The Relationship Between Implicit And Explicit Attitude Toward Tibetan Buddhism Among The Tibetan College Students

The study of religious attitude is one of the most important area of study in the psychology of religion.The aim of this study is to examine the characteristics of Tibetan college students' implicit and explicit attitude toward Tibetan Buddhism as well as to explore effective tools for the study of this area.The study consists of two sub-studies.In study 1,a Tibetan Buddhist Religious Attitude Scale is developed.The scale contains two sub-scales namely Religious Behavior and Religious Help.The study is of good reliability and structure validity(NFI=0.929,RFI=0.902,IFI=0.951,TLI=0.932,CFI=0.951,RMSEA=0.081,general cronbach a=0.869,Religious Behavior a=0.785,Religious Value a=0.797);the Tibetan college students' explicit attitude toward Tibetan Buddhism shows no significant differences in sex,grades,regions and birth place.In study 2,an SC-IAT experimental study is conducted to explore their implicit attitude towards Tibetan Buddhism.Results:the subjects' reaction to compatible task is significantly lower than that to incompatible task on the overall SC-IAT;the correlation among the three independent SC-IATs and the overall SC-IAT scores in each experiment is significant,which explains that the implicit experiment is of good construct validity;for Religious Subject task,the implicit effect in living Buddha and the Buddhas are significantly positive,but significantly negative in dhammapala;for Religious Behavior task,the implicit effect in religious ceremony and other everyday religious behaviors are significantly positive;for Religious Places task,the implicit effect is significantly positive in man-made religious places and negative in natural religious places.Subjects of different sex have no significant difference in implicit attitude;subjects of different grades have significant difference in Religious Subject task but no difference in Religious Behavior and Religious Places tasks;subjects of different birth place have significant difference in Religious Behavior and Religious Places task;subjects from different areas have significant differences in Religious Behaviors,but no difference in Religious Subject and Religious Places tasks;the Religious Attitude Scale of Tibetan Buddhism and the SC-IAT tasks are used to investigate the correlations between implicit and explicit religious attitudes.Results shows no significant correlation between implicit and explicit attitude which means they are of relatively independent mechanisms but both contribute to the whole idea of the attitude study.