Social identity and the true believer: responses to threatened self-stereotypes among the intrinsically religious.

ABSTRACT

That religion is an impactful social category has often been assumed but seldom tested. Based on social identity and self-categorization theories, it is argued that devout religious commitment reflects, at least in part, an individual's motivation to engage in religious self-stereotyping (i.e. to perceive oneself as an exemplary religious group member). In order to test this analysis, individuals scoring high or low on a measure of intrinsic religious orientation received false feedback that either threatened or bolstered their self-perceptions on a dimension of behaviour that was either important or not important to religious group membership. As expected, intrinsic orientation predicted increased religious self-stereotyping only when feedback was threatening and important to religious group membership; affective and behavioural indices revealed a similar pattern. Implications for the social identity/self-categorization literature, and for theory development in the psychology of religion, are subsequently discussed.