One would sing and then the other would sing. One bird had blue, white, and silver feathers. The other bird had dull gray feathers. While God was listening to the birds, a large jet landed.
See a Problem?
It was extremely loud: The air was full of fumes. God listened to the jet until it turned off its engines. God finished listening to the birds. The story is consistent with a theologically correct view of God's perceptual abilities. For example, the story mentions that the two birds could not hear each other over the noise of the jet but does not say that the jet interfered with God's ability to hear. Nevertheless, when paraphrasing the story, many participants exhibited anthropomorphism by attributing human limitations to God.
These findings suggest that participants' explicit descriptions of God's mind differ from their implicit representations. Participants may say that God is everywhere, knows everything, and defies physical constraints, but on some level they also represent God's mind as far more human-like. One criticism of Barrett and Keil's research is that the stories themselves may have primed an anthropomorphic representation of God's mind. For instance, in the example above, God is portrayed as having conscious awareness and the ability to listen.
Because these traits were included in the original stories, the experimental stimuli may have primed participants to adopt an anthropomorphic representation of God's mind, even if this representation did not match participants' everyday understanding. More recent work has used methods that overcome the limitations of Barrett and Keil's work to provide additional evidence for the hypothesis that adults implicitly anthropomorphize God's mind.
One promising technique to investigate anthropomorphism without priming human-like representations of God's mind involves using neuroimaging to compare patterns of neural activation in response to thoughts of God versus thoughts of other beings. Neuroimaging can be considered an implicit measure insofar as people are largely unaware of, and cannot typically control, variations in levels of their own brain activity. If God is represented as an imaginary being or as an impersonal force, praying to God should not uniquely activate these brain regions.
For example, if these regions are simply activated any time people direct speech toward an agent, neural activation should be similar across the prayer and Santa Claus conditions. However, this research found more activation in the personal prayer condition when participants prayed in their own words than in the other three conditions. This result highlights the similarities, on a neural level, between communicating with people and communicating with God. Therefore, this finding provides further evidence in favor of a dissociation between adults' implicit representation of God's mind as similar to humans and adults' explicit representations of God's mind as quite distinct from humans.
If adults' implicit and explicit representations matched, communicating with God would not be expected to activate regions associated with reasoning about human minds. Rather than perceiving God as just another human being, adults may perceive God's as especially similar to their own, revealing a representation of God that is not only anthropomorphic, but egocentric as well.
Ideologies include beliefs about topics such as abortion and same-sex marriage. The participants in Epley et al. Like the work by Schjoedt and colleagues , this research used fMRI to show that at an implicit uncontrolled, non-deliberative level, participants represented God's mind as human-like. The work by Epley et al. Epley and colleagues also found behavioral evidence of anthropomorphism; participants' own ideological beliefs correlated more strongly with the ideological beliefs they attributed to God than with the ideological beliefs they attributed to other people.
Christian adults perceived Jesus who is portrayed as God or God's son in Christian traditions to hold the same ideological beliefs they did, but more strongly. That is, liberal Christians reported that a contemporary Jesus would hold an even more liberal ideology, while conservative Christians reported that a contemporary Jesus would hold an even more conservative ideology.
These responses can be considered implicit because participants were not asked to directly compare human minds with God's mind. Had adults been asked directly whether they are more similar to God or to another human being, they may have reported greater similarity with other humans. By contrast, the measures employed by Epley et al.
How children and adults represent God's mind
In summary, adults implicitly anthropomorphize God's mind despite displaying an explicit tendency to distinguish God's mind from human minds. For example, on an explicit level, adults may attribute complete knowledge and superhuman perceptual abilities to God. However, on an implicit level, adults show similar patterns of brain activity when thinking about God and another person—especially themselves. The differences between adults' explicit and implicit religious cognition suggest that perceiving God's mind as human-like may be implicit and that distinguishing God's mind from human minds may require deliberate reasoning.
