When Allah meets Ganesha: Developing supernatural concepts in a religiously diverse society

Shtulman, Andrew; Foushee, Ruthe; Barner, David; Dunham, Yarrow; Srinivasan, Mahesh

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2019.100806

Cited by 14 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Consistent with this evidence, our results indicate that children who are exposed to religious testimony on a regular basis endorse naturalistic and divine intervention at similar rates. Indeed, by demonstrating that the gap between divine intervention and the other supernatural interventions widens with age, this study shows that children become more accepting of supernatural ideas that are endorsed by their culture and discard the ones that are not as they get older, adding to previous evidence (Harris & Gimenez, 2005;Richert, Saide, Lesage, & Shaman, 2016;Rosengren et al, 2014;Shtulman, Foushee, Barner, Dunham, & Srinivasan, 2019). Lastly, our findings also have implications regarding how children think about counterfactuals.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 76%

What could have been done? Counterfactual alternatives to negative outcomes generated by religious and secular children.

Payir¹,

Heiphetz²,

Harris³

et al. 2022

Developmental Psychology

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Recent research has shown that a religious upbringing renders children receptive to ordinarily impossible outcomes, but the underlying mechanism for this effect remains unclear. Exposure to religious teachings might alter children’s basic understanding of causality. Alternatively, religious exposure might only affect children’s religious cognition, not their causal judgments more generally. To test between these possibilities, 6- to 11-year-old children attending either secular (n = 49, 51% female, primarily White and middle-class) or parochial schools (n = 42, 48% female, primarily White and middle-class) heard stories in which characters experienced negative outcomes and indicated how those characters could have prevented them. Both groups of children spontaneously invoked interventions consistent with natural causal laws. Similarly, when judging the plausibility of several counterfactual interventions, participants endorsed the intervention consistent with natural laws at high levels, irrespective of schooling. However, children’s endorsement of supernatural interventions inconsistent with these laws revealed both group similarities and differences. Although both groups of children judged divine intervention (i.e., via prayer) as more plausible than mental (i.e., via wishing) and magical (i.e., via magical powers) interventions, children receiving religious (vs. secular) schooling were more likely to do so. Moreover, although children with a secular upbringing overwhelmingly chose naturalistic interventions as the most effective, children with a religious upbringing chose divine as well as naturalistic intervention. These results indicate that religious teaching does not alter children’s basic understanding of causality but rather adds divine intervention to their repertoire of possible causal factors.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 76%

What could have been done? Counterfactual alternatives to negative outcomes generated by religious and secular children.

Payir¹,

Heiphetz²,

Harris³

et al. 2022

Developmental Psychology

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show abstract

“…Past research regarding the cognitive foundations of religious beliefs has largely investigated the predictors of belief in God, especially in historically-Christian cultural contexts (for a recent exception comparing conceptions of Hindu gods and the Islamic God, see Shtulman, Foushee, Barner, Dunham, & Srinivasan, 2019; see also Baimel, 2019). While God beliefs are prevalent and central to many people's lives around the globe, this reflects only a subset of the world's diversity in religious beliefs (Norenzayan, 2016).…”

Section: Cognitive Pathways To Belief In Karma and Belief In Godmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive Pathways to Belief in Karma and Belief in God

