How Your Religion Shapes Your News Preferences

Newswise — Religious experiences will subconsciously affect the way that individuals consume news about religion and spirituality, according to the latest research by Michael Kitchens, assistant professor of psychology at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, PA.

Kitchens and his co-authors hypothesized that participants who had self-described high comfort with their religion and low reported strain would be more apt to gravitate toward positive news about Christianity. Those with low comfort and high strain were more apt to want to read about stories that were biased against Christianity. That was true with a few notable exceptions.

Respondents with both high comfort and high stain had the highest preference for positive news stories about Christianity.

“This is someone that is on the tipping point in their religious experience; on one hand they feel a lot of strain with their religion, but they also can be comforted by it,” said Kitchens.

“Those that favor negative news about Christianity report high strain and low comfort with their religion. This is not surprising, except that this group is overwhelmingly biased toward this kind of news,” said Kitchens.

In order to group individuals into four different camps, Kitchens asked questions about strain and comfort in one’s religion. Religious comfort and religious strain are measured on an established scale that measures these constructs. Religious comfort items measure the degree to which one feels loved by God and forgiven of their sins, for example. Religious strain measures the degree to which one feels fear and guilt, alienated from God, and rifts with others over religious beliefs.

The participants of this study were given short abstracts of three different research papers. Each had a title of the paper and more information about the research. The three papers were titled “Christian Beliefs Cause Happiness, Meaning and Prosperity,” “Christians Do Not Practice What They Preach: Religious Beliefs Foster Racial Intolerance,” and “Synergetic Personalities Predict Success in Work, School and Interpersonal Relationships.” Participants were then given four questions to evaluate about the abstracts on a 1 (strongly disagree) to 10 (strongly agree) scale. Those questions were: I think this article sounds interesting; I want to read this article; I think this research is important for people to know about. The last question asked students to rate on a 1-10 (very unfavorable to very favorable) scale the about the general impression of the articles.

“The general consensus is that we look at information that confirms our own belief. We want to consume news stories that affirm our beliefs and we’ll ignore the ones that don’t,” said Kitchens.

News stories written about religion have never been more popular, according to a recent Pew study that tracked religious-based news stories in 2010. Discovering how Christians and non-Christians alike are attracted to those stories is something beneficial to marketers.

In total, 213 people were surveyed in this study. 83 percent reported to be Christian. Roughly 9 percent were Agnostic; 4 percent described themselves as Agnostic; and 3 percent said “other.” The final one percent of respondents were either Buddhist or did not list their religion. The full article will be published this spring in the Journal of Psychology and Christianity.