Relations between Gau ḍ īya Vai ṣṇ ava Devotional Practices and Implicit and Explicit Anthropomorphic Reasoning about K ṛṣṇ a

Employing a narrative comprehension task procedure, this study tests the hypothesis that engagement in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava religious practices, which are aimed at cultivating a personal relationship with the Hindu deity Kṛṣṇa, predict increased implicit attribution of anthropomorphic properties to him. Contrary to our hypothesis, multiple regression analyses of data from 184 native Krishna devotees in West Bengal, India, indicated that increased engagement in these practices loaded as a tertiary predictor after education and age, such that increased practice predicted a decrease in implicit anthropomorphic reasoning about Kṛṣṇa (ß = 0.16, p <</em> 0.03). Based on these and additional analyses of the data, we theorize that these results may be due to the tradition’s emphasis on presenting Kṛṣṇa’s non-anthropomorphic dimensions to neophyte practitioners and the non-Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava public. One implication of these results is that religious cultures and engagement in religious practices have the potential to significantly affect a human cognitive tendency to implicitly attribute anthropomorphic properties to divine beings. This may result from developing alternative knowledge from which to reason about a deity by engaging in religious practices and beliefs shaped by particular theological, historical, and cultural factors. Employing a narrative comprehension task procedure, this study tests the hypothesis that engagement in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava religious practices, which are aimed at cultivating a personal relationship with the Hindu deity Kṛṣṇa, predict increased implicit attribution of anthropomorphic properties to him. Contrary to our hypothesis, multiple regression analyses of data from 184 native Krishna devotees in West Bengal, India, indicated that increased engagement in these practices loaded as a tertiary predictor after education and age, such that increased practice predicted a decrease in implicit anthropomorphic reasoning about Kṛṣṇa (ß = 0.16, p <</em> 0.03). Based on these and additional analyses of the data, we theorize that these results may be due to the tradition’s emphasis on presenting Kṛṣṇa’s non-anthropomorphic dimensions to neophyte practitioners and the non-Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava public. One implication of these results is that religious cultures and engagement in religious practices have the potential to significantly affect a human cognitive tendency to implicitly attribute anthropomorphic properties to divine beings. This may result from developing alternative knowledge from which to reason about a deity by engaging in religious practices and beliefs shaped by particular theological, historical, and cultural factors. Disciplines Comparative Methodologies and Theories | History of Religions of Eastern Origins | Other Religion | Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Comments This is a manuscript of an article from Journal of Cognition and Culture 16 (2016): 107, doi:10.1163/ 15685373-12342170. Posted with permission. This article is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/philrs_pubs/14 Submitted for publication by the Journal of Cognition and Culture (forthcoming, 2016) 1 Relations between Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Devotional Practices and Implicit and Explicit Anthropomorphic Reasoning about Kṛṣṇa Travis Chilcott Iowa State University Raymond F. Paloutzian Westmont College Author Note: This paper is based on a talk given at the conference “Homo Experimentalis: Experimental Approaches in the Study of Religion,” at the Laboratory for Experimental Research of Religion (LEVYNA) in Brno, Czech Republic, October 2527, 2012. The fieldwork for this research took place while the senior author was a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. We would like to thank Ann Taves, Justin Barrett, Richard Sosis, and Miguel Farias for their time and advice, Abhishek Ghosh for organizational help and translation of the materials, and all those in both the United States and India who facilitated this project in various ways. We thank Oxford University’s Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, the Oxford Centre for Anthropology and Mind, and the Templeton Foundation for making this study possible, and the University of California at Santa Barbara, Claremont Graduate University, and Iowa State University for the use of resources. Correspondence concerning this paper can be addressed to Travis Chilcott, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011 (Email: Chilcott@isu.edu); or to Raymond F. Paloutzian, Department of Psychology, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, CA 931081099 USA (Email: paloutz@westmont.edu). Accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognition and Culture (forthcoming, 2016) 2 Abstract Employing a narrative comprehension task procedure, this study tests the hypothesis that engagement in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava religious