Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concepts

“Similarly, the results of these studies could be understood as a case of structured imagination ( Ward, 1994; 1995 ).”

“…of God tend to match these beliefs, but their more informal descriptions of God's actual behavior show strong evidence of anthropomorphism, with God moving from one place to another, answering prayers in a serial fashion, or being unaware of certain events in the world (J. L. Barrett & Keil, 1996).”

“Measures have ranged from explicit questions about how much an agent looks or acts human (Kiesler & Goetz, 2002) to implicit measures of memory mistakes in which people recall supernatural agents behaving in humanlike ways (Barrett & Keil, 1996).”

“A number of anthropologists have argued that religious concepts do not in fact constitute an autonomous “domain” (Spiro & D’Andrade, 1958; Sperber, 1985; Lawson & McCauley, 1990; Bloch, 1992; Whitehouse, 1992; Guthrie, 1993; Dulaney & Fiske, 1994; Barrett & Keil, 1996 ).”

“For example, while most would claim that God has special powers, on a recall task for stories in which God was depicted as all-powerful and all-knowing many undergraduates defaulted to a view of God as a human with limited capacities (Barrett & Keil, 1996).”

“Experiments with Americans and Indians illustrate a gap between religious utterances and the mental processing of religious concepts (Barrett and Keil 1996; Barrett 1998).”

“When asked to respond to narratives about these same gods, the same subjects described the deities as being in only one place at a time, puzzling over alternative courses of action, and looking for evidence in order to decide what to do (e.g., to first save Johnny, who’s praying for help because his foot is stuck in a…”

“Barrett and Keil (1996) found that people have two parallel concepts of God that may be evoked in different situations—a theological one that they use to answer many general questions and an anthropomorphic representation that may be more important for some online tasks such as story understanding.”

“Previous research and everyday experience suggest that even when people’s abstract understanding of an entity is clearly not anthropomorphic,their social behavior and attributions may be anthropomorphic (Barrett & Keil, 1996).”

“In recent years, there has been growing empirical work on the cognitive factors that constrain the cultural success of beliefs, and this research yields a more complex perspective ( Barrett & Keil, 1996; Barrett & Nyhof, 2001; Boyer, & Ramble, 2001).”

“Many properties are quite counterintuitive and cognitively cumbersome, especially in real-time inference generation (Barrett, 1998; Barrett & Keil, 1996).”

“…demonstrated that religious subjects are generally incapable of keeping a strict doctrinal representation of God in online cognitive processing (Barrett and Keil, 1996). by guest on N ovem ber 8, 2016 http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from However, praying, which lies at the center…”

“Although such a view may be at odds with scripture, research suggests that people will frequently ignore theology in their perceptions of God (Barrett & Keil, 1996; Epley, Akalis, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2008).”

“This is by no means the first attempt of its kind, and others have in fact seen a relationship between theory of mind and theism (e.g., J. L. Barrett & Keil, 1996; Boyer, 1994; Maser & Gallup, 1990); however, it is the first attempt, so far as I can gather, to clearly articulate the issues involved.”

“Even adults implicitly represent an omniscient God as having essentially anthropomorphic mental limitations (Barrett & Keil, 1996).”

“A third dimension along which CTs vary is their connection with collective action – some being confined to collective sense-making, whilst others (as in the pogroms) lead to collective action against the alleged conspirators.”

“Rather, framework biological and psychological theories may afford the development of supernatural concepts (Boyer & Walker, 2000; Rosengren & Hickling, 2000) and constrain their interpretation (Barrett & Keil, 1996).”

“This extends to a more general anthropocentric bias that colors the perception of nonhuman agents in terms of human attributes ( Barrett & Keil, 1996; Eddy, Gallup, & Povinelli, 1993).”

“Empirical studies have shown that people anthropomorphize a wide range of nonhuman objects, including pets (Antonacopoulos & Pychyl, 2008), gods (Barrett & Keil, 1996), and products (Wan, Chen, & Jin, 2016).”

“As shown in Figure 3, more interpretive action verbs were used for less polite interviewers, both robotic and human (F [1, 64] = 4.”

“What distinguishes the representation of supernatural agents from natural agents are violations of the intuitive ontological categories that humans use to reason about the natural world (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Barrett & Keil, 1996; Boyer, 2001).”

“Even though control conditions demonstrated that readers did not have to understand God’s activity anthropomorphically in the stories (Barrett and Keil, 1996, Study 2), participants generally did use an anthropomorphic concept of God - even when it contradicted their own stated theological beliefs…”

“Neither is he the first to propose that ToM becomes generalized to other domains (see Barrett & Keil 1996; Boyer 1994).”

