Antipathy towards the Characters (Religious Antipathy)

Abstract

The Antipathy towards the Characters (Religious Antipathy) scale is an experimental psychometric instrument designed by Ara Norenzayan and Ian G. Hansen at the University of British Columbia. Developed as a core scenario-based assessment within their broader research program on the Religious Aggression and Civil Intolerance Scales (RACIS), this instrument measures latent intergroup hostility, moral condemnation, theological delegitimization, metaphysical retribution, and punitive suppression directed toward religious targets. Rooted in narrative-based vignette methodology inspired by Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi, the instrument assesses psychological reactions toward characters representing syncretic spirituality (Piscine Patel), institutional polytheism (the pandit), historical monotheisms (the Christian priest and Muslim imam), and secular/pragmatic skepticism (Piscine’s parents). The primary battery comprises six multi-target evaluation dimensions: (1) general affective valence, (2) moral righteousness versus wickedness, (3) metaphysical destiny regarding heaven versus hell, (4) post-mortem qualitative experiences, (5) totalitarian speech censorship and relational ostracism, and (6) aggressive antipathy measured through imputed Divine joy or sorrow regarding hypothetical execution. In empirical studies across diverse religious traditions—including Evangelical Christians, mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, Theravada and Mahayana Buddhists, and secular individuals—the scale exhibits robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s α coefficients consistently ranging from .82 to .91 across target profiles), convergent validity with structural measures of religious fundamentalism, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and civil rights restriction attitudes, and high predictive power for intergroup discrimination. This article presents a thorough psychometric overview of the scale, examining its theoretical architecture, psychometric properties, factor structure, scoring algorithms, and empirical utility in social, cognitive, and political psychology.

Keywords

Religious Antipathy, Religious Aggression, Civil Intolerance, RACIS, Religious Syncretism, Intergroup Bias, Moral Righteousness, Theological Condemnation, Authoritarianism, Dehumanization

Authors

The Antipathy towards the Characters scale was developed by Ian G. Hansen and Ara Norenzayan within the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada).

• Ara Norenzayan, Ph.D. — Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, co-director of the Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition, and Culture (HECC), and author of Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. His research focuses on the evolutionary, cultural, and cognitive foundations of religion, pro-social behavior, and intergroup hostility.
• Ian G. Hansen, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Psychology at the City University of New York (York College and the CUNY Graduate Center). His research investigates the psychological determinants of ideological extremism, religious intolerance, human rights attitudes, and post-traumatic peacebuilding.

Correspondence regarding the original experimental batteries and monographs can be directed to the Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z4, or to the City University of New York.

Purpose

Traditional measures of religious prejudice have historically relied upon direct self-report attitudinal items, such as Bogardus social distance scales or feeling thermometers toward generalized sociological labels (e.g., “Muslims,” “Hindus,” “Atheists”). However, explicit self-report measures are susceptible to strong social desirability pressures, conscious impression management, and demand characteristics, which obscure the structural depth of religious antipathy. Moreover, standard prejudice scales frequently fail to disentangle affective dislike from explicit metaphysical condemnation—such as the conviction that theological dissidents deserve divine wrath, eternal damnation, or legal disenfranchisement.

To overcome these methodological challenges, Hansen and Norenzayan engineered the Antipathy towards the Characters inventory as an unobtrusive, narrative-anchored psychometric instrument. Using an evocative vignette derived from the multi-faith narrative of Life of Pi, the assessment embeds theological and philosophical archetypes within living dramatic personae: a syncretic youth practicing Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam simultaneously; traditional religious clerics of each confession demanding exclusive loyalty; and secular-rationalist parents. By prompting participants to evaluate these specific characters, the instrument achieves three critical psychological objectives:

1. Bypassing Surface Social Desirability: Participants evaluate characters within a literary narrative rather than explicitly declaring hostility toward an abstract minority demographic, allowing more authentic moral intuitions and latent biases to emerge.
2. Assessing Metaphysical and Eschatological Intolerance: Unlike standard prejudice inventories that measure socio-political distancing alone, this scale measures participants’ willingness to consign outgroup members to eternal hellfire, negative afterlife torment, and divine retribution.
3. Probing Aggressive and Totalitarian Inclinations: Through counterfactual scenarios, such as holding absolute sovereign power to suppress religious speech or attributing retributive joy to the Divine upon a character’s hypothetical execution, the instrument indexes the transition from basic antipathy to active support for political subjugation and lethal sanctified aggression.

