Refining and Testing “Counterintuitiveness” in Virtual Reality: Cross-Cultural Evidence for Recall of Counterintuitive Representations

Reverse Engineering Complex Cultural Concepts: Identifying Building Blocks of “Religion”

“…7 This paragraph adopts Purzycki's distinction between violations at the ontological or "template-level" and at the schematic level. His distinction parallels the distinction between "counterintuitive" (violations at the ontological level) and "counterschematic" (violations at the schematic level) noted in Hornbeck and Barrett (2013) and discussed below. In referring to ontological violations as violations at the template level, Purzycki is able to characterize violations at both template and schematic levels as "counterintuitive" from the point of view of subjects.…”

“…In conceptualizing deities and other culturally postulated superhuman agents as (minimally) counter-intuitive, CSR researchers situated them within a larger class of representations that involve violations of pan-cultural ontological categories and offered a theory, based on the presumed memorability of such representations (Sperber, 1996), to explain why such concepts are so widely disseminated (Barrett, 1999(Barrett, , 2004Boyer, 2001;Atran, 2002). Researchers have devoted considerable effort to refining and testing the hypothesis that MCI concepts are more salient and memorable than those that are more or less so, with mixed results (for reviews, see Barrett, 2008;Hornbeck & Barrett, 2013).…”

“…We can see the overlap between "religion" and "magic" more clearly if we look at Subbotsky's list of magical beliefs alongside the religious beliefs to which children are biased. Viewed in tandem, Keleman's promiscuous teleology (Kelemen, 1999a,b) and Barrett's bias toward purposeful design (Barrett & Richert, 2003;Barrett, 2013), in so far as they are linked to a deity, rest on the belief that the deity has powers of "mind-over-matter" (i.e., the power to direct things toward a goal or think them into existence) that Subbotsky views as the core of magical thinking. Similarly, we find that Subbotsky considers animates that know everything, can see in people's minds, and attend to all tasks at once as "magical animate entities."…”

“…If this is the case, we may be able to subsume the processes through which children learn to distinguish between God and other nonphysical beings (Barrett, 2013), ordinary and magical reality (Subbotsky), and sensory and extra-sensory perceptions under a general process in which default assumptions about omniscient other minds are activated through natural pedagogy or suspended or inhibited through critical thinking and cultural learning. In light of this research, we may need to refine our folk ontology of persons to include a subcategory of "pedagogues," those who from a fast processing perspective are trustworthy sources of generalizable, universal knowledge.…”

Conversations and Controversies in the Scientific Study of Religion

“…Who are these "cognitivists?" Much of the cognitive science of religion focuses on relationships between mind, religious beliefs, and ritual without any obvious concern for or hint of romanticizing religion's social dimensions (e.g., Hornbeck & Barrett 2013;Kapogiannis et al 2009;Legare & Souza 2012;Rossano 2009;Schjoedt et al 2013;Wigger et al 2013;Willard & Norenzayan 2013). Assuming that the authors take "cognitivists" to be those who engage in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion, given the diversity of the fields and the major debates going on within them Frey 2010;Watts & Turner 2014;Voland & Schiefenhövel 2009), it remains even more difficult to take their impressionistic portrait as an approximation of something grounded in reality.…”