Yousaf, Omar and Gobet, Fernand 
ORCID: 0000-0002-9317-6886
(2013)
The emotional and attitudinal consequences of religious hypocrisy: experimental evidence using a cognitive dissonance paradigm.
Journal of Social Psychology, 153 (6).
pp. 667-686.
ISSN 0022-4545
Abstract
We explored the emotional and attitudinal consequences of personal attitude-behavior discrepancies using a religious version of the hypocrisy paradigm. We induced cognitive dissonance in participants (n = 206) by making them feel hypocritical for advocating certain religious behaviors that they had not recently engaged in to their own satisfaction. In Experiment 1, this resulted in higher levels of self-reported guilt and shame compared to the control condition. Experiment 2 further showed that a religious self-affirmation task eliminated the guilt and shame. In Experiment 3, participants boosted their religious attitudes as a result of dissonance, and both religious and non-religious self-affirmation tasks eliminated this effect. The findings provide evidence that dissonance induced through religious hypocrisy can result in guilt and shame as well as an attitude bolstering effect, as opposed to the attitude reconciliation effect that is prevalent in previous dissonance research.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Official URL: | https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/vsoc20/current |
| Additional Information: | © 2013 Informa UK |
| Divisions: | CPNSS |
| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BL Religion |
| Date Deposited: | 01 Nov 2019 10:45 |
| Last Modified: | 08 Nov 2024 01:06 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/102322 |
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