Beliefs about the mental lives of supernatural beings: A cross-cultural comparison

• In Event: 2-088 - The Development of Religious Concepts and Norms Across Cultures

Integrative Statement

Beliefs about supernatural beings are present in every human culture and feature prominently in socialization practices around the world. Here we examine how people come to understand the mental lives of such beings: Which aspects of mental life do people attribute to supernatural beings, and how might these attributions vary across development and cultural-religious context?

We report the results of a large-scale study with children (7-12y) and adults in the US, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu; this abstract focuses on the 6 complete samples to date (N=933; planned N≥1300). This study assessed patterns of mental capacity attributions to a wide range of target entities, including supernatural beings—ghosts and God—as well as humans, animals, technologies, and natural objects.

We first examined the correlational structure of participants’ responses: E.g., when someone said ghosts feel pain, what other capacities did s/he endorse? Using exploratory factor analysis, we projected data from all samples into a shared conceptual space, which was characterized primarily by a three-way distinction between bodily sensations (e.g., hunger, pain), cognitive capacities (memory, thinking), and social-emotional abilities (guilt, shyness; Figure 1).

This allowed us to compare samples by analyzing “factor scores”—summaries of each participant’s attributions of these latent constructs (Figure 2).

In all samples to date, participants attributed fewer bodily sensations to supernatural beings than to humans and animals—but tended to attribute at least as many cognitive abilities, if not more. Participants generally attributed middling levels of social-emotional abilities to supernatural beings: not as many as they did to humans, but more than they did to inanimate beings. These results suggest a common construal of supernatural beings as disembodied but cognitively competent, with access to a subset of the social-emotional abilities of humans. The linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity of our participant populations makes these similarities across samples particularly striking.

Closer analyses, however, reveal subtle but important differences across samples. E.g., in the bodily domain, some participants (Ghanaian adults and children, Thai children) considered supernatural beings fully “disembodied,” much like inanimate objects—while others (Thai adults, ni-Vanuatu adults and children) perceived supernatural beings as intermediate between animate and inanimate targets, perhaps reflecting less dichotomous views of body/mind and living/non-living. Meanwhile, an analysis of individual items reveals that the specifics of participants’ “middling” attributions of social-emotional abilities varied substantially across samples. E.g., children in Thailand and Vanuatu tended to say that God feels happy, but not sad—but adults in these sites tended to say that God experiences both of these emotions.

In sum, these findings suggest substantial commonalities in how people from diverse cultural-religious contexts represent the mental lives supernatural beings—as well as subtle but potentially important developmental and cross-cultural differences within this common framework. Attributions of bodily, cognitive, and social-emotional capacities to supernatural beings likely shape how people attempt to engage with these beings (e.g., through offerings of food, through prayer), and could play an important role in explaining how children growing up in different cultural-religious contexts come to experience and interact with the supernatural world.

Authors

• Kara Weisman, Stanford University
  Presenting Author

• Cristine H Legare, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tanya M. Luhrmann, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author