In the following section, we draw on the developmental literature to investigate the origins of adults' religious cognition and to highlight converging evidence that anthropomorphism may be intuitive. What role do social learning and cognitive development play in the emergence of adult-like concepts of supernatural minds? The answer to this question comes from cognitive and developmental psychology, where researchers have turned their attention to the developmental origins of the patterns observed in social psychology among adult participants.
In conjunction, data from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology provide converging insights on people's representations of God's mind. Below, we review evidence that anthropomorphizing God's mind comes intuitively to young children and that a full explicit understanding of omniscience emerges progressively over the course of development. Thus, the developmental and adult literatures provide converging evidence for the hypothesis that people need to learn to distinguish God's mind from human minds.
In Piaget's view, children younger than approximately seven years old treat God's mind and human minds similarly, either by imbuing God and adults with omniscience or by attributing mental fallibility to both. In this framework, the same underlying conceptual structure is responsible for children's representations of both God's mind and human minds, and the cognitive development necessary to distinguish human minds from God's mind is not specific to the domain of religious cognition. Under this account, children's representations of God's extraordinary mind are supported by the same cognitive structures that allow children to reason about intentional agents in general.
Unlike Piaget's view, however, the preparedness account argues that children are prepared to represent minds as extraordinary e. In this framework, the role of social learning is not to teach children that God is omniscient but rather to teach them that humans' mental capacities are limited.
Below, we review evidence that has been taken to support the preparedness account and then discuss more recent findings providing evidence that challenge this account. Ultimately, we argue that, under some circumstances, very young children represent God's mind—like human minds—as fallible, and cultural input e. Piaget's account and Barrett and colleagues' account both predict that by the time children have reached the early elementary school years, they will be able to distinguish God's mind from human minds.
Indeed, empirical evidence does show that, by this age, children attribute fewer false beliefs to God than to humans on explicit tasks. For example, in one study Barrett et al. An experimenter showed children a cracker box and asked what they thought was inside the box. After providing their response, children were shown that the box actually contained rocks.
Given this information, five-year-olds as well as younger children, in this study responded that a human was more likely than God to think that the box contained crackers. Participants in this study also attributed more knowledge to God than to ordinary animals and to trees. Similarly, by the age of four years, American Christian children attributed equal low amounts of knowledge concerning an occluded display to their mother and to an ordinary dog, but higher amounts of knowledge to God Barrett et al.
Numerous other studies conducted with American, Greek, Spanish, and Mayan children have found that, by the age of five years, children attribute greater and more accurate knowledge to God than to humans e. This greater attribution of knowledge generalizes to other beings. The preparedness hypothesis found initial support in findings that children as young as three years old fail to attribute false beliefs to God Barrett et al.
Proponents of the preparedness perspective argue that such findings indicate that an understanding of God's infallibility is present in three-year-olds and perhaps even younger children and that to later understand God's extraordinary powers requires only that children and adults hold on to their early concepts. However, more recent work has typically not found developmental continuity. Only later in development did children distinguish between humans' fallibility and God's less fallible knowledge.
Studies with Greek and German children also indicate that Barrett and colleagues' earlier findings may be specific to contexts in which children themselves know the correct answer.
When children possessed the knowledge needed to correctly answer the experimenter's question as in Barrett et al. Further evidence against the idea that three-year-olds' concepts are theologically correct and represent cognitive preparedness is found in children's explicit reasoning. When asked to explain why God would possess knowledge on ToM tasks, three-year-olds often mentioned their own knowledge, whereas five-year-olds more often mentioned God's mental capacities—that God is very smart or all-knowing Lane et al.
These findings appear to reflect egocentrism—whereby young children tend to attribute the contents of their own minds to others—as well as anthropomorphism. Thus, even three- and four-year-olds do not appear to attribute extraordinary knowledge to God. Moreover, preschoolers' understanding of omniscience not just knowing the contents of boxes, but knowing everything that can be known is especially limited. In one line of work illustrating this phenomenon Lane et al. Smart was omniscient, preschoolers often denied her many types of knowledge, including historical knowledge e.
