Fundamentalism, social dominance and religion: an empirical approach

Over the last few years many acts of violence, power abuse, and mutual intolerance between different religious denominations were witnessed; frequently they were related to intolerant and discriminatory policies, defined fundamentalist by media. The background hypothesis is that fundamentalism (or extremism) is a general psychological dimension that manifests itself at best in religious practices and beliefs, and reflects a individual's preference for hierarchy within any given social system. Attention has been focused on religious fundamentalism in the Italian world and on variables that could be connected to it, above all by attempting to translate and/or devise instruments to detect them. A set of six scales and a series of socio-demographic variables such as age, gender, educational level, occupation and political orientation were used in this analysis. The survey questionnaire contained Liht et al. (2005) Multi-Cultural Fundamentalism Inventory (MCFI) used to measure fundamentalism, Gorsuch and McPherson’s (1989) Religious Orientation Scale to measure intrinsic, personal extrinsic and social extrinsic religiosity, the 12-item Quest Scale developed by Batson et al.(1993) to measure quest religion orientation, Pratto et al. (1999) SDO Scale to measure social dominance, Stenner (2005) Authoritarian Scale for authoritarian dynamics and Winter (2006) Sermon of the Mount to detect pacifism tendencies. The aim of this specific investigation was to study the relationships between the variables measured by these instruments focusing on the relationship between fundamentalism, religious orientations and individual differences in levels of group-based discrimination and domination (SDO). Results might suggest a positive degree of relationships between fundamentalism and social dominance orientation as well as it seems related to religious orientations; in particular all the three subscales, that constituted Multi-Cultural Fundamentalism Inventory, showed a good negative correlation with quest religion and a positive relationship with intrinsic and extrinsic religion. Furthermore we found an interesting negative relationship between SDO scale and pacifism dimension. Participants were 190 and part of them were students enrolled in undergraduate course in psychology. The data student was collected from the University of Milan while the others in the cities of Northern Italy and their districts.