Citation

Ginges J, Hansen I, Norenzayan A. Evol. Psychol. 2010; 8(3): 346-349.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, The Author(s), Publisher Ian Pitchford and Robert M. Young)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Reply by the current authors to the comments made by James R. Liddle, Karin Machluf and Todd K. Shackelford (see record 2010-18253-002) on the original article (see record 2009-01682-016). In the article of Ginges, Hansen and Norenzayan (GHN), we presented studies investigating the relationship between religion and popular support for suicide attacks. Liddle, Machluf and Shackelford (LMS) comment on our findings, suggesting that there may be more to the religious belief hypothesis than we allow in GHN. LMS do not dispute our results, but they worry that the strength of our claims may deter other researchers from investigating the hypothesis further, and argue for different methods of testing the hypothesis. As LMS note, we did not investigate the relationship between specific religious beliefs such as belief in the afterlife, and support for suicide attacks. Our reasoning is as follows: devotion to a religion typically involves a general endorsement of the core beliefs and values of that religion, such as monotheism or the existence of an afterlife. As we demonstrate in GHN, a tractable way to deal with these issues is to investigate devotion to the body of beliefs that make up a religion in creative ways--by asking how important religion is to the lives of participants, or to measure religious devotion indirectly through prayer frequency, which we have found varies even in highly religious populations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)