Though older children seven-year-olds attributed considerably broader knowledge to Ms. Smart—claiming that she knew information across all of these domains—it was not until adulthood that participants attributed an extraordinary depth of knowledge to Ms. Smart by responding that she knew even more than experts about their domains of expertise. The difference between children's and adults' responses was greater on questions concerning Ms. Smart's depth of knowledge as compared with specific pieces of knowledge. This result suggests that understanding the depth of omniscient knowledge is more cognitively challenging than understanding that supernatural beings from God to Ms.
Smart may have certain knowledge that ordinary humans lack. In summary, young children's explicit representations of God's mind resemble adults' implicit representations. In both cases, God's mind is often imbued with human properties, such as ignorance. Though the argument that children anthropomorphize God's mind has been made previously, recent evidence has highlighted the process by which such anthropomorphism occurs: Integrating insights from work with children and adults allows for a more precise understanding of the developmental trajectory of anthropomorphism and leads to the novel conclusion that young children's explicit understanding of God's mind is consistent with adults' implicit representations.
Developmental data can inform scientific understanding of the process by which adult-like beliefs emerge. Integrating approaches from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology and from neuroscience provides a clearer understanding of the emergence, development, and maintenance of anthropomorphism. In conjunction, findings from these separate research programs provide converging evidence for the conclusion that distinguishing God's mind from human minds requires both development and deliberate reasoning. The findings reviewed thus far suggest that children initially generalize qualities from human minds to God's mind and only later gain an appreciation of potential differences between the two.
One example of a plausible developmental trajectory is as follows. Early in development, children understand that, in some circumstances, others' minds may contain imperfect representations of the world. For example, preschoolers reject inaccurate information and correct inaccurate informants e. Preschoolers also understand that their own minds are limited they do not know everything and fallible some of their factual beliefs are mistaken, e.
Because every human mind that children have ever encountered including their own is fallible, children may initially assume that all minds including God's mind are similarly limited. As they increasingly understand that different minds may possess different knowledge and beliefs, children may also come to see God's mind as different from all human minds. If this hypothesis is correct, a developing ToM should support children's and adults' ability to represent God's mind.
Labeled by Humanity, Loved by God
One piece of evidence supporting this claim is that the distinction between God's mind and human minds seems to emerge contemporaneous with children's ability to explicitly report that other people lack knowledge that they themselves possess see Wellman et al. This ability may emerge later than preschoolers' tendency to correct inaccurate informants in part because, in the latter case, preschoolers are presented with indisputable evidence that an adult has a false belief.
In traditional tasks measuring false-belief understanding, participants must infer the presence of a false belief, which may be more challenging than simply responding to an incorrect statement. Thus, adults with ToM deficits may experience difficulty representing God's mind, making the idea of God less compelling and less believable. Such findings provide evidence against the preparedness hypothesis—the ToM deficits typical of three-year-olds and adults on the autism spectrum do not reflect an understanding of God-like omniscience.
Rather, typical ToM development likely supports an increased differentiation between God's mind and human minds and a greater understanding of God's omniscience. ToM development might also foster stronger belief in God. ToM abilities allow children and adults to understand both human minds and God's minds, yet these same abilities also allow individuals to distinguish human minds from God's mind.
For example, children who were better at imagining novel, improbable phenomena also attributed broader knowledge to an omniscient being Lane et al. Additionally, because omniscience can be understood as knowing everything that can be known, an ability to cognitively represent limitlessness more generally may contribute to understanding omniscience. Consistent with this hypothesis, children's ability to understand infinity in the domain of number is related to their attributions of a deeper body of knowledge to an omniscient being Lane et al.
These findings identify some conceptual difficulties e. In summary, anthropomorphism—seeing God's mind as human-like and therefore limited—does not require adult-like cognitive abilities or extensive experience e. Instead, it is a richer understanding of God's omniscience that requires social experience and cognitive development. Nevertheless, this later developing understanding of God's mind does not entirely replace the earlier emerging anthropomorphic representations of God's mind.
