Dinosaurs and Man

[Angrboda]

…Justin Barrett thought that there may be something more to people's thoughts about God than they themselves believed. So he used a very simple, tried and tested method. He got his subjects to read specially prepared stories and to retell them after a while. The point of this is that people cannot store a text verbatim if it is longer than a few sentences. What they do is form a memory of the main episodes and how they connect. So when they recall the text people often distort the details of a story. Between the bits that are actually preserved from the original they insert details of their own invention. For instance, people read in Little Red Riding Hood that 'she went to her grandmother's house' and a few hours later say that 'she walked to her grandmother's house'. Minor changes of this kind or additions reveal what concepts people use to represent the story. In this particular case, they show that people imagined the heroine walking rather than taking a bus or riding a motorbike, although the story did not mention anything about how she travelled about.

So Barrett did two things. First, he asked his subjects to answer the simple question, What is God like? People produced all sorts of descriptions with common features. For instance, many of them said that an important feature of God is that he can attend to all sorts of things at the same time, contrary to humans who by necessity attend to one thing and then to another. After this, Barrett had his subjects read stories in which these features of God were relevant. For instance, the story described God as saving a man's life and at the same time helping a woman find her lost purse. After a while the subjects had to retell the story. In a spectacular and rather surprising way, many subjects said that God had helped one person out and then turned his attention to the other's plight.

So people both say explicitly that God could do two things at once – indeed, that is what makes him God – and then, when they spontaneously represent what God does, construe a standard agent who attends to one thing after another. Barrett observed this effect with both believers and non-believers, and in Delhi, India, in the same way as in Ithaca, NY. These experiments show that people's thoughts about God, the mental representation they use to explain what God does and how he does it, are not quite the same as what they say when you ask them. In fact, in this case, one contradicts the other. In each person there is both an official concept – what they can report if you ask them – and an implicit concept that they use without being really aware of it.

Barrett coined the phrase 'theological correctness' to describe this effect. In the same way as people sometimes have an explicit, officially approved version of their political beliefs that may or may not correspond to their actual commitments, people here are certain that they believe in a God with non-standard cognitive powers. However, the recall test produces what could be called a certain 'cognitive pressure' which diverts their attention from the desire to express 'correct' beliefs. In such a context, people use intuitive expectations about how a mind works, which are available automatically since they are activated to make sense of people's behaviour at all times. When the task allows for conscious monitoring, we get the theological version; when the task requires fast access, we get the anthropomorphic version. This shows, not only that the theological concept has not displaced the spontaneous one but also that it is not stored in the same way. Very likely the theological concept is stored in the form of explicit sentence-like propositions ('God is omniscient', 'God is everywhere'). By contrast, the spontaneous concept is stored in the format of direct instructions to intuitive psychology, which would explain why it is accessed much faster.

— Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained, pp. 87-88