Biting into the apple: or how religiosity may be linked to moral thought-action fusion through moral vitalism

ABSTRACT

Religious beliefs have been linked to both positive and negative outcomes, although the outcomes may depend upon what specific beliefs are held. Moral thought-action fusion (TAF-M), a belief that members of certain religious groups display, is associated with experiencing greater psychological symptoms. We investigated whether a construct called moral vitalism (i.e., beliefs in good and evil forces and their capability to influence people and/or outcomes) mediated the association between religiosity and TAF-M. Moral vitalism was found to mediate the relationship between religiosity and TAF-M in a sample comprised of mostly political liberals and conservatives. This finding has implications for interventions to reduce moral vitalism. First, in clinical contexts, exposures with individuals who have scrupulosity may be enhanced by specifically blaspheming deities. Second, collaboration and consultation between psychotherapists and clergy members regarding moral vitalism and TAF-M may be critical, given that clergy members may be sought for help regarding such concerns.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral thought-action fusion
• moral vitalism
• religiosity
• intrusive thoughts

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To ensure robustness in the results, we also checked whether the pattern for mediation analyses shifted when using (1) each ordered-categorical individual item that comprised the moral vitalism total score (n = 5), (2) an ordered-categorical moral vitalism total score with five levels, and (3) a continuous moral vitalism total score, which used maximum likelihood estimation with robust standard errors as the estimator. These results are included in Supplemental Tables 1-2. Results revealed that moral vitalism significantly mediated the relation between religiosity and TAF-M for four of the five individual moral vitalism items and when moral vitalism was modeled as a continuous variable. For the five-category ordered categorical moral vitalism variable, the lack of mediation may have occurred due to this variable having less variance than the individual items, the nine-category ordered-categorical variable, and the continuous variable. Overall, most analytic approaches revealed significant mediation.

2 The sample included people who identified as non-religious so that we could ensure representation of multiple religious identities. However, we also examined the pattern of results when excluding people who identified as agnostic or atheist, resulting in n = 388. The analyses with this restricted sample yielded the same pattern of results: religiosity was positively associated with moral vitalism (B = 0.08, 95% CI [0.07, 0.09], SE = 0.01, ß = 0.64, p < .001). Moral vitalism was positively associated with TAF-M (B = 1.79, 95% CI [0.63, 2.96], SE = 0.59, ß = 0.13, p = .002). Religiosity was positively associated with TAF-M even when adjusting for moral vitalism (B = 0.47, 95% CI [0.31, 0.64], SE = 0.08, ß = 0.10, p < .001). There was a positive indirect effect of religiosity on TAF-M through moral vitalism (unstandardized ab = 0.14, 95% CI [0.05, 0.23], SE = 0.05, standardized ab = 0.09, p = 003).