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Belief systems and attitudes toward the death penalty and other punishments
Author(s) -
Harvey O J
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
journal of personality
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.082
H-Index - 144
eISSN - 1467-6494
pISSN - 0022-3506
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1986.tb00418.x
Subject(s) - psychology , conservatism , punishment (psychology) , social psychology , openness to experience , construct (python library) , church attendance , personality , belief system , classical liberalism , liberalism , epistemology , religiosity , politics , philosophy , political science , computer science , law , programming language
This study focused on the relationship of belief systems as a configural construct and conservatism‐liberalism to attitudes toward the death penalty and other punishments for offenses of varying severity Extrapersonalists, the most concretely functioning of the four conceptual or belief systems posited by Harvey, Hunt, and Schroder (1961), were most in favor of the death penalty They also endorsed the most severe punishment for a variety of crimes, to a particularly greater extent than did representatives of either of the two more abstractly functioning systems The belief dimensions of Openness, Evaluativeness, and Complexity, as well as the frequency of church attendance, correlated more highly and consistently with attitudes toward punishment than did either Conservatism‐Liberalism or gender Both of the latter variables failed to correlate with a number of the outcome variables and related at only low levels to the others The greater predictive power of a configural conception of personality or belief systems over a unidimensional conception seems to have been demonstrated Configural concepts may additionally be generally superior to multidimensional concepts treated linearly