practices, which are aimed at cultivating a personal relationship with the Hindu deity Kṛṣṇa, predict increased implicit attribution of anthropomorphic properties to him. Contrary to our hypothesis, multiple regression analyses of data from 184 native Krishna devotees in West Bengal, India, indicated that increased engagement in these practices loaded as a tertiary predictor after education and age, such that increased practice predicted a decrease in implicit anthropomorphic reasoning about Kṛṣṇa (ß= .16, p< .03). Based on these and additional analyses of the data, we theorize that these results may be due to the tradition’s emphasis on presenting Kṛṣṇa’s non-anthropomorphic dimensions to neophyte practitioners and the non-Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava public. One implication of these results is that religious cultures and engagement in religious practices have the potential to significantly affect a human cognitive tendency to implicitly attribute anthropomorphic properties to divine beings. This may result from developing alternative knowledge from which to reason about a deity by engaging in religious practices and beliefs shaped by particular theological,Employing a narrative comprehension task procedure, this study tests the hypothesis that engagement in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava religious practices, which are aimed at cultivating a personal relationship with the Hindu deity Kṛṣṇa, predict increased implicit attribution of anthropomorphic properties to him. Contrary to our hypothesis, multiple regression analyses of data from 184 native Krishna devotees in West Bengal, India, indicated that increased engagement in these practices loaded as a tertiary predictor after education and age, such that increased practice predicted a decrease in implicit anthropomorphic reasoning about Kṛṣṇa (ß= .16, p< .03). Based on these and additional analyses of the data, we theorize that these results may be due to the tradition’s emphasis on presenting Kṛṣṇa’s non-anthropomorphic dimensions to neophyte practitioners and the non-Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava public. One implication of these results is that religious cultures and engagement in religious practices have the potential to significantly affect a human cognitive tendency to implicitly attribute anthropomorphic properties to divine beings. This may result from developing alternative knowledge from which to reason about a deity by engaging in religious practices and beliefs shaped by particular theological, historical, and cultural factors. Accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognition and Culture (forthcoming, 2016) 3 Relations between Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Devotional Practices and Implicit and Explicit Anthropomorphic Reasoning about Kṛṣṇa In a seminal psychological study of anthropomorphism, Barrett and Keil (1996) explored the extent to which people implicitly think about God in anthropomorphic terms in contrast to the non-anthropomorphic qualities that theologies and individuals often explicitly attribute to God. Using a variation of a narrative comprehension paradigm developed by Bransford and McCarrell (1974), subjects were read a series of narratives in which God was an agent, after which participants were asked to recall particular details. Each narrative contained two kinds of recall items: “base” items, or control items, which were concerned with the basic facts of the narrative and “test” items, which were concerned with how God was conceptualized. Test items were constructed in such a way that an inaccurate recall would indicate implicit attribution of anthropomorphic qualities to God that were inferred and not made explicit in the narrative. This indirect method was chosen in order to tap into God concepts that subjects use in everyday life rather than in the context of theologically normative expectations for how God should be conceived. Participants were also asked to fill out an explicit beliefs questionnaire that included ratings of self-religiosity, religious affiliation, and a series of multiple-choice questions concerning the specific properties God might possess. The procedure was run in two separate studies with two groups each distinguished by variations in the procedure. Two groups were read the narratives first, followed by the explicit beliefs questionnaire, and two groups read them in the reverse order to make explicit beliefs more salient. In all four cases, the groups indicated a strong tendency to implicitly anthropomorphize God in contrast with wide agreement amongst participants Accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognition and Culture (forthcoming, 2016) 4 that God is subject to few if any physical and psychological constraints typical of human beings. They interpreted these results as evidence that people intuitively make anthropomorphic assumptions about God. In order to explore whether such findings might be cross-culturally stable, Barrett (1998) conducted a similar study among North Indian Hindus. Allowing the participants to read the narrative comprehension tasks first and using adapted versions of the materials used pre