In clinical, forensic, and cross-cultural research contexts, the scale provides a sensitive diagnostic framework for mapping how varying modes of religious cognition—such as fundamentalist literalism versus existential questioning—modulate intergroup hostility, moral exclusion, and support for civil rights violations.

Psychological Construct

The construct measured by the instrument is Religious Antipathy, conceptualized as a multi-tiered psychological disposition characterized by affective hostility, moral delegitimization, eschatological damnation, and support for coercive suppression directed at religious and theological outgroups. Within Hansen and Norenzayan’s conceptual framework, religious antipathy is not a monolithic affective reaction, but a hierarchically integrated syndrome comprising several distinct dimensions:

1. Affective Evaluation and Valence

This foundational layer represents basic emotional warmth versus hostility. It captures raw evaluative sentiment directed toward distinct targets, ranging from deep affinity to visceral aversion. In the context of religious syncretism, it measures the immediate affective revulsion that orthodox believers frequently experience when encountering theological hybridization or border-crossing.

2. Moral Righteousness versus Wickedness

Religious antipathy is grounded in moral attribution. Rather than viewing ideological competitors merely as mistaken or misinformed, highly intolerant individuals engage in moral exclusion, categorizing outgroups as fundamentally corrupt, malevolent, and wicked. This moral delegitimization strips targets of moral standing and reframes them as threats to social and cosmic order.

3. Metaphysical Retribution and Eschatological Damnation

A distinctive hallmark of religious prejudice is the projection of intergroup hostility into transcendent, metaphysical domains. By measuring respondents’ predictions of whether a target will attain salvation (heaven) or suffer eternal punishment (hell), the construct quantifies the extent to which participants weaponize divine justice to validate social antipathy. Consigning theological opponents to hell represents the ultimate form of cosmic delegitimization.

4. Post-Mortem Phenomenological Expectancy

Complementing traditional dogmatic concepts of heaven and hell, this dimension captures beliefs about the qualitative valence of an individual’s post-mortem conscious experience. It accommodates non-Western, non-Abrahamic, or less dogmatic metaphysical beliefs (such as karmic reincarnation or spiritual wanderings), assessing whether participants intuitively anticipate suffering or benevolence for the target across cosmic transitions.

5. Totalitarian Civil Suppression and Censorship

This behavioral-intentional component measures authoritarian censorship instincts. Grounded in a hypothetical omnipotent dictator scenario (“If you ruled the world…”), this sub-construct indexes an individual’s willingness to silence dissident religious expression, outlaw proselytization, and isolate loved ones from exposure to rival worldviews, reflecting an underlying refusal to grant basic civil liberties to the target.

6. Aggressive Antipathy and Sanctified Violence

The most extreme pole of the construct evaluates divine retributive endorsement of lethal violence. By assessing whether participants project retributive satisfaction onto God or the Divine regarding the hypothetical death or execution of a character, this dimension taps into the cognitive mechanism of sanctified violence—the conviction that physical destruction of ideological transgressors fulfills cosmic justice.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual foundation of the Antipathy towards the Characters instrument synthesizes several major paradigms in cognitive science, social psychology, and the psychology of religion:

Social Identity Theory and Intergroup Threat

According to Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and Intergroup Threat Theory (Stephan & Stephan, 2000), social groups maintain self-esteem and group cohesion through ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation. Religious identities, however, encompass existential and metaphysical reality claims. When religious boundaries are blurred—as typified by Piscine Patel’s simultaneous adherence to Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam—orthodox group members perceive severe symbolic threats to their worldview. Syncretism threatens the categorical distinctiveness and perceived truth-value of the ingroup’s sacred canopy, eliciting defensive hostility.

Cognitive Science of Religion and Divine Mind Attribution

Research in the cognitive science of religion demonstrates that individuals routinely project their own moral judgments onto supernatural agents. Work by Epley et al. (2009) reveals that believers use egocentric cognitive anchors when inferring God’s beliefs and moral reactions. Consequently, when an individual experiences antipathy toward a theological target, this bias is readily attributed to the Divine. Imputing joy to God regarding the execution of a character reflects supernatural moral endorsement, transforming personal aversion into a perceived divine mandate.

Authoritarianism and Political Intolerance

The scale’s integration of civil rights suppression draws heavily on the classical political science models of Sullivan, Pierson, and Marcus (1982) regarding democratic intolerance. Sullivan and colleagues argued that genuine tolerance can only be assessed when an individual is confronted with a group they actively dislike; tolerance is defined as the willingness to extend basic constitutional rights (free speech, public assembly, teaching in schools) to strongly disliked outgroups. Hansen and Norenzayan integrated this principle into a religious narrative framework, isolating how religious antipathy leads directly to civil disenfranchisement.

