Baiting the Dissident Hook: Some Effects of Bias on Measuring Religious Belief

This paper suggests that previous estimates of religious belief are inadequate not because they were biased but rather because they were biased in the wrong direction. Given the natural pressures toward traditionalism in this "most religious of all societies," more accurate research may require a strategically dissident bias as a countervailing influence. After showing that the simple question "Do you believe in God?" predicts very little of one's specific beliefs about God, the paper explores four biases that can be steered in either traditional or dissident directins in ascertaining the specifics. When the biases are pooled into maximally dissident and traditional instruments, the differences are predictably large. More interestingly, if the respondent's own evaluations of the instruments are acknowledged, the dissident version is shown to come closer to reality.