How Children and Adults Represent God's Mind

Abstract

For centuries, humans have contemplated the minds of gods. Research on religious cognition is spread across sub-disciplines, making it difficult to gain a complete understanding of how people reason about gods' minds. We integrate approaches from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology and neuroscience to illuminate the origins of religious cognition. First, we show that although adults explicitly discriminate supernatural minds from human minds, their implicit responses reveal far less discrimination. Next, we demonstrate that children's religious cognition often matches adults' implicit responses, revealing anthropomorphic notions of God's mind. Together, data from children and adults suggest the intuitive nature of perceiving God's mind as human-like. We then propose three complementary explanations for why anthropomorphism persists in adulthood, suggesting that anthropomorphism may be: 1) an instance of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic; 2) a reflection of early testimony; and/or 3) an evolutionary byproduct.

The role of religious context in children's differentiation between God's mind and human minds

“…Muslim children had the greatest differentiation of God's mind from human minds, followed by Protestant and Catholic children, with Non-Affiliated children reporting almost no differentiation between their views on God's mind and human minds. The Non-Affiliated children in particular treated humans and God similarly during these preschool years, suggesting a strong anthropomorphism heuristic for God used by children in the absence of cultural supports to the contrary (Heiphetz et al, 2015;Lane & Harris, 2014).…”

“…Certainly, numerous cultural factors support children's understanding of human minds, such as engaging in discourse about mental states (Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002;Turnbull, Carpendale, & Racine, 2009). Additionally, in the absence of cultural supports to the contrary, one might expect children's concepts of God to be anthropomorphic to the extent that their concepts of other agents is anthropomorphic (Heiphetz, Lane, Waytz, & Young, 2015;Lane & Harris, 2014). Thus, the current study examined how religious experiences impact when and to what degree preschoolers differentiate the capabilities of God's mind from human minds, utilizing analyses of religious context at both the group level and within a family system.…”

“…Additionally, many adults have anthropomorphic biases that structure their concepts of God (Heiphetz et al, 2015;Lane & Harris, 2014), and these anthropomorphic biases likely emerge in the language parents use when talking about God with their children. Additionally, Lane et al (2012) found that children who were tested using anthropomorphic depictions or language about God were more likely to attribute ignorance to God than children tested without such anthropomorphic depictions.…”

My mind, your mind, and God's mind: How children and adults conceive of different agents’ moral beliefs

“…By elementary school age, children from various cultures (e.g., Christian and secular communities within the United States and Spain, Yucatec Maya) attribute more accurate factual knowledge to God versus humans (Barrett, Richert, & Driesenga, ; Giménez‐Dasí, Guerrero, & Harris, ; Knight, ; Lane, Wellman, & Evans, , ; Richert & Barrett, ; Wigger, Paxson, & Ryan, ). Yet, a full‐fledged understanding of the distinction between God's extraordinary mind and human minds entails a protracted developmental process, and even adults often revert to thinking about God's mind as being human‐like (Heiphetz, Lane, Waytz, & Young, ). Moreover, U.S. adults hold egocentric views of God's ideological beliefs (e.g., about abortion), perceiving such beliefs as especially similar to their own (Epley, Converse, Delbosc, Monteleone, & Cacioppo, ; Ross, Lelkes, & Russell, ).…”

The explanatory structure of unexplainable events: Causal constraints on magical reasoning

“…We prefer extraterrestrial creatures that honor the biological properties of terrestrial creatures (e.g., bilateral symmetry, dual appendages, cephalization) to those that do not (Smith, Ward, & Schumacher, 1993;Ward, 1994). And we prefer divine agents that honor the properties of human psychology (e.g., that knowledge depends on perception, that perception depends on attention, that attention depends on interest) to agents that violate such expectations (Heiphetz, Lane, Waytz, & Young, 2015;Lane, Evans, Brink, & Wellman, 2016;Purzycki, 2013).…”