Shaman Nicholas J, Saide Anondah R, Richert Rebekah A
Department of Psychology, University of Houston-Clear Lake, Houston, TX, United States.
Educational Psychology, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, United States.
Front Psychol. 2018 Aug 10;9:1425. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01425. eCollection 2018.
When considering other persons, the human mind draws from folk theories of biology, physics, and psychology. Studies have examined the extent to which people utilize these folk theories in inferring whether or not God has human-like biological, physical, and psychological constraints. However, few studies have examined the way in which these folk attributions relate to each other, the extent to which attributions within a domain are consistent, or whether cultural factors influence human-like attributions within and across domains. The present study assessed 341 individuals' attributions of anthropomorphic properties to God in three domains (psychological, biological, and physical), their religious beliefs, and their engagement in religious practices. Three Confirmatory Factor Analyses tested hypothetical models of the underlying structure of an anthropomorphic concept of God. The best fitting model was the "Hierarchical Dimensions Concept," the analyses indicated one overall dimension of anthropomorphism with three sub-domains. Additionally, participants' religiosity was negatively related to attributing human-like psychological properties to God, suggesting that the more people engage with their religion, the less they think about God as having a 'human-like' mind. Religiosity was positively related to individual consistency scores in the biological domain. In other words, greater religiosity was related to less consistent answers about God's biological properties. As a result, the findings of the current study also suggest that individuals do not just vary between each other in how much they anthropomorphize God, but additionally, variation exists in the type of anthropomorphic reasoning used within an individual person's concept of God.
在考虑其他人时，人类思维会借鉴生物学、物理学和心理学的民间理论。研究已经考察了人们在推断上帝是否具有类似人类的生物学、物理学和心理学限制时，在多大程度上运用这些民间理论。然而，很少有研究考察这些民间属性之间的关联方式、一个领域内属性的一致程度，或者文化因素是否会影响不同领域内及跨领域的类人属性。本研究评估了341个人在三个领域（心理、生物和物理）对上帝拟人化属性的归因、他们的宗教信仰以及他们参与宗教活动的情况。三项验证性因素分析测试了上帝拟人化概念潜在结构的假设模型。拟合度最佳的模型是“层次维度概念”，分析表明拟人化有一个总体维度和三个子领域。此外，参与者的宗教虔诚度与将类似人类的心理属性归因于上帝呈负相关，这表明人们越深入参与宗教活动，就越少认为上帝具有“类似人类”的思维。宗教虔诚度与生物领域的个体一致性得分呈正相关。换句话说，更高的宗教虔诚度与关于上帝生物属性的答案一致性较低有关。因此，本研究的结果还表明，个体之间不仅在将上帝拟人化的程度上存在差异，而且在个体对上帝的概念中所使用的拟人化推理类型上也存在差异。
