Karma and God: Convergent and divergent mental representations of supernatural norm enforcement.

Abstract

Few studies have directly examined mental representations of supernaturally monitored morality, as they are reflected in world religions as conceptions of karma and God. In seven samples (total N= 3861), we use an open-ended free-list task to investigate participants' mental representations of God and karma, among culturally diverse samples from the USA and India, including Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and non-religious participants. Key results showed that (1) there is substantial consensus among believers that actions relevant to interpersonal cooperation (e.g., generosity, harm, fairness, and honesty) are highly relevant to both karma and God beliefs; however, (2) God is prototypically represented as a personified, social agent, who believers have a devotional relationship with, whereas karma is more commonly conceived of as a non-agentic causal process, through which moral actions generate commensurate good and bad consequences; (3) God-but not karma-is expected to reward and punish acts of religious devotion, in addition to the harm and fairness norms that characterize interpersonal prosociality; and (4) karma-more than God-is expected to reward generosity and punish greed. These findings show how culturally-constructed religious beliefs shape expectations about the consequences of moral behavior. A greater understanding of the mental representations of karma and God contribute to cultural evolutionary theories of supernatural norm-enforcement and its role in large-scale cooperation.

Cognitive and cultural models in psychological science: A tutorial on modeling free-list data as a dependent variable in Bayesian regression

“…A rapidly growing body of work assesses the relationship between moralizing religions and deities and social behavior (Bendixen, Lightner, et al, n.d.) and item response scales are very common instruments as measures of moral salience of deities and religions. However, our finding that an item response scale on a target deity's moral concerns does not predict moral salience of that deity in a free-list task raises questions about current methodological approaches and is consistent with another recent cross-cultural study that failed to find clear evidence of an association between item scales and free-list tasks on moral and political attitudes (White & Norenzayan, 2021).…”

“…Further, in terms of how to measure and model individual-level and cross-cultural variation in mental representations (e.g., beliefs, attitudes, values), we want to stress that the present work has ramifications that reach beyond the scholarly field in which the presented case study was conceived. For instance, there is arguably untapped potential in employing free-list tasks in measuring not only religious beliefs, but also beliefs and attitudes on science (e.g., Bendixen, 2020), morality (e.g., Purzycki, Pisor, et al, 2018;White & Norenzayan, 2021), health (e.g., Quinlan, 2017), as well as political, ideological, and economic issues (e.g., Bendixen, 2019;White & Norenzayan, 2021), disciplinary areas in which item response scales are extremely common but oftentimes not externally or cross-task verified. Here too, the free-list task could serve as a convenient measure of cross-task robustness or as a methodological tool to explore whether these two tasks indeed tap into distinct cognitive processes.…”

Cognitive and cultural models in psychological science: A tutorial on modeling free-list data as a dependent variable in Bayesian regression.

“…Further, in terms of how to measure and model individual-level and cross-cultural variation in mental representations (e.g., beliefs, attitudes, values), we want to stress that the present work has ramifications that reach beyond the scholarly field in which the presented case study was conceived. For instance, there is arguably untapped potential in employing free-list tasks in measuring not only religious beliefs, but also beliefs and attitudes on science (e.g., Bendixen, 2020), morality (e.g., Purzycki, Pisor, et al, 2018; White & Norenzayan, 2021), health (e.g., Quinlan, 2017), as well as political, ideological, and economic issues (e.g., Bendixen, 2019; White & Norenzayan, 2021), disciplinary areas in which item response scales are extremely common but oftentimes not externally or cross-task verified. Here too, the free-list task could serve as a convenient measure of cross-task robustness or as a methodological tool to explore whether these two tasks indeed recruit distinct cognitive processes.…”

Unique Cognitive and Emotional Profiles of Interpersonal Gratitude and Spiritual Gratitude

“…Future research may find that diverse supernatural forces elicit distinct patterns of emotional responses in part based on their distinct operating rules and patterns of attributions. For example, feelings of pride may be especially likely when outcomes are attributed to karmic rewards for one's past good deeds, due to the internal locus of control for much of karmic causality (White & Norenzayan, 2022); whereas there may be less pride when a personal God is thought to be the external causal agent. Additional unique psychological profiles may be evident when positive and negative experiences are attributed to other supernatural entities, such as luck, fate, witchcraft, the evil eye, or the intervention of spirits.…”