Explaining the Christian (vs. nonreligious) advantage in self-concept clarity and self-concordance : it’s the community not the philosophy
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Past research on goal striving in religious and nonreligious populations has primarily focused on the contents of goals (Emmons et al., 1998; Emmons, 2005) being pursued rather than the reasons participants have for pursuing those goals, i.e., their motivations. To date there has been no formal attempt at investigating the extent to which religious and nonreligious individuals tend to choose and strive towards selfconcordant goals, i.e., goals pursued out of autonomous, rather than controlled, motivation. The current work aimed to establish reliable comparisons of idiographic goal choice between Christian and nonreligious samples, as well as to demonstrate relevant conative and social processes underlying differences and similarities between the two populations. Studies 1 and 2 established variation in autonomous striving between religious and nonreligious samples such that Christians demonstrate increased selfconcordance, on average. Study 3 replicated and extended these findings to include related constructs of value salience and self-concept clarity. Finally, study 4 explored reasons why Christians may evidence greater self-concordance of idiographic goals and higher scores on related outcomes compared to the nonreligious. It was found that membership in organizations with shared philosophical leanings, and consequent social contextual support, may explain variations in self-concordance, value salience, and selfconcept clarity in these two groups. Implications are discussed as well as contributions of this work to expanding the extant literature in this area of psychology.
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Ph. D.