God Can Hear But Does He Have Ears? Dissociations Between Psychological and Physiological Dimensions of Anthropomorphism

God Can Hear But Does He Have Ears? Dissociations Between Psychological and Physiological Dimensions of Anthropomorphism Andrew Shtulman (shtulman@oxy.edu) Department of Psychology, Occidental College 1600 Campus Road, Los Angeles, CA 90041 Marjaana Lindeman (marjaana.lindeman@helsinki.fi) Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki P.O. Box 9, 00014 Helsinki, Finland Abstract Anthropomorphism is a default strategy for making the unfamiliar familiar, but is it a uniform strategy? Do all dimensions of anthropomorphism “hang together”? We explored this question by involving adults (n = 99) in a speeded property-attribution task in which they decided, as quickly as possible, whether properties of two types— psychological and physiological—could be attributed to God. Participants not only attributed more psychological properties to God than physiological properties, but they were also faster, more consistent, and more confident in making those attributions. Participants showed the reverse pattern when denying properties to God. That is, they were slower, less consistent, and less confident in denying psychological properties to God than in denying physiological ones. These findings suggest that God is conceptualized, by default, as having a mind but not a body—a distinction that has important implications for the nature and origin of God concepts in particular and supernatural concepts in general. Keywords: religious cognition, God concepts, folk theories Introduction The Greek philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon once noted, “If cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw, and could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own” (Lesher, 1992). This intuition—that God concepts are essentially a projection of human properties onto a nonhuman entity—has remained popular for centuries. Many scholars have appealed to anthropo- morphism as a way of explaining religion in general (Guthrie, 1993; Hume, 1757; Tylor, 1871) or God concepts in particular (Boyer, 2001; Barrett & Keil, 1996; Kelemen, 2004). Guthrie (1993), for instance, has argued that belief in supernatural beings, like God, arises from an evolutionarily endowed propensity to interpret changes in the physical environment as products of intentional agency. Similarly, Boyer (2001) has argued that God concepts are highly memorable, and thus highly “contagious,” because they are built from one of our most inferentially rich and early developing ontologies: the “PERSON” ontology. This appeal to anthropomorphism, though initially a matter of speculation, has been validated by research demonstrating the ubiquity of anthropomorphic thought in everyday life. Psychological studies have shown that people regularly attribute human properties to nonhuman entities, including animated shapes (Heider & Simmel, 1944), computers (Nass & Moon, 2000), robots (Haslam, et al., 2008), pets (Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007), nature (White, 1992), and groups of moving objects (Bloom & Veres, 1999). While there are a number of factors that influence the strength and consistency of such attributions— e.g., salience and accessability of intentional explanations, need to understand and predict the physical environment, degree of social connectedness (Epley et al., 2007)—the basic tendency to attribute human properties to nonhuman entities appears to be automatic, widespread, and early developing. Even infants appear to adopt an ”intentional stance” in the presence of self-moving objects, expecting such objects to move in a goal-directed manner (Gergely, Nadasdy, Csibra, & Biro, 1995), exert stable preferences for some objects over others (Woodward, 1998), and interact contingently with other agents in the environment (Johnson, Slaughter, & Carey, 1998). One important caveat when applying these findings to theories of religious cognition is that the kind of anthropomorphism readily displayed from infancy to adulthood is not the attribution of all human properties to nonhuman entities but the attribution of basic psychological properties—i.e., beliefs, desires, emotions, perceptions—to these entities. This distinction is important for two reasons. First, Boyer (2001) has explicitly argued that God concepts are really just “PERSON” concepts on to which God’s extraordinary properties (e.g., omnipotence, omnipresence, immortality) have been grafted. This stipulation is vital to Boyer’s larger claim that religious concepts derive their memorability from inconsistencies between the entailments of the concept’s base ontology and the entailments of its unique, non-natural properties. In the case of God, inconsistencies between beliefs like (a) people die and (b) God does not die or (c) people are in one place at one time and (d) God is in all places at all times are what presumably makes God concepts highly memorable and thus highly transmittable. While it is possible that most people do, in fact, assign God the physiological attributes that would lead to such contradictions, this assumption does not automatically follow from the psychological literature on anthropomorphism, which documents a predisposition to treat nonhuman entities as agents but does not document a predisposition to treat those same entities as people.