Are religious people nice people? Religiosity, race, interview dynamics, and perceived cooperativeness

Prior research has shown consistently that religiosity, as indexed by self- reported Frequency of prayer, is associated positively with "niceness," mea sured by interviewers' ratings of respondents' cooperativeness. We used dat a pooled from the 1983, 1988, and 1993 General Social Surveys to further ex amine the association between religiosity and niceness, and to raise questi ons about the adequacy of this currently preferred operationalization of ni ceness. We used three different measures of religiosity and directly examin ed racial differences in perceived cooperativeness, Our results indicate th at each self-reported indicator of religiosity was associated positively wi th perceived cooperativeness tin separate models), while race was associate d negatively. We found no evidence of mediating or moderating relationships . Overall, our results provide additional evidence that persons who are mor e religious are perceived by others to be more cooperative and that this ef fect operates net of more readily observable characteristics that might inf luence interview dynamics and interviewers' evaluations of respondents' coo perativeness. However, our results also suggest that new, more specific mea sures of niceness ate needed to improve our ability to fully measure this s ociologically important concept and to refine our understanding of the rela tionship between religiosity and niceness.