Rather, in adulthood, such representations of God's mind as human-like persist and are elicited especially by implicit rather than explicit measures. Why do adults anthropomorphize God? In this section, we elucidate several accounts for anthropomorphism. These accounts include the following: We perceive these accounts as complementary—in principle, all could contribute to anthropomorphism in adulthood. Nevertheless, these accounts have received varying levels of empirical support, and we highlight relevant experimental findings and directions for future research.
Furthermore, these accounts can function at both proximate and ultimate levels. For example, in a given moment, adults may anthropomorphize God because anthropomorphism is a cognitively straightforward heuristic; at the same time, anthropomorphism may serve longstanding adaptive purposes e. Each account stems primarily from one research area—the heuristic account from cognitive psychology, the early learning account from developmental psychology, and the byproduct account from evolutionary psychology.
We bring together insights from each area to provide a more complete picture of why adults anthropomorphize. One promising explanation for anthropomorphism among adults is that anthropomorphism is a heuristic that minimizes cognitive load. Human life is full of encounters with novel beings people that one is meeting for the first time, animals that one has not previously encountered, fictional characters in stories , and deciphering each being's full set of characteristics would require a great deal of cognitive effort and resources.
Using the minds with which humans are most familiar i. God is perceived to have more or less of certain abilities, but God is not perceived to have an entirely unique sort of mind with capacities that are unheard of in human minds. For example, it appears nonsensical to debate whether God's mind can fly, because that is not the kind of thing that a human mind does. The similarity between concepts of God's extraordinary mind and concepts of ordinary human minds suggests that, to understand God's mind, people may represent human minds and then adjust up e. If people anchor on human minds in general or on their own minds in particular e.
If this heuristic account is correct, children and adults may anthropomorphize any object or agent if their attempts to understand that object or agent begin by consciously or unconsciously representing a human mind. Few experiments have investigated the conditions under which people anchor on human minds, though one promising line of work suggests that people may be especially likely to anchor on human minds when trying to understand aspects of their environment over which they have not yet mastered Waytz, Morewedge, et al.
Future work could investigate other situations that promote or inhibit anchoring on human minds. Additionally, future research could examine the influence of manipulating the initial anchor. Under the heuristic account, people ought to anthropomorphize more when they are led to anchor on human minds and less when they are led to anchor elsewhere.
The heuristic account offers a compelling explanation for why anthropomorphism persists into adulthood. Other accounts are needed to explain why adults anchor on human minds in particular. An early-learning account of anthropomorphism suggests that perceiving God's mind as similar to human minds, as opposed to other phenomena, may come intuitively in part because individuals learn about the two kinds of minds in similar ways—via social interaction.
According to this account, people have learned to anthropomorphize God's mind during childhood and, as adults, maintain the same strategy to some extent. Because all of the minds that children interact with are fallible, it makes sense that children should first come to understand that minds are limited, not omniscient. It is this understanding that will help children navigate their social world. Whereas children can learn about other people through these sorts of social interactions, they lack the ability to directly interact with God this way. Children may infer that the beings about whom they receive testimony are similar to one another.
Because adults' explicit representations of God's mind distinguish it from human minds e. However, children may notice more subtle testimony that paints a more anthropomorphic picture. The early learning account explains the process of social transmission by which children learn about God's mind. It takes as its starting point the beginning of a human life—once children are born, how do they come to reason about God's mind? Other accounts provide hypotheses concerning the historical origins of this representation. To teach children about God's mind, parents would need to have a representation to transmit, which they would have learned from their own parents, and so on.
In this chain, how did anthropomorphic representations of God's mind originate? Drawing on evolutionary theory, some scholars have argued that anthropomorphism may initially arise as a byproduct of other, evolutionarily adaptive processes.
