Folk Theories of Religious Identity- Evidence from Palestine and the United States

Abstract

How do people understand what makes a person Muslim, Hindu, or Christian? Social categories are sometimes viewed as natural kinds, where category membership is believed to derive from an underlying biological essence. Current theorizing posits this tendency to be motivated by contextual features such as saliency of categories, or quality of intergroup relations. Accordingly, along with categories such as ethnicity or gender, religious categories may be susceptible to essentialism in contexts of violent conflict along religious lines. An alternative perspective, drawn from the literature that links the spread of aspects of religious cognition to the growth of large-scale cooperative societies, is that religious category membership could be perceived as especially transformable by context and practice. We investigated essentialist reasoning about religious categories heavily implicated in intergroup conflicts in two populations: Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, and citizens of the United States. In four experiments (N = 2578), we employed variations of the adoption task to compare how people reason about membership in religious and national categories. Results show that people are less likely to believe that one’s religion (compared to one’s nationality) is passed on through some type of biological mechanism and so is “fixed at birth”. Thus, religious categories seem particularly resistant to essentialist reasoning, even when the social context appears to motivate such reasoning. Implications for understanding essentialist reasoning and the role of religion in intergroup conflict are discussed.

Folk Theories of Gender and Anti-Transgender Attitudes

“…By systematically varying the stimulus on features of interest, we can infer the role or weight of that feature in the subject's theory of that category. Here and in other research on folk theories of nationality and religions, we take this approach but with some modifications [58,59]. Specifically, the stimulus (e.g., a person) moves from one category to another via a specific procedure (e.g., adoption, surgery), and participants use continuous scales to indicate the extent to which it belongs to either category.…”