ABSTRACT

This chapter aims to integrate existing theoretical efforts, extend them by incorporating more of the attribution literature and more of the existing empirical psychology of religion. One task for the psychology of religion is to characterize the ways in which people use such religious explanations. All attribution theories begin with the assumption that people seek to make sense of their experiences. Traditional approaches to attribution theory have focused on two aspects of the attribution process, a general desire to seek meaning in the world and an attempt to control and predict events. Perspectives on religiosity generally agree that the concepts are multidimensional. The most thoroughly researched framework is that of Allport, which distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. A widely recognized principle that permeates psychology is that people are assimilate new information into existing cognitive structures than to alter firmly held beliefs to accommodate contradictory information.