Violence with a conscience: Religiosity and moral certainty as predictors of support for violent warfare.

Objective: Emerging research on the moral licensing effect implies that increasing a person's moral certainty may decrease concerns about the moral consequences of violent warfare. Therefore, if religion increases moral certainty, then it may also contribute to support for violent warfare. The present experiment tested the extent to which religion's contribution to moral certainty explains participants' support for the United States' war in the Middle East. Method: Ninety-three predominantly Catholic and Protestant participants from a university setting completed the present study. The study was completed across two separate days. On the first day of the experiment, individual differences in a variety of types of religiosity (e.g., prayer), and moral certainty were measured. On the second day of the experiment, the perception that the United States' war in the Middle East is a religious or geopolitical conflict was experimentally manipulated, and support for violent warfare was measured. Results: Regression analyses and an analysis of variance yielded support for the moral certainty hypothesis. As predicted, greater religiosity relates to greater moral certainty, and greater moral certainty strengthens the (positive) relation between religiosity and support for violent warfare. Furthermore, moral certainty is a stronger predictor of support for violent warfare in religious conflict than it is in geopolitical conflict. Conclusion: The results support the moral certainty hypothesis and suggest that stronger moral certainty (1) predicts greater support for violent warfare, (2) is an underlying moderator of the relation between religiosity and support for violent warfare, and (3) is particularly influential in religious conflict. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)