When Allah Meets Ganesha: Developing Supernatural Concepts in a Religiously Diverse Society

• In Event: 2-192 - Cultural and religious differences in anthropomorphism of technology, nature, fictional characters, and supernatural agents

Integrative Statement

Belief in supernatural beings is a cultural universal, but the properties of those beings vary from one culture to another. The supernatural beings that are part of Hinduism, for instance, are represented as human-like, whereas those that are part of Islam are represented more abstractly. Here, we explore how children exposed to both types of representations conceptualize the relevant beings.

Our participants were 124 children recruited from an English-language school in Vadodara, in Gujarat Province, India. Sixty-one children were recruited from the fourth and fifth grade classrooms (age range = 8.5 to 11.7, M age = 9.9), and 63 from the eighth and ninth grade classrooms (age range = 12.4 to 15.3, M age = 13.7). Half the participants in each age group were Hindu, and half were Muslim.

Participants were asked about the properties of six supernatural beings: Allah (the Islamic creator god), Muhammed (an Islamic prophet), Ganesha (the Hindu god of wisdom and new beginnings), Krishna (the Hindu god of love and compassion), a bhoot (a ghost), and a pari (a fairy). Allah and Muhammed were selected as exemplars of Islamic beings; Ganesha and Krishna, Hindu beings; and bhoots and paris, fictional beings. Questions took the form “Does [being] [property]?”, as in “Does Allah dream?” or “Does Ganesha sneeze?” Four of the properties were psychological (dream, think, forget, make a mistake); four were biological (eat, grow, cough, sneeze); and four were physical (jump, sit, fall, get tired).

Total property attributions to the three types of beings are displayed in Figure 1. Fictional beings and Hindu beings were attributed about the same number of properties by all participants, but Islamic beings were attributed significantly fewer properties by older participants and by Islamic participants. Property attributions are broken down by being in Table 1. Younger participants attributed significantly more properties to Allah than did older participants, and Hindu participants attributed significantly more properties to both Muhammad and Allah than did Muslim participants. Analyzed by domain, participants attributed significantly more psychological properties to the beings than biological or physical properties, and older children made this differentiation more consistently than younger children.

These findings suggest that the development of supernatural concepts is shaped not just by age or by culture but by their interaction. In India, Islamic beings are known to children of all ages and religions, but they are conceptualized differently by those who have been raised to believe in them. Hindu beings, on the other hand, are conceptualized similarly by believers and nonbelievers alike, regardless of age. These differences likely arise from differences in how Hindu and Islamic beings are represented in speech and images, as well as differences in whether the practice of anthropomorphization is encouraged or discouraged. In Judeo-Christian cultures, the distinction between fictional beings and religious beings is confounded with the distinction between anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic representations. When these distinctions are pulled apart, it appears that tendencies to anthropomorphize supernatural beings track the content of the beings’ public representations more closely than their inclusion in a religion.

Authors

• Mahesh Srinivasan, UC Berkeley
  Presenting Author

• Andrew Shtulman, Occidental College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ruthe Foushee, UC Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Author

• David Barner, University of California, San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yarrow Dunham, Yale
  Non-Presenting Author