engleski

Relationship between religiosity, authoritarianism, empathy and forgiveness in Croatian students

Research on religiosity has discovered its multiple covariates, such as traditional values and the attitudes towards one’s own nation and the out-group, which can be viewed as parts of a wider construct of right-wing authoritarianism. This might seem contradictory to covariates we would expect based on church teaching, such as empathy and willingness to forgive. In our research we tried to further explore these relations via detailed correlation analysis including partialization. Data on sociodemographic characteristics, religiosity, right wing authoritarianism, emotional empathy, and willingness to forgive were collected on a quota sample of 452 students from various Croatian faculties. We confirm the earlier findings of high correlations between different measures of self- report religiosity with authoritarianism, as well as with empathy and willingness to forgive. By partialization of sociodemographics, political ideology and consequences of religiosity on social behaviour, a significant part of the covariation between religiosity and authoritarianism is explained, but not with empathy and willingness to forgive. Religiosity is weaky correlated with emotional empathy for women and not for men, and with willingness to forgive for men and not for women. The results caution about the use and interpretation of these variables in research and stress the need for control of external variables as well as analysis of the actual processes involved in measuring these constructs.

religiosity, emotional empathy, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, forgiveness

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