et al. 2021

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Supernatural beliefs are ubiquitous around the world, and mounting evidence indicates that these beliefs partly rely on intuitive, cross-culturally recurrent cognitive processes. Specifically, past research has focused on humans' intuitive tendency to perceive minds as part of the cognitive foundations of belief in a personified God-an agentic, morally concerned supernatural entity. However, much less is known about belief in karma-another culturally widespread but ostensibly non-agentic supernatural entity reflecting ethical causation across reincarnations. In two studies and four high-powered samples, including mostly-Christian Canadians and mostly-Hindu Indians (Study 1, N = 2006) and mostly-Christian Americans and Singaporean Buddhists (Study 2, N = 1752), we provide the first systematic empirical investigation of the cognitive intuitions underlying various forms of belief in karma. We used path analyses to (1) replicate tests of the previously documented cognitive predictors of belief in God, (2) test whether this same network of variables predicts belief in karma, and (3) examine the relative contributions of cognitive and cultural variables to both sets of beliefs. We found that cognitive tendencies toward intuitive thinking, mentalizing, dualism, and teleological thinking predicted a variety of beliefs about karma-including morally-laden, non-agentic, and agentic conceptualizations-above and beyond the variability explained by cultural learning about karma across cultures. These results provide further evidence for an independent role for both culture and cognition in supporting diverse types of supernatural beliefs in distinct cultural contexts.

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“…Hindu participants attributed the most body-dependent properties, most likely because Hindu deities are theologically represented as having bodies. Indeed, research with Hindu children indicates that conceptions of Hindu deities like Ganesha and Krishna remain embodied throughout development: Hindu elementary schoolers attribute body-dependent properties to Hindu deities nearly as frequently as they attribute mind-dependent properties, and the same holds for Hindu adolescents (Shtulman, Foushee, Barner, Dunham, & Srinivasan, 2019).…”

Section: Do Children and Adults Mentally Represent Gods As Disembodied?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Accordingly, most-thought not all-Christian adults represent God as disembodied (Shtulman & Lindeman, 2016). Hindu theology, in contrast, details both the psychological and physiological properties of the Hindu gods-the elephant head of Ganesha, for instance, or the four arms of Brahma-so this theology does not require an extensive reinterpretation of the initial embodied-person conception of the gods (Shtulman & Lindeman, 2016;Shtulman, Foushee, Barner, Dunham, & Srinivasan, 2019). However, as revealed by comparing explicit and implicit tasks, even Christian adults who have acquired a conception of God as disembodied continue to represent God as embodied; the early-acquired conception coexists alongside and is not revised by this later-acquired theological conception.…”

Section: Do Children and Adults Mentally Represent Gods As Disembodied?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Minds, bodies, spirits, and gods: Does widespread belief in disembodied beings imply that we are inherent dualists?

Barlev¹,

Shtulman²

2021

Psychological Review

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Belief in beings without physical bodies is prevalent in present and past religions, from allpowerful gods to demonic spirits to guardian angels to immortal souls. Many scholars have explained this prevalence by a quirk in how we conceptualize persons, intuitively representing their minds as separable from their bodies. Infants have both a folk psychology (for representing the mental states of intentional agents) and a folk physics (for representing the properties of objects) but are said to apply only folk psychology to persons. The two modes of construal become integrated with development, but their functional specialization and initial independence purportedly make it natural for people of all ages to entertain beliefs in disembodied minds. We critically evaluate this thesis by integrating studies of both children and adults' representations of intentional agents, both natural and supernatural, beliefs about the afterlife and souls across societies, and reflections on thought experiments about mind transfer, body duplication, and body transplantation. We show that representations of minds and bodies are integrated from the start, that conceptions of religious beings as disembodied are not evident in early ages but develop slowly, and that early-acquired conceptions of religious beings as embodied are not revised by theological conceptions of such beings as disembodied. We argue that belief in disembodied beings requires cultural learninga learned dualism. We conclude by suggesting that disembodied beings may be prevalent not because we are developmentally predisposed to entertain them but because they are counterintuitive and thus have a social transmission advantage.

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When Allah meets Ganesha: Developing supernatural concepts in a religiously diverse society

Cited by 14 publications

References 24 publications

What could have been done? Counterfactual alternatives to negative outcomes generated by religious and secular children.

What could have been done? Counterfactual alternatives to negative outcomes generated by religious and secular children.

Cognitive Pathways to Belief in Karma and Belief in God

Minds, bodies, spirits, and gods: Does widespread belief in disembodied beings imply that we are inherent dualists?

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