1. Introduction
For example, drawing on the work of Guthrie , Barrett argued that concepts of intentional supernatural beings are a byproduct of what he calls a hypersensitive agency detection device. The argument goes like this. Imagine that you are walking in the woods at nighttime. Suddenly, you hear a twig snap. It could have snapped due to an agent e. If you assume that a bear snapped the twig, you might run and save your life. If you are mistaken, the cost is relatively minimal. However, if you mistakenly assume that the wind snapped the twig when in fact a bear is coming after you, you are likely to become bear food.
Barrett argued that perceiving agents is evolutionarily adaptive for this reason—mistakenly perceiving an agent is less costly than failing to perceive an agent. In this framework, humans may represent God as agentic because it is evolutionarily adaptive to perceive agents even when no agents are present.
Currently, empirical evidence for the byproduct account is limited; however, future studies could investigate the extent to which this account explains the earliest origins of anthropomorphism. Of the three accounts presented here, the heuristic account and the social learning account are supported by the greatest amount of empirical evidence. The heuristic account offers a strong explanation of the usefulness of anthropomorphism in adulthood, and the social learning account provides a compelling explanation of anthropomorphism's childhood origins.
Though the byproduct account has limited empirical support at this time, future studies could provide additional evidence in its favor. Thus far, we have highlighted several distinct lines of research that lead to the conclusion that anthropomorphism is intuitive. Children perceive God's mind as predominantly human-like, and this perception is maintained at an implicit level in adulthood.
These data suggest that distinguishing God's mind from human minds requires both cognitive development and deliberate reasoning. The development of religious cognition is a burgeoning literature, and many interesting questions remain ripe for future investigation. One area for future research is the extent to which individual differences account for anthropomorphism.
Such individual differences could influence the extent to which heuristic use accounts for anthropomorphism in individual adults. For example, because heuristics are intuitive, adults who prefer to engage in intuitive, pre-potent thinking may be more likely to rely on this heuristic than adults who prefer to engage in cognitive reflection. Relatedly, individual differences among parents could contribute to differences in their children's anthropomorphism. For example, children of parents who avoid using gendered pronouns for God and avoid referring to God's perceptual abilities may be less likely to anthropomorphize God's mind in adulthood, compared to individuals who receive much early testimony about God's anthropomorphic properties.
Individual differences could also contribute to individuals' propensity to perceive agents.
Therefore, the byproduct account may apply especially strongly to individuals who are already religious. In addition to investigating the types of people who anthropomorphize, future research can also examine domains where anthropomorphism is especially likely to occur. One promising possibility is that anthropomorphism is more likely to occur in non-moral domains. The heuristic account argues that if people anchor on human minds, they should attribute human characteristics such as caring about morality to God. Though empirical support for the presence of a hypersensitive agency detection device is limited, the byproduct account—as well as related research in evolutionary and social psychology—also argues that God is perceived as a specific kind of agent: At the same time, if people attribute complete knowledge of morally relevant actions to God, they would be demonstrating non-anthropomorphic representations because people do not have access to all morally relevant information.
They judge that God, like humans, cares about morality. In one line of work Purzycki, in press , American Christian adults and Tyvan Buddhist adults attributed more knowledge of morally relevant rather than non-moral behaviors to God. Furthermore, though American adults attributed some knowledge of non-moral behaviors to God, they also reported that God cared more about morally relevant information. This research may shed light on the paradox introduced at the start of this paper. Why was Schmitt deemed crazy for arguing that God commanded him to commit a crime despite the fact that in many other circumstances, adults readily accept that God communicates with humans?
The judge in Schmitt's case may have perceived Schmitt's claim that God commanded him to commit a crime as crazy because she did not believe that God would command an act that she herself considered immoral. Separate lines of work show that adults also represent God non-anthropomorphically by attributing a special knowledge of morally relevant information to God. In one study Purzycki et al. Does God know that John cheats on his taxes?
- Danger Everywhere (The Legion Book 2).
