Date of Award

2017-01-01

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Psychology

Advisor(s)

Daniel N. Jones

Abstract

Religious overclaiming is a persons' tendency to claim to be familiar with fake religious concepts. In both Christian and Muslim samples, previous research has found a relationship between religious overclaiming and communal narcissism, as well as a relationship between religious overclaiming and support for religious violence. The present research extends previous work by including several different measures of narcissism including grandiose (agentic), vulnerable, communal, and collective narcissism to predict religious overclaiming for the Bible and the Qur'an. Moreover, the present research investigates the relationship between support for violence, peace, and apathy using an Internet Commenter task. The results found that grandiose (agentic), collective, and communal narcissism were associated with religious overclaiming and poor religious accuracy. Moreover, though grandiose (agentic) narcissism did not extend to support for violence, communal and collective narcissism did. Collective narcissism had a direct association with support for violence. While the relationship between communal narcissism and support for violence was fully mediated by intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. Finally, poor religious knowledge and, interestingly, overclaiming a religion that is not your own predicted support for violence. Additional findings and implications are discussed. Tangentially, the present research also discussed the appropriate use of Signal Detection Theory to measure religious overclaiming.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

202 pages

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Adon Lee Neria

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