models, both implicit and explicit self‐esteem were hypothesized to be related to appearing self‐confident to unacquainted others. A total of 127 participants responded to the Rosenberg Self‐Esteem Scale, the Multidimensional Self‐Esteem Scale, and an adjective scale for measuring explicit self‐esteem (ESE). Participants' implicit self‐esteem (ISE) was assessed with four indirect measures: the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the name‐letter task (NLT), and two variants of an affective priming task, the reaction‐time affective priming task (RT‐APT) and the error‐based affective priming task (EB‐APT). Self‐confident behaviour was observed in four different social situations: (i) self‐introduction to a group; (ii) an ostracism experience; (iii) an interview about the ostracism experience; and (iv) an interview about one's personal life. In general, appearing self‐confident to unknown others was independently predicted by ESE and ISE. The indirect measures of self‐esteem were, as expected, not correlated, and only the self‐esteem APTs—but not the self‐esteem IAT or the NLT—predicted self‐confident behaviours. It is important to note that in particular the predictive power of the self‐esteem EB‐APT pertained to all four criteria and was incremental to the ESE measures. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Cross‐cultural Generalizability of the Alternative Five‐factor Model Using the Zuckerman–Kuhlman–Aluja Personality Questionnaire

Several personality models are known for being replicable across cultures, such as the Five‐Factor Model (FFM) or Eysenck's Psychoticism–Extraversion–Neuroticism (PEN) model, and are for this reason considered universal. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the cross‐cultural replicability of the recently revised Alternative FFM (AFFM). A total of 15 048 participants from 23 cultures completed the Zuckerman–Kuhlman–Aluja Personality Questionnaire (ZKA‐PQ) aimed at assessing personality according to this revised AFFM. Internal consistencies, gender differences and correlations with age were similar across cultures for all five factors and facet scales. The AFFM structure was very similar across samples and can be considered as highly replicable with total congruence coefficients ranging from .94 to .99. Measurement invariance across cultures was assessed using multi‐group confirmatory factor analyses, and each higher‐order personality factor did reach configural and metric invariance. Scalar invariance was never reached, which implies that culture‐specific norms should be considered. The underlying structure of the ZKA‐PQ replicates well across cultures, suggesting that this questionnaire can be used in a large diversity of cultures and that the AFFM might be as universal as the FFM or the PEN model. This suggests that more research is needed to identify and define an integrative framework underlying these personality models. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Comparing OECD PISA Reading in English to Other Languages: Identifying Potential Sources of Non-Invariance

The use of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) across nations, cultures, and languages has been criticized. The key criticisms point to the linguistic and cultural biases potentially underlying the design of reading comprehension tests, raising doubts about the legitimacy of comparisons across economies. Our research focused on the type and magnitude of invariance or non-invariance in the PISA Reading Comprehension test by language, culture, and economic development relative to performance of the Australian English-speaking reference group used to develop the tests. Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis based on means and covariance structure (MACS) modeling was used to establish a d_MACS effect size index for each economy for the degree of non-invariance. Only three wealthy, English-speaking countries had scalar invariance with Australia. Moderate or large effects were observed in just 31% of the comparisons. PISA index of economic, social and cultural status had a moderate inverse correlation with dMACS suggesting that socioeconomic resourcing of education played a significant role in measurement invariance, while educational practice and language factors seemed to play a further small role in non-invariance. Alternative approaches to reporting PISA results consistent with non-invariance are suggested.