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Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concepts
Open accessAbstract
We investigate the problem of how nonnatural entities are represented by examining university students' concepts of God, both professed theological beliefs and concepts used in comprehension of narratives. In three story processing tasks, subjects often used an anthropomorphic God concept that is inconsistent with stated theological beliefs; and drastically distorted the narratives without any awareness of doing so. By heightening subjects' awareness of their theological beliefs, we were able to manipulate the degree of anthropomorphization. This tendency to anthropomorphize may be generalizable to other agents. God (and possibly other agents) is unintentionally anthropomorphized in some contexts, perhaps as a means of representing poorly understood nonnatural entities.
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“In a similar fashion, minds never free themselves entirely from their mortal coil: the dead continue to be imagined as possessing ethereal bodies resembling those they ' possessed ' in life, as well as being subject to the sorts of physical limitations typically imposed by bodies. 39”
From Body and Mind in Early China: An Integrated Humanities–Science Approach (2013) · cites this paper as Barrett 1996
In the citing paper
“In a similar fashion, minds never free themselves entirely from their mortal coil: the dead continue to be imagined as possessing ethereal bodies resembling those they ' possessed ' in life, as well as being subject to the sorts of physical limitations typically imposed by bodies. 39”
From Body and Mind in Early China: An Integrated Humanities–Science Approach (2013) · cites this paper as Barrett and Keil 1996
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“Research by Barrett (1994; Barrett & Keil, 1996 ) showed that adults’ concepts of God are constrained by their concepts of intentional agents.”
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“The early works in the cognitive science of religion have theorized that the key for the emergence of religious belief is to perceive supernatural agents as human-like agents (e.g., Barrett, 2000; Barrett & Keil, 1996).”
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“However, I would like to advance an additional explanation by drawing on the dual processing model of religious thought, as developed by scholars in the cognitive science of religion (CSR), especially the dual-processing/representation theory of religious cognition (Barrett & Keil, 1996).”
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“For example, Barrett and Keil (1996) showed that though believers adopted theologically correct beliefs when asked formally (i.e., they reported believing God is omniscient), when participants were presented with vignettes they defaulted to anthropomorphized, theologically incorrect god concepts…”
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“…a supernatural agent are theorised to be related to the evolved social–cognitive functions that enable humans to infer and interpret the minds of other humans (Guthrie 1995; Boyer 2001; Atran and Norenzayan 2004; Piazza et al. 2011; Jong 2011; Bering 2006; Barrett 2011; Barrett and Keil 1996).”
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“For example, speeded statement evaluation studies provided parallel evidence that in Christian adults person-based, embodied conceptions of God coexist with theologically mandated trans-personal, disembodied conceptions (Barlev et al., 2017, 2018; cf. Barrett & Keil, 1996).”
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“In their most influential studies (Barrett and Keil, 1996; Barrett, 1998) conducted with American Christians and Indian Hindus, participants were presented a narrative about a divine being (God or Brahman, re ectively) answering a prayer which was neutral with regard to time and space and perceptual abilities in relat…”
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“Although Barrett and Keil were initially cautious about settling on this explanation (Barrett and Keil 1996, pp. 241–44), Barrett was more confident by 1998 (Barrett 1998, pp. 612, 616–17) and he began a 1999 article by demarcating his two streams of religious conceptualization and supplying this…”
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“There is thus a world of a difference between what is theologically correct and how people actually think (Barrett 1999; Barrett and Keil 1996).”
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“…have chosen Pyysiäinen et al. 2003 plus the eight articles with ‘empirical evidence’ that are (re)published in Slone 2006a as a representative sample: Barrett & Keil (1996) 2006; Barrett & Nyhof (2001) 2006; Boyer & Ramble (2001) 2006; Barrett & Lawson (2001) 2006; Evans (2001) 2006; Knight et al.…”
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“wishes and desires and interact with people [3], [5], [6], [9], [40], [49].”
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“…that would allow him to accomplish this feat—the same way they (often) conclude that God, which, according to Barrett, we represent anthropomorphically as an MCI person (Barrett & Keil, 1996), possesses the counterintuitive properties that allow him to perform the actions attributed to him?”
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Metadata
- Authors
- Barrett, J. L., & Keil, F. C.
- Affiliations
- Cornell University (US)
- Venue
- Cognitive Psychology
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 1996-12
- Volume
- 31
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 219-247
- ISSN
- 0010-0285 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2166757416
- Cited by
- 769
- References
- 32
- Citations by year
- 2026: 14 · 2025: 33 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 37 · 2022: 30 · 2021: 35 · 2020: 84 · 2019: 48 · 2018: 29 · 2017: 22 · 2016: 29 · 2015: 26 · 2014: 32 · 2013: 25 · 2012: 23
- FWCI
- 7.97
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Cognitive Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) (University of Oxford) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01-HD23922, R01HD023922)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Language, Metaphor, and Cognition
- Social Sciences › Health › Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Study and Philosophy of Religion
- Keywords
- anthropomorphism, concept of God, theological beliefs, narrative comprehension
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Adult, Analysis of Variance, Cognition, Concept Formation, Culture, Humans, Mental Recall, Religion and Psychology, Metaphor, Intuition
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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