Religiosity or ideology? On the individual differences predictors of sexism

Abstract

The present set of studies investigated the role of both religiosity and social-ideological attitudes in the prediction of various forms of sexist and gender-related attitudes. Hierarchical regression analyses on data collected in three countries (i.e., two heterogeneous adult samples from Turkey and the Netherlands, and two student samples from Belgium; combined N = 964) revealed that although individual differences in religiosity did predict traditional gender role beliefs and sexism (towards both women and men), its impact was limited compared to the impact of individual differences in social-ideological attitudes (i.e., social dominance orientation and particularly authoritarianism). In the discussion, we argue that sexism primarily relates to individual differences in peoples' perspective on the social world, and that religiosity explains little additional variance.