God representation , self representation , and educational experience among university students in Rio de Janeiro *

r E s u m E n En este estudio procuramos verificar relaciones entre representaciones de Dios (RD), auto-representaciones (AR), y experiencia educacional (LEE) entre estudiantes universitários en Rio de Janeiro. Estudiamos representaciones de Dios enfatizando el poder de Dios sobre los humanos (RD1); poderes espirituales (RD2); proveer una mejor vida humana (RD3); dependencia mutua entre Dios y humanos (RD4); y no creencia en su existencia (RD5). Tratamos AR como siendo compuesta por yo-individual, yo-interpersonal y yo-colectivo. La LEE fue estudiada como eventos producidos sobretodo por una acción de aprendizaje del estudiante el/ella misma o como eventos causados por la acción de la enseñanza sobre el estudiante, como institución/ profesor/curriculum. Usamos cuestiones cerradas/abiertas para investigar estudiantes de economía (n=82) e psicología (n=107). RD1 y RD2 interfirió sobre las AR de yo-interpersonal y yo-colectivo; mientras las otras RD interfirieron sobre las AR del yo-individual, yo-interpersonal y yo-colectivo. Auto-afirmación, auto-afirmación interpersonal y relación interpersonal negativa correlacionaron con LEE. Palabras clave: creencia/práctica religiosa; auto-representación; estudiante universitario; abordaje psicocultural doi:10.11144/Javeriana.upsy14-1.gsee Para citar este artículo: Souza, E. (2015). Representaciones de Dios, auto-representación y experiencia educacional entre estudiantes universitarios en Rio de Janeiro. Universitas Psychologica, 14(2), 695-710. http://dx.doi.org.10.11144/Javeriana.upsy14-1.gsee * Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Maria Silvia Possas, who has read a first draft of this paper and provided stimulating insight; I am also grateful to João Pedro Magalhães Simões and Taiza Oliveira Melo, who collaborated as trainees in this research, as well as to the support of CNPq, FAPERJ and PIBIC-UFRJ. Edson A. dE souzA Filho 696 Un i v e r s i ta s Ps yc h o l o g i c a V. 14 No. 2 a B r i l-j U n io 2015 Introduction In many countries the number of university students has increased. Their first challenge is to appropriate knowledge outside the common sense and sometimes even to reconstruct or to abandon their previous shared knowledge like religion among other tendencies. It is usual to take it from granted without considering the effects on educational experience. Thus the educational experience at university becomes a more unilateral than multilateral event, in the sense that students as learners tend to put aside their previous own thoughts/ practices, among other unfolding events. To take an example, the individual practice of studying can become something painful for someone more used to collective studying habits. Further, beliefs originated from religion, acting as guides for action may implicate in educational attitudes focusing more or less on learning or/and teaching action. In a country where some religious beliefs are quite widespread the importance of sociocultural rupture with family, for instance, may have an effect over students, even when they are working by themselves to make to a certain extent a cultural mutation. In this sense, the inclusion in a network could have an impact as support or as source of references to be evaluated and adopted regarding eventual confrontation between academic information and common sense. Religion is a very rich subjective and practical experience, in terms of oneself and with others, including sacred entities. Most of religions in Brazil have a central entity called God, which could be considered a common denominator between them, as many others. In fact, it is very difficulty to find research in Brazil to evaluate the impact of religious beliefs on education. Anyway, in the last years has increased the amount of people without religion reaching around 7,4% in the 2000 National Census (Jacob et al., 2003), but what has been more current in the history of this country is people’s shifting among religions, eventually creating new ones (Pereira de Queirós, 1968). But because Catholicism had been the official religion for many centuries, we would say that this influence is the strongest one. So even among Evangelicals who today are over 25% of the religious people, we can find Catholicism’s influence in family relations (authors). But in general Evangelicals use to stress religious practices, attending to church or using more frequently religious discourse (authors). So after extensive qualitative research about GR (authors), we decided to create “scenarios”, or statements involving God, religious practices, believers and theirs lives and non believers, which could be considered artificial at a first glance. Yet it can be useful not for the study of religious psychology in itself (Paiva, 2000; Lindeman; Pyysiäinen, & Saariluoma, 2002), but to understand its impact over educational experiences. So we formulated four types of beliefs about God as follows: 1) God is an absolute, super-powerful entity; 2) God benefits individuals spiritually; 3) God benefits individuals providing the chance to have a better life; 4) God and individuals are interdependent to exists; but we added a last statement which states the non existence of God in itself, 5) God is a belief created and maintained by men. Some authors have described the phenomenon of self-presentation (Baumeister, 1998; 1999; Jones et al, 1981; Leary, Tchividjian & Kraxberger, 1994; Owens, 2003; Sedikides & Gregg, 2003; Stryker, 1980), as Goffman (1959) in his book on “the presentation of self in everyday life”. For him it could be considered a self image construction in order to comply with social expectancies and to conform to social norms. In this sense, Beauvois, J-L. & Dubois (1988) were able to show how ‘internality’ was rather a social norm adopted by students to please teachers, confirming Goffman’s theoretical proposal. Many authors reproduced this stress on social conformity to study social interaction until the sixties when innovative social movements emerged everywhere on earth. In fact this trend started at the beginning of the twentieth century in many fields of human activities, perhaps overshadowed by the long period of the so called Cold War. Since then it had been necessary to study interaction also as a search for autonomy, differentiation and delimitation of frontiers among individuals and groups. In this direction is the work (Moscovici, 1976; MoscoGod representation, self representation, and educational experience amonG university students in rio de Janeiro Un i v e r s i ta s Ps yc h o l o g i c a V. 14 No. 2 a B r i l-j U n io 2015 697 vici & Doise, 1992) on minority influence in which the importance of social conflict creation to change society was underscored. Or the work of Wicklund & Gollwitzer (1982) who described