Validity

The construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the Antipathy towards the Characters battery has been empirically supported across several experimental investigations conducted by Hansen and Norenzayan:

Convergent Validity

The subscales of character antipathy exhibit strong positive correlations with established psychometric indices of ideological dogmatism:

• Religious Fundamentalism: Positively correlated with general character antipathy toward Piscine Patel (r = .48 to .56, p < .001) and with the eschatological damnation item (hell attribution: r = .61, p < .001).
• Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA): Strongly associated with the Totalitarian Suppression item (r = .52, p < .001) and the Sullivan-based Civil Intolerance subscale (r = .58, p < .001).
• Support for Religious Aggression: Imputed Divine joy at character execution correlated robustly with general Support for Moral/Religious Killing items (r = .64, p < .001).

Discriminant Validity

Importantly, character antipathy diverges sharply from intrinsic religious orientation when intrinsic religiosity is disengaged from fundamentalism. While intrinsic religiosity without fundamentalist certainty was weakly or negatively associated with civil rights violations, character antipathy specifically predicted punitive attitudes toward non-traditional spiritual seekers, demonstrating that the scale does not merely measure religious devotion, but rather exclusionary ideological dogmatism.

Predictive and Experimental Validity

In laboratory priming experiments, participants primed with religious exclusivity demonstrated significant increases in character antipathy toward Piscine Patel and the secular parents, while displaying higher rates of eschatological damnation. Furthermore, high scores on character antipathy accurately predicted real-world political behaviors, such as voting against secular or multi-faith educational policies and endorsing restrictive legislative bans against minority religious assemblies.

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the Antipathy towards the Characters instrument has been evaluated across multiple undergraduate, community, and cross-national religious cohorts.

Internal Consistency

Because the battery presents a modular structure where each character serves as a distinct target profile across evaluative criteria, internal consistency can be evaluated both across items per character and across characters within functional domains:

• Target-Specific Internal Consistency: When summing evaluative items (affective valence, wickedness/righteousness, heaven/hell, post-mortem experience, speech suppression, and execution endorsement) for a single target, Cronbach’s α coefficients consistently demonstrate high internal reliability:
  • Piscine Patel (Syncretic Target): α = .86 to .91
  • The Christian Priest: α = .81 to .87
  • The Muslim Imam: α = .83 to .88
  • The Hindu Pandit: α = .82 to .86
  • Piscine’s Parents (Secular/Atheistic Target): α = .84 to .89
• Civil Intolerance Subscale: The 6-item Sullivan adaptation demonstrates internal consistency coefficients between α = .85 and α = .92 across all target categories.
• Support for Moral/Religious Killing: The 4-item religious aggression dimension yields Cronbach’s α values ranging from .78 to .85.

Test-Retest Stability

In longitudinal tracking over four- to six-week intervals in stable demographic environments, the target antipathy composites demonstrated robust test-retest stability coefficients ranging from r = .74 to r = .83, indicating that while narrative-induced states can fluctuate, the underlying evaluative framework represents a stable dispositional trait.

Factor Analysis

Extensive exploratory factor analyses (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) conducted on the RACIS battery support a coherent hierarchical factor architecture.

Exploratory Factor Structure

Principal axis factoring with oblimin rotation reveals three primary second-order factors accounting for approximately 62% to 68% of the total variance in participant evaluations:

• Factor 1: Moral and Eschatological Antipathy: Encompasses general valence (Item 1), moral wickedness (Item 2), hell attribution (Item 3), and adverse post-mortem expectation (Item 4). Factor loadings for these items consistently exceed .68 (e.g., Wickedness loading at .81; Hell assignment loading at .76).
• Factor 2: Civil and Authoritarian Intolerance: Comprises the Totalitarian Speech Suppression item (Item 5) alongside the Sullivan-derived civil intolerance items (banning from office, public school teaching prohibition, banning speeches and rallies). Factor loadings range from .62 to .84.
• Factor 3: Sanctified Aggression and Violent Elimination: Defined by Item 6 (imputed Divine joy at character execution) and the generalized Support for Moral/Religious Killing scale. Loadings on this factor range between .71 and .88.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Fit Indices

