The Hope of Fundamentalists

Abstract

In Optimism and Fundamentalism, we (Sethi & Seligman, 1993) indicated that members of the fundamentalist faiths (e.g., Muslims, Orthodox Jews, and Calvinists) are more optimistic than members of moderate faiths (e.g., Conservative Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, and Methodists), who are in turn more optimistic than members of liberal faiths (e.g., Reform Jews and Unitarians). Following the recommendation of Kroll (this issue, pp. 56-57), we now present the data about which dimensions led to greater optimism with more fundamentalism. There are three dimensions of explanatory style: internality, stability, and globality. Kroll asks if the differences with fundamentalism still hold when internality is excluded. There are two widely used statistics of the data that exclude internality: Hopefulness (HP) is derived through summing dimensions of stability-instability and globality-specificity for positive events within the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ). The hopelessness (HN) score sums across these dimensions for negative events. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed significant differences among the fundamentalists, moderates, and liberals in their HP scores for positive events, F(2, 601) = 6.32, p < .002. The mean HN score for negative events also showed significant differences among the fundamentalists, moderates, and liberals, F(2, 601) = 2.65, p < .007. As shown in the paired comparisons of Table 1, fundamentalists had significantly higher HP scores than moderates nd liberals, while liberals had significantly higher HN scores than fundamentalists. These findings indicate that even after internality-externality is removed, fundamentalism is associated with higher levels of optimism and hope. A separate analysis was conducted on the third dimension of the questionnaire, internality-externality. ANOVA indicated that the internality score for negative events (IN) significantly differed across the three groups, F(2, 601) = 10.96, p < .00001 . As Table 1 shows, fundamentalists and moderates had more optimistic IN scores than liberals. This result suggests that fundamentalists and moderates are less likely to attribute their failures to themselves. The internality score for positive events (IP), however, did not differ across the fundamentalists, moderates, and liberals, F(2, 601) = 0.01, n.s. This finding suggests that fundamentalists are no more likely than moderates and liberals to attribute their successes to themselves.