Barrett J L, Keil F C
Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA.
Cogn Psychol. 1996 Dec;31(3):219-47. doi: 10.1006/cogp.1996.0017.
We investigate the problem of how nonnatural entities are represented by examining university students' concepts of God, both professed theological beliefs and concepts used in comprehension of narratives. In three story processing tasks, subjects often used an anthropomorphic God concept that is inconsistent with stated theological beliefs; and drastically distorted the narratives without any awareness of doing so. By heightening subjects' awareness of their theological beliefs, we were able to manipulate the degree of anthropomorphization. This tendency to anthropomorphize may be generalizable to other agents. God (and possibly other agents) is unintentionally anthropomorphized in some contexts, perhaps as a means of representing poorly understood nonnatural entities.
我们通过研究大学生对上帝的概念来探讨非自然实体是如何被表征的问题，这些概念既包括他们公开宣称的神学信仰，也包括他们在理解叙事时所使用的概念。在三项故事处理任务中，受试者经常使用一种与既定神学信仰不一致的拟人化的上帝概念；并且在毫无察觉的情况下大幅歪曲了叙事内容。通过提高受试者对其神学信仰的意识，我们能够操控拟人化的程度。这种拟人化倾向可能适用于其他主体。在某些情况下，上帝（可能还有其他主体）会被无意地拟人化，这或许是一种表征难以理解的非自然实体的方式。
