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Many Americans are familiar with the First Amendment, but its application to prayer and religious activities in public schools is often misunderstood. Religious beliefs are increasingly diverse in the United States. Therefore, it seems imperative that school personnel are aware of the law and sensitive to an array of religious practices. We conducted two studies that explored school personnel’s (a) understanding of laws on religious expression in public schools; (b) attitudes toward religious expression in public schools; and (c) tolerance for different religions. Key Study 1 findings were that school personnel with more service years had less accurate knowledge of religious expression laws than school personnel with fewer service years, and more knowledge was related to increased sensitivity to religious practices in schools. Study 2 conceptually replicated these relations with a sample of pre-service teachers and found that Right-wing Authoritarianism mediated the relation between knowledge of the law and religious sensitivity, presenting an avenue for interventions to increase religious sensitivity.

Global attitude certainty consists of two subconstructs: attitude clarity—certainty that one is aware of one’s true attitudes—and attitude correctness, certainty that one’s attitudes are morally correct and valid. Attitude correctness is more often associated with group-related psychological and behavioral outcomes than attitude clarity. As such, we expected that attitude correctness, but not attitude clarity, would be associated with more negative attitudes toward outgroups when group boundaries are defined by attitudes. Across four studies, greater attitude correctness related to more negative attitudes toward attitudinal outgroups regardless of context (e.g., political, religious); attitude clarity’s relationship to prejudice was inconsistent (Studies 1a and 2: positive or no relationship; Study 3: negative; Studies 1b and 4: no relationship). In Studies 2 and 3, mediational analyses showed that greater attitude correctness was associated with stronger beliefs that group boundaries are sharp and distinct (i.e., discreteness beliefs), which in turn was associated with greater prejudice. Finally, Study 4 demonstrated that the attitude correctness–prejudice link was associated with greater intention to engage in competitive behaviors in a conflict resolution scenario with an outgroup member.

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Self-relevant research (i.e., “me-search”) often elicits mixed reactions among both academics and laypeople. However, little is known about how social scientists perceive entire identity-related subfields (e.g., psychology of gender, sociology of religion). Building upon preliminary findings that social/personality psychologists view religion and gender research as less rigorous than subfields not closely tied to identities, we tested whether these perceptions of lower rigor are (a) predicted by beliefs that researchers in identity-related subfields primarily belong to the group(s) they study and thus have an “agenda,” and (b) weaker among academics high in intellectual humility (i.e., openness to admitting one’s views may be wrong). In our survey-experiment, 600 psychology, anthropology, and sociology faculty from US colleges/universities answered questions about their perceptions of research on religion, gender, and health/medicine within their home discipline. Faculty across disciplines viewed religion research as least intellectually/scientifically rigorous, followed by gender research, then health/medicine research. Furthermore, faculty viewed religion and gender researchers as mostly religious and mostly female, respectively, and as less objective than health/medicine researchers. Perceptions of lower objectivity in turn predicted lower perceived rigor. Encouragingly, though, intellectual humility mitigated tendencies to stereotype religion and gender research as less objective and rigorous than health/medicine research.