- Labeled by Humanity, Loved by God?
- How children and adults represent God's mind;
- Procedimientos administrativos y judiciales de la Unión Europea (Spanish Edition).
Furthermore, participants responded to questions concerning morally blameworthy behavior more quickly than questions concerning morally praiseworthy behavior. These findings indicate that adults are particularly likely to distinguish God's mind from a human mind in morally relevant contexts, where adults find it especially intuitive to represent God as having special knowledge.
On both an explicit and an implicit level, adults represent God as knowing morally relevant information Purzycki, in press ; Purzycki et al. In this domain, adults' implicit and explicit representations converge, leading to the societal benefits that result from people's perception that God knows all morally relevant behaviors. In other words, adults are more capable of representing God as an omniscient agent—both explicitly and implicitly—when reasoning about moral knowledge rather than other knowledge domains.
Why do adults anthropomorphize less in moral domains than in non-moral contexts? Anthropomorphism—particularly the perception that God, like humans, cares about morality—may play an important role in fostering such cooperation. This research showed that the more these devout Christians anthropomorphized God, the more morally wrong they perceived violations of the Ten Commandments to be.
Thus, it may also be the case that the more Christians anthropomorphize God's mind, the less likely they are to violate the Ten Commandments themselves. Interdisciplinary work is necessary to address the questions laid out here—how individual differences influence anthropomorphism and how anthropomorphism varies across domains. Work investigating evolutionary origins, developmental origins, and the adult end state of anthropomorphism forms an invaluable component of scientific understanding of how people represent God's mind. Such interdisciplinary endeavors will shed more light on religious cognition than is possible from any single disciplinary approach and will greatly enhance scholars' understanding of human cognition.
The authors would like to thank Tanya Luhrmann for her helpful comments and feedback. These funding sources played no direct role in the writing of this report and the decision to submit this article for publication. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Author manuscript; available in PMC Jan 1. Larisa Heiphetz , a Jonathan D. Lane , b Adam Waytz , c and Liane L. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. The publisher's final edited version of this article is available at Cogn Sci. See other articles in PMC that cite the published article. Abstract For centuries, humans have contemplated the minds of gods.
Introduction On January 16, , Gary Schmitt stabbed a former high school classmate and his classmate's daughter a total of 20 times. Adults' explicit representations of God's mind Theologians and religious studies scholars have long argued that God's mind is quite different from that of a person see Armstrong, , for a review. Adults' implicit representations of God's mind People perceive God, like humans, to have a mind Waytz, Epley, et al. Participants heard stories such as the one below: Children's representations of God's mind What role do social learning and cognitive development play in the emergence of adult-like concepts of supernatural minds?
What do developmental data reveal about adults? Why adults anthropomorphize God Why do adults anthropomorphize God? Future research directions Thus far, we have highlighted several distinct lines of research that lead to the conclusion that anthropomorphism is intuitive. Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Tanya Luhrmann for her helpful comments and feedback. Ritual, emotion, and sacred symbols: The evolution of religion as an adaptive complex. A rejection of the by-product hypothesis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
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Intuitive conceptions of dead agents' minds: The natural foundations of afterlife beliefs as phenomenological boundary. Recursiveness and the evolution of supernatural agency. The naturalness of religious ideas: We can only dimly understand Him, but we can know Him through prayer, through the teachings of the Bible, and through our faith. In His teachings, Jesus presents a picture of a very loving God who wants everyone to be in harmony with Him. He is seeking to awaken a loving response in each of us.
God knows and loves each of us personally, as parents know and love their children. God will give good things to those who ask:. Like children, some of us return God's love, and some do not. Nevertheless, He loves all of us. God's gifts of love and salvation are freely offered to all, even to those who choose the path of wickedness.
He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. God is also merciful. He is always willing to forgive a truly repentant sinner and give him or her another chance. Even when we sin, we can be assured that God still loves us and seeks to bring us back into harmony with Him.