Journal article
Conceptualizing a nonnatural entity: anthropomorphism in God concepts
- Abstract:
- We investigate the problem of how nonnatural entities are represented by examining university students' concepts of God, both professed theological beliefs and concepts used in comprehension of narratives. In three story processing tasks, subjects often used an anthropomorphic God concept that is inconsistent with stated theological beliefs; and drastically distorted the narratives without any awareness of doing so. By heightening subjects' awareness of their theological beliefs, we were able to manipulate the degree of anthropomorphization. This tendency to anthropomorphize may be generalizable to other agents. God (and possibly other agents) is unintentionally anthropomorphized in some contexts, perhaps as a means of representing poorly understood nonnatural entities.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Authors
- Publisher:
- Elsevier
- Journal:
- Cognitive Psychology More from this journal
- Volume:
- 31
- Issue:
- 3
- Pages:
- 219-247
- Publication date:
- 1996-12-01
- DOI:
- ISSN:
-
0010-0285
- Language:
-
English
- Subjects:
- UUID:
-
uuid:c5863a58-950d-45cb-815f-41b2c416996d
- Local pid:
-
ora:3124
- Deposit date:
-
2009-12-04
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Academic Press, Inc
- Copyright date:
- 1996
- Notes:
- N.B. Dr Barrett is now based at the the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. The full-text of this article is not available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page.
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