Despite the general criticisms of self-reports pointing out problems due to memory and cultural biases, self-reports remain a widespread method for assessing ritual attendance such as churchgoing. During an eight-month-long observation in a Fijian village, John Shaver, Thomas White, Patrick Vakaoti, and Martin Lang measured how self-report methods correlate with actual church attendance of the local population.
They found that self-report measures do not predict ritual attendance measured by observation and that people with parental duties were more likely to over-report their ritual attendance. Furthermore, the data suggested that third-part ratings of a person’s religiosity were the best predictor of that person’s frequency of ritual attendance.
You can find the article here:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0257160
In a paper published in Religion, Brain & Behavior, J. Nenadalová & D. Řezníček demonstrated that some study participants in a sensory-deprived laboratory environment sensed the presence of another person. This feeling was mostly associated with perceived uncertainty and only somewhat associated with psychological dispositions.
In a cross-national investigation published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, F. M. Saxler with LEVYNA’s E. Kundtová Klocová and other colleagues show that the COVID-19 pandemic affected young people’s normative beliefs about unpaid domestic work; and that this effect is stronger in countries with greater gender inequality.
