Coding and Quantifying Counterintuitiveness in Religious Concepts: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections

Abstract

Boyer's theory of counterintuitive cultural concept transmission claims that concepts that ideas that violate naturally occurring intuitive knowledge structures enough to be attention-demanding but not so much to undermine conceptual coherence have a transmission advantage over other concepts (Boyer et al. 2001: 535-64). Because of the prominence of these counterintuitive concepts in religious belief systems, Boyer's theory features prominently in many cognitive treatments of religion. Diffi culties in identifying what are and are not counterintuitive concepts in this technical sense, however, has made empirical treatment of Boyer's theory irregular and diffi cult to evaluate. Further, inability to quantify just how counterintuitive a given concept is has made ambiguous specifying where the alleged cognitive optimum lies. Th e present project attempts to clarify Boyer's theory and presents a formal system for coding and quantifying the "counterintuitiveness" of a concept, and hence, facilitates empirical scrutiny of the theory.

Reverse Engineering Complex Cultural Concepts: Identifying Building Blocks of “Religion”

“…In conceptualizing deities and other culturally postulated superhuman agents as (minimally) counter-intuitive, CSR researchers situated them within a larger class of representations that involve violations of pan-cultural ontological categories and offered a theory, based on the presumed memorability of such representations (Sperber, 1996), to explain why such concepts are so widely disseminated (Barrett, 1999(Barrett, , 2004Boyer, 2001;Atran, 2002). Researchers have devoted considerable effort to refining and testing the hypothesis that MCI concepts are more salient and memorable than those that are more or less so, with mixed results (for reviews, see Barrett, 2008;Hornbeck & Barrett, 2013).…”

“…To account for the richness and complexity of what we see on the ground historically and ethnographically, we have to see if we can reassemble the parts into recognizable wholes. In this regard, we should note that in focusing on concepts that presumably violate pan-cultural expectations, they explicitly set aside research on concepts, sometimes referred to as counterschematic, that violate cultural or idiosyncratic expectations (Barrett, 2008;Hornbeck & Barrett, 2012). Other researchers, however, are focusing on the interplay between violations at the ontological (or template) and cultural (or schematic) levels (Purzycki, 2010).…”

Psychologists finding religious belief: Building bridges between developmental cognitive science and cultural psychology

“…Researchers in CSR have claimed that humans have attractor mechanisms that prepare them for some kinds of representations over others (e.g. Atran & Norenzayan, 2004;Barrett, 2008;Barrett, Burdett, & Porter, 2009;Gregory & Barrett, 2009;McCauley & Lawson, 2002;Pyysia¨inen, 2002). They describe how super-agents tend to have a mix of properties where some are counterintuitive and some are not.…”

From individual to social counterintuitiveness: how layers of innovation weave together to form multilayered tapestries of human cultures

“…This includes ideas that have been learned through explicit training such as the socio-cultural and religious schemas, scripts, and scientific concepts that people acquire after having been immersed in a sociocultural or religious community or through exposure to long periods of training and practice such as the knowledge acquired by chess experts or scientists i.e., the so called ''maturationally natural concepts'' (McCauley and Lawson 2002;Barrett 2008). Another hurdle in the applicability of the MC-hypothesis to the spread of the cultural beliefs in contemporary social groups is the implicit assumption by some that the MC-hypothesis is only applicable post-hoc to explaining how religious ideas arose in the evolutionary past but has little to tell us about how religious ideas are likely to evolve now or in the future.…”