Individualism-collectivism has emerged as one of the most important constructs to depict cultural differences and similarities. It is typical to examine individualism and collectivism through comparison between the cultures of the West and those of the East or comparison between various religious traditions, e.g. Christianity has been seen as the source of Western individualistic understanding whilst Buddhism as the source of Eastern collectivist understanding. The research presented in this paper explored the connections between individualism-collectivism and religiosity in Polish Catholic culture. (...) Although Poland is an orthodox Catholic environment, gradually intensified secularization processes have been observed there. In two separate studies we examined relationships between individualism-collectivism and religiosity defined in a traditional and secularized context. (shrink)

D. Wulff developed a notion of post-critical beliefs as a proposal for the description of religion in the light of the progress of secularization and socio-cultural changes. According to his theory, we can situate potential attitudes toward religion in a two-dimensional space. The vertical dimension stands for Inclusion vs. Exclusion of Transcendence, and the horizontal one-for the way an individual interprets religious content: Literal vs. Symbolic. In this way, the two dimensions determine four quadrants, each reflecting a potential attitude towards (...) religion, operationalized by D. Hutsebaut in the Post-Critical Belief Scale as: Orthodoxy, External Critique, Relativism and Second Naiveté. The research presented in this paper is our attempt at fi n ding an answer to the question whether the religious attitudes determined by Wulff are related to self-consciousness types. We tested 159 adult individuals by means of the PCBS scale by D. Hutsebaut and the Self-consciousness scale by Z. Zaborowski and Z. Oleszkiewicz. The results of these tests are that the refl ective type of self-consciousness correlated positively with Orthodoxy and Second Naiveté and negatively with External Critique and Relativism. (shrink)