Reflective minds and open hearts: Cognitive style and personality predict religiosity and spiritual thinking in a community sample

TLDR

The study investigated how analytic cognitive style and openness to experience relate to religious affiliation, faith strength, and spiritual epistemology in a community sample. Analytic style predicted lower religious affiliation but higher faith, while openness predicted lower affiliation but higher spiritual epistemology; mediation analysis showed openness increased faith and denomination through spiritual epistemology, yet had negative direct effects on religiosity after accounting for mediation, extending prior research on cognitive and personality influences on religiosity. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract

Abstract We examined associations between two psychological constructs, analytic cognitive style and the personality facet ‘Openness to Experience’, and several dimensions of religiosity: religious affiliation, strength of faith and spiritual epistemology. In a relatively large (N = 1093), older community sample (M = 55.4 years), analytic cognitive style was associated with a lower probability of affiliating with a religious denomination and a higher probability of possessing strong religious faith. Overall, openness was also associated with a lack of religious affiliation but was positively related to possessing a spiritual epistemology. A path‐analytic model revealed that openness had a positive relationship to both faith and religious denomination that was mediated by spiritual epistemology, but negative direct relationships with religiosity after the meditational effects were taken into account. Taken together, these results extend previous findings on the effect of cognitive style on religiosity and provide a new perspective on the complex relationship between cognitive and personality factors and different dimensions of religiosity. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.