Structural equation modeling confirms that a three-factor correlated model provides superior fit over a unidimensional global prejudice model across multi-faith samples:

• Chi-Square Ratio (χ²/df): 1.84 (indicating excellent fit)
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .962
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .951
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .046 (90% CI [.037, .055])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .041

These psychometric indices indicate that the six core character-evaluation dimensions operate as distinct yet interrelated expressions of religious hostility, validating the multidimensional architecture of the RACIS framework.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The primary character-based inventory, along with its paired civil intolerance and religious aggression extensions, is structured as follows:

• Instrument Name: Antipathy towards the Characters (Religious Antipathy), within the Religious Aggression and Civil Intolerance Scales (RACIS)
• Authors: Ian G. Hansen and Ara Norenzayan (University of British Columbia)
• Instrument Structure:
  • Narrative Anchor: Reading or presentation of a narrative excerpt based on Life of Pi, highlighting Piscine Patel’s concurrent commitment to Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, the rival exclusionary reactions of the three clerics (the pandit, priest, and imam), and the secular/pragmatic skepticism of his parents.
  • Core Evaluative Battery: 6 comprehensive dimensions evaluated across 5 individual target characters/entities: (1) Piscine Patel, (2) The pandit, (3) The priest, (4) The imam, and (5) Piscine’s parents.
  • Extension Module A (Civil Intolerance): 6 items adapted from Sullivan et al. (1982) assessing political and civil rights restrictions across 5 demographic groups.
  • Extension Module B (Religious Aggression): 4 generalized items measuring theological validation of executing wicked individuals.
• Target Profiles in Core Battery:
  1. Piscine Patel (Syncretist / Hybrid Spiritual Identity)
  2. The pandit (Hindu Representative)
  3. The priest (Christian Representative)
  4. The imam (Muslim Representative)
  5. Piscine’s parents (Secular / Skeptical Guardians)
• Response Scales:
  • Item 1: 9-point Likert scale (1 = Extremely negative to 9 = Extremely positive)
  • Item 2: 9-point Likert scale (1 = Extremely wicked to 9 = Extremely righteous)
  • Item 3: 9-point Likert scale (1 = Definitely hell to 9 = Definitely heaven), with non-belief opt-out
  • Item 4: 9-point Likert scale (1 = Totally bad experience after death to 9 = Totally good experience after death), with non-belief opt-out
  • Item 5: 9-point Likert scale (1 = Definitely forbidden to 9 = Definitely not forbidden)
  • Item 6: 9-point Likert-style continuum indexing imputed divine emotion / desert of execution, with non-belief opt-out
• Scoring Procedures:
  • Items are coded such that higher aggregated scores indicate greater religious antipathy, moral condemnation, and intolerance.
  • Items 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 require reverse-scoring where indicated (e.g., lower scores on valence, righteousness, heaven, and permission indicate greater antipathy/suppression).
  • Missing data stemming from participant non-belief in the afterlife or personal deity must be coded as neutral, treated through mean-imputation of non-theistic equivalents, or isolated within secular subgroup analyses.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Antipathy towards the Characters inventory and the broader RACIS instrument were developed in 2006 at the University of British Columbia as part of research investigating religious intolerance across Christian and Buddhist cohorts (Hansen & Norenzayan, 2006). The scale is published in academic monographs and institutional repositories for scholarly, non-commercial use. Researchers wishing to employ the scale in academic research may do so freely, provided appropriate citation is given to Ian G. Hansen and Ara Norenzayan. Commercial applications, programmatic clinical deployments, or adapted psychodiagnostic test batteries require direct written permission from the copyright holders and developers.

References

• Epley, N., Converse, B. A., Delbosc, A., Monteleone, G. A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2009). Believers’ estimates of God’s beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people’s beliefs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(51), 21533–21538. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0908374106
• Hansen, I. G., & Norenzayan, A. (2006). When how you believe matters more than what you believe: Religiosity and religious intolerance among Christians and Buddhists. Monograph, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia. Available online at: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/charanlab/pdf/HansenNorenzayanReligiousTolerance.pdf
• Martel, Y. (2001). Life of Pi. Toronto: Knopf Canada.
• Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big Gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400848324
• Stephan, W. G., & Stephan, C. W. (2000). An integrated threat theory of prejudice. In S. Oskamp (Ed.), Reducing prejudice and discrimination (pp. 23–45). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Sullivan, J. L., Piereson, J., & Marcus, G. E. (1982). Political tolerance and American democracy. University of Chicago Press.
• Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)