“In a study by Barrett and Keil (1996), subjects strongly professed belief in non-anthropomorphic properties of God: that God could be in more than one place at a time, or pay attention to multiple events simultaneously.”

“In support of these ideas, studies show that very young children all over the world, often despite their parents ’ own beliefs, seem to generate concepts of God (Barrett & Keil, 1996 ; Barrett & Richert, 2003 ).”

“Regarding reflective beliefs, Barrett (1998) and Keil (Barrett & Keil, 1996) reason that ‘‘If subjects were asked directly what they believed about God, responses would tend to fit into an abstract theology’’ (223).”

“It is important to distinguish explicitly held religious beliefs and affiliations from religious intuitions (see [4,14,33, 34 ]).”

“For example, Barrett and Keil (1996) found that even religious believers well versed in God's omniscience conceptualized God as attending to people's prayers sequentially, rather than attending to all prayers simultaneously, suggesting that they thought of God as subject to some of the same…”

“It is likely that anthropomorphized God concepts (Barrett & Keil, 1996; Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007; Morewedge & Clear, 2008) are particularly potent in motivating attributions to fate, since a human-like, agentic God is more likely to get involved in peoples’ lives and influence outcomes than…”

“It is now widely thought in the cognitive science of religion (e.g., Barrett & Keil, 1996; Pyysiäinen, 2009) that conceptions and cognition of supernatural agents are built upon some form of anthropomorphism (Guthrie, 1980, 1995).”

“Such interpretations are consistent with deep intuitions concerning agency and its relation to the body (Atran, 2002; Barrett, 2004; Barrett and Keil, 1996; Bering, 2006; Bloom, 2004; Cheyne and Girard, 2007b; Tremlin, 2006).”

“Indeed, especially when adults are generating non-reflective, real-time inferences about God they may unwittingly use a concept of God that includes anthropomorphic properties they reflectively reject (Barrett 1998, 1999; Barrett and Keil 1996; Barrett and VanOrman, 1996).”

“…Frank Keil prompted religious devotees in American and India represented their gods in ways that made them far more anthropomorphic than the theologically explicit representations that these believers of each tradition consciously assent to in explicit doctrines and creeds (Barrett and Keil 1996).”

“Religious participants asked to describe God or tell stories involving God will anthropomorphize God, even when doing so contradicts their theological beliefs—anthropomorphic errors by the participants’ own lights (Barrett and Keil 1996).”

“As demonstrated by Barrett (1998) and others (Barrett & Keil, 1996; Slone, 2004), even though in many cases there are authoritative versions of SNAs, people often process them in ways that run counter to these versions.”

“In one study, Barrett and Keil (1996) had student participants of different academic and religious backgrounds read a story in which God was not described in anthropomorphic terms.”

“…and Laidlaw 2004); historiographic (Lisdorf 2001; Vial 2004; Whitehouse and Martin 2004); interview (Malley and Barrett 2003); and experimental (Barrett and Keil 1996), including cross-cultural (Astuti and Harris 2008; Knight 2008) and developmental techniques (Barrett and Richert 2003; Bering…”

“Notably, though developmental and implicit approaches reveal that people often attribute less than perfect knowledge to God (Barrett & Keil, 1996; Lane et al., 2010, 2012), a different result has emerged in the domain of morality.”

“This point relates to the notion of “theological” or “cultural correctness,” which is doctrinal information that people are supposed to say or believe (Barrett, 1999; Barrett & Keil, 1996; Purzycki, 2013a; Purzycki et al., 2012; Slone, 2004).”

“…explicitly questioned about various deities, they correctly acknowledged the extraordinary powers of the deity in question but in reading short stories, they often interpreted the actions and utterances of the deity as subject to ordinary human constraints (Barrett, 1998; Barrett & Keil, 1996).”

“Mystical experiences can be defined as fusion with a supernatural agent (Barrett & Keil, 1996).”

“Although the present study did not employ implicit measures, other studies have shown that explicit measures can reveal implicit biases (e.g., Barrett & Keil, 1996; Bering, 2002b).”

“Indeed, while even adult believers tend to think of God as subject to many human-like psychological constraints, they are less likely to do so if first asked questions (and so reminded) about the nature of God's powers (Barrett & Keil, 1996).”

“…(1) religious rituals (Lawson & McCauley, 1990; Whitehouse, 1992); (2) cognitive constraints in the representation of supernatural agents (Barrett, 1999; Barrett & Keil, 1996; Boyer, 1996); and (3) the acquisition of supernatural concepts (Barrett, 2000; Boyer, 1994; Guthrie, 1993; Guthrie, 1980).”

“1 Participants were presented with words referring to supernatural agents (e.g., God or Devil) or natural agents (e.g., animals or humans).”