Reading: 'Quest Religion, Anti-Fundamentalism, and Limited Versus Universal Compassion'

Batson, C. Daniel, Drew M. Denton, Jason T. Vollmecke, 2008, 'Quest Religion, Anti-Fundamentalism, and Limited Versus Universal Compassion', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 47, 1, pp.135-45

'Quest religion' is religion pursued as an open-ended journey towards spirituality, with the assumption that there is no one true path. Obviously these people are more likely than most to disapprove of 'religious intolerance', so this leads to the question: does it make sense to describe followers of quest religion as being intolerant of intolerant people? That is, do they just get annoyed when people are actively trying to promote 'one true way' religion, or do they also personally dislike anyone who believes in a 'one true way'?

Batson et al. conducted an experiment to explore this idea. Undergraduate students were asked to take part in some research on the effects of disclosing information about yourself. They were also told that they'd been randomly selected as 'recipients' and would be receiving notes from other undergraduate students who'd been selected as 'disclosers'. In fact, the notes from the dicloser were all standardised and written by experimenters.

The recipients then got given two pieces of paper with randomly generated numbers on them. They were told to circle a specific number whenever it came up (e.g. every time they saw the numbers 13 and 47). They had two minutes to do this, and could decide which of the two pages they wanted to focus their efforts on. They were told that if they did well at finding all the target numbers on page 1, the discloser they'd been paired with would be entered into a raffle to win a $30 gift certificate. If they instead focused on circling numbers on page 2, the raffle ticket would go to an unknown student.

The subjects were split into three groups. Group 1 got notes saying that their imaginary discloser had been worried about starting college and making new friends, but really hoped they'd win the gift certificate because they'd been saving every penny so that they could afford to go to Dallas and visit their grandparents. Group 2 got the same note as Group 1, except it also said that the main reason the discloser had been worried about making friends was that they were a fundamentalist Christian who believed very strongly that their faith was the only true religion, and they weren't sure how the people at their college would react to that. Group 3 got the same note as Group 2, except that the reason they gave for needing the money was to go to a Dallas rally for evangelical fundamentalists.

So, basically, subjects were able to decide how much they wanted to help the person who they thought was writing to them. If they felt like their discloser deserved a chance to win a $30 gift certificate, they could opt to focus on circling numbers on page 1. Alternately, they could choose to help the unknown student instead, by circling numbers on page 2.

In experiments like this, people normally choose to help the discloser rather than an unknown student. So if it's true that people into quest religion dislike fundamentalists on a personal level, then we'd expect such people to opt to help the unknown student more often when the discloser says they're fundamentalist. If, however, followers of quest religion are ok with fundamentalists as people even though they may dislike their belief systems, then we'd expect them to help the fundamentalist discloser when they need money to visit grandparents (although they might still choose not to help them when they wanted money to go to a fundamentalist rally).

The subjects were also asked to complete psychological questionnaires called the Quest Scale, the Balanced Quest Scale, and the Fundamentalism Scale. I haven't read any of these, so I don't know how sensible they look. The Quest Scale is meant to measure the extent to which someone is a follower of Quest Religion. The Balanced Quest Scale is a different test which is meant to do the same thing, but Batson et al. suspect it may actually be measuring how anti-fundamentalist you are (and someone may be hostile to fundamentalism without being a fan of quest religion). The Fundamentalism scale is a measure of how fundamentalist someone is. Batson et al. reckon these scales only really make sense when you're studying people with a Christian background, so of their 60 undergraduate subjects, there were 21 Protestants, 25 Catholics, and 14 with Christian backgrounds but no current religious affiliation. Also, all subjects had scored 4 or higher when asked to rate how interested they were in religion (on a scale of 1 to 9).

Results: scores for the Balanced Quest Scale had a fairly low positive correlation with results from the Quest Scale (r=0.5), but a very high negative correlation with results from the Fundamentalism Scale (r= -0.81)- which reinforces Batson et al's sense that it's more of measure of how much you hate fundamentalism than how much you like quest religion. People who scored low (i.e. below the median) on the Quest Religion Scale tended to help the discloser about 70% of the time, regardless of which note they got. People who scored high also tended to help the discloser about 70% of the time if they got the note saying that didn't mention the discloser's religion.

So, did people who score high on Quest Religion opt to deny help to fundamentalists? If the dicloser said they were going to the fundamentalist rally, then followers of quest religion chose to help them about 50% of the time (which is still higher than it might be). If, however, they said they wanted to see their grandparents, then followers of quest religion chose to help them about 90% of the time- even more often than they chose to help non-fundamentalist disclosers (although the difference between the two wasn't statistically significant). So, the only statistically significant difference here was that between helping the fundamentalists visit their grandparents vs helping the fundamentalists go to the rally (p < 0.005, via ANOVA). I suspect that this is partly because, like many otherwise interesting psychological studies, the sample size is smaller than I'd like. Some of the cells in the ANOVA have less than 10 subjects in them.

Something else that may be worth filing in the 'quirks specific to psychology' column: on p.143, Batson et al. remark that "ever since the classic work of Allport (1950, 1966), religious orientations have been conceived at a theoretical level in terms of psychological process rather than religious content." I'm assuming there's meant to be an invisible "within psychology" caveat on that (I don't know if this is a psychology-specific journal- from the title, I'd assumed that it would also attract quantitative sociologists, at least, but maybe I'm wrong). In any case, Batson et al. don't think religious content is totally irrelevant (that's why they argue that Quest Religion scale is derived from research on people with Christian backgrounds, and therefore we shouldn't just assume that it can be applied to people from other backgrounds without any change in results. Given the amount of time I spend bitching about psychologists who seem to start off with the assumption that culture is irrelevant, I approve of this.