Abstract

Two related hypotheses were tested ; (1) the Christians who strongly believe in Rapture would be more likely to value sharedness(rather than uniqueness) of their beliefs than the Christians who only weakly believe in Rapture; (2) the atheists who strongly reject Rapture would be more likely to value uniqueness(rather than uniqueness) of their beliefs than the atheists who only weakly reject Rapture. The dependent measure was obtained by subjects' guessing on how much % of their ingroup members would agree with their own beliefs on Rapture. The predicted interaction between the level of conviction (the strength of subjects' beliefs) and the group (Christians vs. atheists) to which subjects belong was significant. In addition, it was found that although both the Christians and atheists tended to rely more on the consensus of a belief-relevant ingroup than on that of a belief-irrelevant ingroup, such a tendency was more striking among the Christians than among the atheists. This implies that heavy reliance on belief-relevant ingroup's consensus may lead to a cohesive religious group's "groupthink" (Janis, 1972) or collective behavior. Even though irrelevant to religion. any belief which has an attribute of "shared wishfulness" (Abelson, 1986) such as beliefs on Rapture might lead to radical collective thoughts or behavior. The results of this study also suggest that the polarized perception of the ingroup norm as a mediator of group polarization would occur more readily among those who value sharedness of beliefs relatively more than uniqueness of them such as Christians with high conviction and atheists with low conviction.