Religious Attributions in Cross - Cultural Comparison

In our comparative perspective we use six nation cultures to test if supernatural attributions differentiate religious and secular authority. Using semantic dimensions derived from Osgood, we empirically match the affective meaning of identities to the Christian concept of God with secular alter identities. The same mechanism is used to identify behaviors, emotions, and traits that are attributed to God and his alter identity. Using the symbolic-integrationist perspective of Affect Control Theory, we extend this analysis by setting identities, behaviors, and emotions into the context of an event. We find that the concept of God represents religious authority that in secular societies is perfectly replaced by other authority concepts in legal, political, professional, medical, or family institutions. While data of the US, Canada, and Ireland establish a cluster of religious attributions to authority, Germany, Japan, and China cluster on the secular side. Religious Attributions in Cross-Cultural Comparison Classic psychological attribution literature like Kelley (1972) invites questions like this: Does the degree of religiosity lead to different attributions through a greater propensity to elicit supernatural explanations? In investigating this question, results have been mixed (Lupfer, Hopkinson et al. 1988; Lupfer, Brock et al. 1992; Lupfer, DePaola et al. 1994). Some attributional studies used research designs in which American subjects are partitioned by degree of religiosity and type of attribution toward God. For example, Dufton and Perlman (1986) state that their more conservatively religious respondents were more apt to attribute their feelings of loneliness to supernatural causes. Likewise, Smith and Gorsuch (1989) state that their American respondents with a religious orientation attributed greater responsibility to God in general, as a causal and as a sanctioning agent. We investigate the degree of religious or secular denotation of attributions to the supernatural concept of the Christian God for six cultures. Here we differentiate between affective and cognitive components in the attribution. Osgood (1962) identified affect and cognition as flip sides of the same coin, the sentiment. Affective reactions will trigger cognitive interpretations. In this recursive relation of affective responses and cognitive reflections, we replicate cultural norms in two ways: the normative affective reaction that we experience towards symbolicallyrepresented sentiments and the reactions to the context of these sentiments when they establish an event through cognitive reflections. With Affect Control Theory (ACT) we employ a cybernetic symbolic interactionist framework that not only matches the affective with the cognitive components, but also allows us to put these components into the context of events (Heise 1987, 2007). ACT is formulated as an algorithm by Schneider and Heise (1995) that uses both the general affective representation of sentiments that follows quantitative principles and a qualitative descriptive level where sentiments receive language representation. This theoretical framework provides us with three methods of cross-cultural analysis of six cultures and two religious sub-cultures that we apply in the investigation of religious attribution. First, we compare the affective representation of the supernatural identity of the Christian God. Second, we match identities, behaviors, traits, and emotions to this supernatural identity according to their affective representation and hereby investigate their degree of religious or secular denotation. Third, we investigate the dynamics that occur when supernatural identities are put into the context of events. THE AFFECTIVE BASES OF RELIGIOUS ATTRIBUTIONS Like the Kelly-inspired (1972) attribution papers, this paper assumes that all attributions are rooted in salient characteristics of attributers and in the embeddedness of attributors in specific situations and events. This paper, however, traces back to the trait-attribution tradition originating in classic work of Asch (1948) on central organizing traits. Essentially, the Asch tradition suggests that specific role-identities traits and emotions are psychologically or semantically equivalent. Asch’s ideas found fruition in psychological mapping of traits and identities in the work of Rosenberg (1972). Smith, Matsuno, and Ike (2001) have explicated the principles underlying both the Western and Japanese attribution processes. The key mechanism in any case is the psychological proximity or equivalence between a person’s identities and traits. For example, a minister (all identities, behaviors traits, and emotions that refer to empirical examples are italicized) is rated in the USA affective meaning database as somewhat good, somewhat potent, and neutral in liveliness. The control part of ACT derives from the simple principle that humans have a need for psychological consistency. So a person for whom being a minister is central to self-image is constrained to act like a minister – make promises, appeal to, serve, address, or give instructions to. Similarly, the role-identity of minister constrains his or her displays of emotions and personality traits. MacKinnon (1994) terms these “characteristic emotions” because they confirm and maintain one’s salient self-presentations and definitions of the situation. Similarly, acting as if he is a father who is possessed by the trait of self-consciousness would perfectly confirm a father’s selfimage. MacKinnon argues that life is more complicated than presupposed by characteristic emotions. While a characteristic emotion perfectly confirms one’s salient identities, in real life the salient identities and emotions of those one interacts with also pull the person to confirm their counterpart’s emotions. MacKinnon uses the term “structural emotion” for capturing the perfect confirmation of one’s self through particular situations. Extending our example of a minister who carries the salient role of father to his son, the salient role of father is perfectly confirmed if he tries to accommodate his son, which leads to structural emotions like pleased father and moved son. The same scenario perfectly confirms the father as possessing the trait of cheerfulness and his son as obedient. The multiple necessary schema literature cited above emanates from the “availability hypothesis.” That is, the assumption is that individuals utilize either religious or secular hypotheses, whichever is most accessible. This raises the question of why certain causal explanations are more or less available. The affect control tradition toggles this problem by focusing on general mechanics used in the explanation process. These general mechanics are captured empirically in impression-formation equations. Perceptions of psychological consistency reinforce, and inconsistency penalizes, the elicitation of specific causal attributions. A minister appears psychologically consistent if he expresses awe and reverence in that role, but it stretches the imagination to think the same person winning the Powerball prize is due to God being on his side rather than luck or chance. We investigate the impact of evoking attributions toward the different cross-cultural conceptions of the Christian God versus other causal agents. Matching the meaning of God with alter identities according to the attribution of affective meaning, and placing God and his alter identities in the context of events investigating the attribution of emotions, traits, and appropriate behaviors, we cross-culturally test if supernatural attributions differentiate religious and secular authority.