people as trying to preserve social identity to assert political and religious ideas before an audience that does not share them. It would happen in public situations like at university or other social environments throughout the action of regular individuals and groups without power or external signs of previous social recognition. To face such a challenger of modern times in Westerns societies, diffusion of beliefs about the individuals’ capacity to change their destiny took place. Therefore, some authors (Farr, 1992) have postulated the existence of a collective norm (‘hegemonic representation’, Moscovici, 1988) about individualism, what for many countries is followed more in terms of self-image construction like the possession of a diploma, cultural consumption, and so on (Bourdieu, 1984), or even showing external image through the use of material objects like cellular phone or prestigious label cloth (Almeida & Tracy, 2003). Apparently, the legitimacy of the individual as an autonomous, differentiated and delimitated entity would be restricted to some dimensions of the self mainly for the middle classes, meanwhile others groups would be able to appear socially according to collective traits, frequently negatively regarded in society. In another direction, Gergen (1992) described the phenomenon of the ‘saturated self’ when the self representation looses consistency and durability in contemporary life, taking for granted that individual and social self were both lived as something unified and durable before. For us what is more frequent nowadays is the importance of a self-reflexion phenomenon which allows people to become aware about social conventions and, in consequence, bringing them to choose and to reconstruct it. So most of traditional social identifications like belonging to an old religion or ethnic group give place to a more dynamic and free relations with it. In order to go deeper about self representations (SR), an extensive qualitative research was undertaken previously (authors). The theoretical descriptive proposal adopted here for SR is a three dimensional construct axed on the individual-self, the interpersonal-self and the collective-self. The individual self would be composed by contents like self assertion, when individuals presented themselves drawing upon personality traits considered something positive or/and neutral (‘calm’; ‘someone with many objectives and able to accomplish them’; ‘beautiful’; ‘I am what I am’), for which someone does not need another individual to actualize them; self criticism, from positive and negative personality traits at the same time, as taking stock of himself/herself (‘with faults and qualities’); self depreciation, when trying to underscore the negative traits of himself/herself (‘anxious’; ‘ugly’; ‘complicated’); The interpersonal self would be composed, in turn, by assertive interpersonal relation, when introducing himself/herself in situations to assert his/her criteria/positions regarding those from the other people (‘I am not concerned about other people say.’; ‘I have my own point of view and I do not admit to be contradicted.’ ‘I like to make everything by myself.’); positive interpersonal relation, when described himself/herself living a common situation with other people without conflict or feeling something negative, (‘someone who is devoted to my family’; ‘a playful fellow’); negative interpersonal relation, when described himself/herself living a situation of interaction in which he/she tries in a certain way to boycott/undo it without the explicit purpose of selfpromotion or to assert something belonging to himself/herself or someone else (‘bad humoured.’; ‘annoying’). Finally, the collective self would be composed by social categorization, when described himself/ herself using demographic categories, in general those employed by official state agencies (‘I am a woman’; ‘ I am an adolescent of the secondary school.’); group identity, describing himself/herself as been part of a particular group or special traits, in general chosen for a rational purpose (‘blond, blue eyes’; ‘I am a daughter of Jesus.’); moral value, when describing himself/herself to follow/respect moral general principles (‘I hate injustice’; ‘I am truthful person’; ‘humble.’); social deviance, when introduced himself/herself throughout transgresEdson A. dE souzA Filho 698 Un i v e r s i ta s Ps yc h o l o g i c a V. 14 No. 2 a B r i l-j U n io 2015 sions/ruptures of general social norms (‘I am crazy.’; ‘I am not normal.’). Thus, self representation and representation of God seem to be social constructs which offer us analytical tools to understand certain complex processes of learning and teaching and, further, could allow us to evaluate the way students interact with educational environments. For us, what it is at stake is the possibility of emergence of free thinking and action at university, for so it is necessary from an early stage to start acting in an assertive way with oneself and with others. Further, we think that educational autonomy is associated to a starting point of self reflexion, including self criticism, which is possible to happen first of all when its is considered legitimate to think about ourselves as individuals, when the social dimension ‘in general’ is considered hierarchically as coming after, including the interpersonal interactions. After the consolidation of the individual self (or not), it would start the moment to work the other components of the self in order to rethink and reconstruct social life. Nevertheless, we consider that all the mentioned three parts of the self are experienced together. For doing so, it would be necessary some socio-cultural reflexions and perhaps ruptures or deep transformations (Touraine & Khosrokhavar, 2004). Most of our individual being is received almost passively and ready made from the previous generations without criticism, so we have considered for example lack of belief in god, because it is known to be a break of a social norm in Brazil. After a very comprehensive study of arguments in history, the social psychologist Michael Billig and collaborators (1987; 1988) proposed that each society in any moment maintained specific ideological dilemmas, like the following pairs: authority versus subordinate, dominant and dominated, and so on. For a long period some societies have organized themselves around the dilemma individual versus society. But of course modern society got at the same time multiple axis of ideological debate. In Brazil, as many other countries, religious has become an important system of beliefs which deserves to be more studied together with self representations and educational experience. So the main objective of this study was to analyse social constructions on God representations in order to verify the impact on self representations, relevant educational experiences and traineeship experiences.