No abstract

Little research exists on how children understand the actions of nonhuman agents. Researchers often assume that children overgeneralize and attribute human properties such as false beliefs to nonhuman agents. In this study, three experiments were conducted to test this assumption. The experiments used 24 children in New York (aged 2,11-6,11 years), 52 children in Michigan (aged 3,5-6,11 years), and a second group of 45 children in Michigan (3,4-8,5 years) from Christian backgrounds. In the first two experiments, children participated in false-belief tests in which they were asked about human and various nonhuman agents including animals and God. Experiment 3 consisted of a modified perspective-taking task, also including nonhuman agents. The results of the study suggest that children do not consistently use human agent concepts but instead can use different agent concepts for some nonhuman agents like God and special animals. Children are not bound to anthropomorphize, but they often do.

In both natural and religious thinking, people have ntultiple versions of the same concepts that may be contradictory. In the domain of religious concepts, these ntultiple levels of representation in single individuals may be termed "Theological Correctness." Versions of religioiis concepts range front fairly simple or concrete to very complex and abstract. Selection of the, concept to be used in any given context is largely dependent on the cognitive processing demands of the task. In tasks in which there is great derrtand to draw quick and rich inferences, a basic concept comprised largely of intuitive knowledge, is used. In tasks in which there is less demand, as when one is slowly and carefully riflecting on one's knowledge, more complicated, intuition violating theoretical concepts may be drawn upon. In the domain of religious concepts these concepts closely match traditional theology and so may be termed theological concepts. Implications for data gathering and theorizing in the study of religion are discussed. Finally, these observations suggest the. importance of insights from cognitive sciertce, for the study of religion.

No 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.