Justin L. Barrett

Implicit theories of intellectual virtues and vices: : A focus on intellectual humility

The study of intellectual humility is still in its early stages and issues of definition and measurement are only now being explored. To inform and guide the process of defining and measuring this important intellectual virtue, we conducted a series of studies into the implicit theory – or ‘folk’ understanding – of an intellectually humble person, a wise person, and an intellectually arrogant person. In Study 1, 350 adults used a free-listing procedure to generate a list of descriptors, one for each person-concept. In Study 2, 335 adults rated the previously generated descriptors by how characteristic each was of the target person-concept. In Study 3, 344 adults sorted the descriptors by similarity for each person-concept. By comparing and contrasting the three person-concepts, a complex portrait of an intellectually humble person emerges with particular epistemic, self-oriented, and other-oriented dimensions.

Attachment Predicts Adolescent Conversions at Young Life Religious Summer Camps

The correspondence hypothesis maintains that people with secure parental attachments will experience gradual religious conversions, with internal working models of childhood attachment figures forming the basis of attachment to God. The compensation hypothesis predicts that people with insecure attachments will experience sudden and dramatic conversions as they seek a relationship with God to compensate for insecure attachment relationships. In Study 1, faith narratives from 162 adolescents were analyzed; associations between parental attachment and the type of conversion reflected in the narrative support both hypotheses. In Study 2, data were prospectively collected from 240 adolescents attending religious summer camps; after camp, 138 participants reported a gradual conversion and 21 reported a sudden conversion. Participants who rated themselves securely attached to their parents before camp were more likely to report a gradual conversion, supporting the correspondence hypothesis. Precamp insecure parental attachment did not predict the subsequent incidence of a sudden religious conversion.

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

The experiment presented provides partial cross-cultural empirical support for Pascal Boyers theory of the transmission of minimally counterintuitive (MCI) ideas. Boyer hypothesized that concepts with a small number of counterintuitive features are better remembered and more faithfully communicated than extremely counterintuitive concepts or comparable ordinary or even unusual concepts. This transmission advantage may help to explain the cross-cultural ubiquity of religious/supernatural concepts, which often have counterintuitive features. The experiment was conducted in Second Life, an online 3D virtual world. Fifty English-speaking western participants and 51 Chinese-speaking participants from far-eastern nations viewed intuitive and counterintuitive test items and then were asked to free recall the displays immediately and after varying delays. Results show that MCI displays were not better recalled than intuitive displays at initial reporting. For both samples, however, the amount of time elapsed since exposure to the test items correlated significantly with memory degradation for intuitive concepts but not for counterintuitive concepts. These results suggest that although MCI concepts may not be more easily encoded than intuitive concepts, once they are encoded they may be more easily retrieved than intuitive concepts. Results also show that, among the westerners, increased age predicted poorer delayed recall of MCI but not intuitive items, suggesting that the MCI effect may bear most directly on transmitting ideas to adolescents and young adults.

Religion Is Kid’s Stuff: Minimally Counterintuitive Concepts Are Better Remembered by Young People

When it comes to explaining the recurrence of cultural forms, group-level naturalness is more important than individual-level naturalness. Building upon Pascal Boyer’s account for the group-level naturalness of religious ideas, Justin Gregory and colleagues provide, in a series of articles, new evidence that slightly or “minimally” counterintuitive concepts are better remembered than fully intuitive ones, but only in young people. Further, adolescents and young adults are more likely to generate ideas that feature minimally counterintuitive concepts. These developmental effects held for both Chinese and British samples. The relative ease of generating and remembering counterintuitive concepts in youth may contribute to the capacity of certain religious ideas, particularly ideas about intentional agents with a counterintuitive tweak or two that makes them inferentially rich, to take hold in a group and become cultural ideas (i.e., ideas that are mentally represented in similar form by the majority of individuals in a group).

Social Networks among Ministry Relationships: Relational Capacity, Burnout, & Ministry Effectiveness

Humans, on average, are believed to have the capacity to sustain approximately 150 personal relationships due to social-cognitive limits and time available for relationship investment (Dunbar, 1993). The consequences of attempting to exceed this relational limit have not been investigated. Yet relational-style ministry workers face pressure to increase their number of personal relationships. It is likely that attempting to exceed this relational limit leads to distress. Therefore, relational ministers exceeding typical social network sizes were predicted to experience higher levels of burnout and lower levels of ministry effectiveness. For this study, two hundred thirty-seven relational ministers completed self-report measures. Multiple hierarchical regressions indicated that while total network size was not a significant predictor of outcome variables, nuanced differences among networks predicted burnout and ministry effectiveness. Above average numbers of intimate, high-investment relationships predicted smaller overall network sizes, and subgroups of more intimate relationships may have optimal size ranges that contribute to personal well-being.

The (modest) utility of MCI theory

Suppose the following were the story of an existing people, an ancient village at the base of a knoll on which a solitary tree grew. One year, the usual summer rains did not come, leaving the crops...

Some common misunderstandings about cognitive approaches to the study of religion: a reply to Sterelny

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Could we advance the science of religion (better) without the concept “religion”?

ABSTRACT Could it be that scientific progress in the study of cultural experience and expression that we usually label “religion” would be accelerated if we dropped religion as an organizing concept? This question is raised in relation to several related queries: whether scientific approaches to the study of religion suffer marginalization in part because of conceptual confusion over the concept religion; whether progress in measurement in the study of religious cultural expression has been hindered by adherence to religion and its derivatives as guiding concepts; and whether partisanship in this academic area may be encouraged by poor conceptual hygiene concerning religion.

Dogs, Santa Claus, and Sun Wukong: Children’s Understanding of Nonhuman Minds

This chapter reviews the cognitive development that influences children’s understanding of nonhuman minds. A summary of prior research is introduced and followed by an overview of two competing hypotheses. The anthropomorphism hypothesis argues that children’s understanding of nonhuman minds generally parallels their understanding of human minds, whereas the preparedness hypothesis posits that young children generally attribute super ability to all agents and only begin to apply limitations as they develop. We argue that recent cross-cultural evidence from a study administered in China and Ecuador supports the preparedness hypothesis. Results from this study indicate that younger children attributed perception and knowledge to all agents similarly, even though these children were themselves ignorant concerning correct responses. Older children differentiated between agents with super ability and agents with limitations. The implications of this study as they relate to religious education and religious studies in China are then discussed.

Introduction: Homo Religiosus and the Dragon

The cover story from the February 7, 2009 issue of New Scientist was Michael Brooks’ “Born believers: How your brain creates God”—a story full of references to scientists studying the naturalness of religious beliefs, particularly in children. The article ends with this: “Would a group of children raised in isolation spontaneously create their own religious beliefs? ‘I think the answer is yes,’ says Bloom” (Brooks, 2009, p. 33). Paul Bloom, whom Brooks quotes, is no crank or marginal scholarly figure: he is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University, and the author of many books and over 100 articles, including his 2007 article in Developmental Science, “Religion is Natural.”