Premium
Predicting Prejudice from Religious Fundamentalism and Right‐Wing Authoritarianism: A Multiple‐Regression Approach[Note 1. Preliminary results of this research were presented in poster ...]
Author(s) -
Laythe Brian,
Finkel Deborah,
Kirkpatrick Lee A.
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
journal for the scientific study of religion
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.941
H-Index - 71
eISSN - 1468-5906
pISSN - 0021-8294
DOI - 10.1111/0021-8294.00033
Subject(s) - authoritarianism , prejudice (legal term) , fundamentalism , psychology , social psychology , politics , political science , law , democracy
In a study designed to investigate the respective roles of religious fundamentalism and right‐wing authoritarianism as predictors of prejudice against racial minorities and homosexuals, participants (47 males, 91 females) responded to a series of questionnaire measures of these constructs. Data were analyzed using multiple regression. Consistent with previous research, authoritarianism was a significant and strong positive predictor of both forms of prejudice. With authoritarianism statistically controlled, however, fundamentalism emerged as a significant negative predictor of racial prejudice but a positive predictor of homosexual prejudice. In a second study, we conducted parallel multiple regressions using the correlations from two previously published studies. The Study 1 results were replicated exactly, except that fundamentalism was a nonsignificant predictor of homosexual prejudice. We interpret the results as evidence that Christian fundamentalism consists of a second major component other than authoritarianism—related to Christian belief content—that is inversely related to some forms of prejudice (including racial prejudice) but not others (e.g., homosexual prejudice).