Nearer My God to Thee: Self–God Overlap and Believers' Relationships with God

Abstract Three studies, using two community samples (ns = 39 and 78) and a university student sample of Christian believers in God (n = 76), found that more religious people report greater self–other overlap with God. Three measures of self–God overlap were used: the Inclusion of Other in Self (IOS) scale, a dynamic version of the IOS, and an adjective checklist that was used to compute the percentage of traits that were shared between self and God. Study 1 compared evangelicals and atheists; Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that two components of religiosity, religious conservatism and awareness of God, independently predicted self–God overlap among Christian believers. The findings suggest that believers' relationships with God parallel other close relationships with human others. Keywords: Individual differences in religiosityRelationships with GodSelf–other overlap Notes From I need you to love me, written by BarlowGirl. Copyright 2005 by Word Music LLC. All rights retained. Used by permission. Leary et al. (2008 Leary, M. R., Tipsord, J. M. and Tate, E. 2008. "Allo-inclusive identity: Incorporating the social and natural worlds into one's sense of self". In Transcending self-interest: Psychological explorations of the quiet ego, Edited by: Bauer, J. and Wayment, H. A. Washington, DC: APA Books. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) also included questions about self–God overlap in their investigation. Data were also collected for a set of adjectives specifically relevant to conceptions of God (e.g., "omniscient" and "infinite"); these are not included in the analyses here. Variances differed between atheists and evangelicals, so adjusted degrees of freedom are used. Four participants left the IOS blank. There were missing data points for some of the other variables (including 11 people who did not provide their age, which we therefore decided not to use as a variable), and so the degrees of freedom vary slightly across subsequent analyses. Matthews and Hodges (2008 Matthews, T. I. and Hodges, S. D. Context matters: Measuring self–other overlap. Poster presented at the 2008 meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. Albuquerque, NM. February. [Google Scholar]) also found that varying the order of the traditional and dynamic IOS (using romantic partners as the "other") changed people's responses on these two measures. Additional informationNotes on contributorsSara D. HodgesStudy 2 is based on the second author's undergraduate Honors Thesis at the University of Oregon. The authors extend thanks to Robert Gordon, Scott John, Michael W. Myers, Krista Rynearson, and Azim Shariff for their help with elements of this paper.