Gender, not Religiosity, Predicts Differences in Conventional Morality Responses in Undergraduate Students

The relationship between a person\u27s self-described level of religiosity and self-reported moral behavior was explored. Religious and non-religious participants (N=60) completed several self-report instruments that measured moral reasoning and conventional moral behavior in order to assess whether or not a participant\u27s religiosity is correlated with his or her responses to a measure of conventional moral behavior. Participants completed the Defining the Issues Test (DIT, Rest, 1990) to measure level of moral reasoning, the Social Behaviors Inventory (SBI, Tooke and Ickes, 1988) to measure conventionally moral behavior, the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (Crowne and Marlowe, 1960) to control for social desirability bias, and a brief demographic questionnaire. Furthermore, a priming paradigm was employed in order to explore whether or not making religious concepts more salient prior to the SBI resulted in any significant difference in mean SBI scores between groups. There was no significant difference in DIT P-scores as a function of religiosity or gender, and data analyses indicated no statistically significant difference in mean SBI scores as a function of religiosity or prime group