Empathy and Exposure to Credible Religious Acts during Childhood Independently Predict Religiosity

Abstract

ABSTRACT Where do religious beliefs come from, and what predisposes people to believe in the supernatural remains an open question in the science of religion. Contemporary theories explaining religion typically focus on either evolved biological dispositions or social factors. In the current research, we were interested in how individual differences in emotional empathic concern and the social learning mechanism of being exposed to credible religious acts during childhood interplay to predict religiosity. The study conducted among Polish adults (N = 379) demonstrated that both empathy and childhood experience were positively related to every dimension of the centrality of religiosity. Moreover, it was observed that for all investigated dimensions (except for religious public practice), both empathy and religious social learning were significant and independent predictors. We also found no evidence that empathy moderates the relationship between childhood religious experience and general religiosity. Finally, we also conducted a relative importance analysis to determine the incremental validity of both factors in their prediction of religiosity. It was revealed that being exposed to credible religious acts explained substantially more variance in religiosity than empathy. Altogether, these findings suggest that there are at least two independent factors associated with the emergence of religious belief. One is an individual disposition to feel other-oriented emotions, while the other is a social factor of being exposed to credible religious models during one’s upbringing.