Most scientists agree that religiosity (also called religiousness) is not an independent personality trait, despite there being some commonality between their characteristics. Religiosity and personality traits both relate to one's feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. However, unlike for personality, one's level of religiosity is often measured by the presence or lack of belief in and relationship with a higher power, certain lifestyles or behaviors adopted for a higher power, and a sense of belonging with other followers of one's religion. Additionally, personality traits tend to follow a normal distribution, such that the majority of individuals' scores for a personality trait will be concentrated towards the middle, rather than being extremely high or low. Distributions for religiosity, however, follow a non-normal distribution, such that there are more individuals who score particularly high or low on religiosity scales. Examining religiosity as it relates to personality characteristics could provide an empirical way to study a difficult concept. With the use of modern, empirically tested personality measures, researchers can look for links and obtain quantitative results to provide insight into how and why religion is such an important element of being human. Overall, when the research on religiosity and personality is summarized, there does not appear to be a strong link between the two. While there is research to suggest that there is a modest relationship between mental ability and religiosity, mental ability is not considered an aspect of personality. It appears that, rather than by personality, religiosity is better explained by environment and upbringing, such that people are likely to maintain the beliefs of the household they grew up in. Research on religiosity is also limited in that much psychological research is biased to Western populations, and therefore research on religiosity and personality may also be skewed towards Western religions.
Five-factor model of personality The five-factor model of personality is currently accepted as a comprehensive model of personality. The five-factor model (FFM) identifies five broad traits (the Big Five) underlying the many, narrower traits that together can be used to describe personality. The identified traits are:
Extraversion — outgoing, talkative, and sociable vs. reserved, shy, and withdrawn. Neuroticism — anxious, moody, and sensitive vs. relaxed and stable. Conscientiousness — organized, thorough, and precise vs. disorderly, careless, and unreliable. Agreeableness — cooperative, kind, and gentle vs. rude, harsh, and cold. Openness to Experience — unconventional, innovative, and complex vs. shallow, uninquisitive, and simple. The Big Five are good for correlating with religiosity, because each trait is orthogonal, or completely independent from one another. In having the ability to separate each essential trait from the other, it is possible to study each personality characteristic and how it relates to religiosity. Studying the psychology of religion through as it relates to personality is not a new idea, however. There has been research to both support and refute the ability of personality traits to explain religious or spiritual involvement. Research using Eysenck's model has found that religiosity in general is associated with low Openness to Experience, as well as low psychoticism, a factor associated inversely with Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. A review of studies examined the relations between the FFM and measures of religiosity, spiritual maturity, religious fundamentalism, and extrinsic religion. General religiosity was mainly related to Agreeableness and Conscientiousness of the Big Five traits. The same was found in a second review, which also noted that the relationship was consistent across different dimensions of religiosity, different cultures, and different measures of the Big Five. The relationship, however, appeared to be weaker in young adults than the rest of the adult population. Additionally, there was a weak positive correlation with Extraversion, and a very small but significant relationship with low Openness to Experience. This same study also found that the two different concepts of religiosity and spirituality both involve an overall compassionate attitude towards others and positively correlates with Agreeableness. Open, mature religiosity and spirituality were associated with high Openness to Experience, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness, and with low Neuroticism. Religious fundamentalism was associated with higher Agreeableness, and lower Neuroticism and lower Openness to Experience. Because of these findings, those with higher religiosity scores seemed to be more altruistic and more well behaved. However, this correlation is pretty small. It is not known if religious people tend to be better behaved or if better behaved people are more attracted to religion. Extrinsic religiosity was associated with higher Neuroticism but unrelated to the other personality factors. Levels of Neuroticism among religiousness vary, with European samples exhibiting higher levels than in the United States, which was speculated to be due to the dominance of Catholicism in European samples. Another study done on a group of Canadian university students, noted some differences between men and women as it related to their religiosity scores. According to this study, women tended to be more religious than men, but both men and women showed positive correlations of agreeableness and conscientiousness when compared to their religious involvement. Women who reported having no religious affiliation scored significantly higher in Neuroticism than those affiliated with a formal religion.
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