CONCEPTUALIZING A NONNATURAL ENTITY - ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN GOD CONCEPTS

We investigate the problem of how nonnatural entities are represented by examining university students' concepts of God, both professed theo logical beliefs and concepts used in comprehension of narratives. In t hree story processing tasks, subjects often used an anthropomorphic Go d concept that is inconsistent with stated theological beliefs; and dr astically distorted the narratives without any awareness of doing so. By heightening subjects' awareness of their theological beliefs, we we re able to manipulate the degree of anthropomorphization. This tendenc y to anthropomorphize may be generalizable to other agents. God (and p ossibly other agents) is unintentionally anthropomorphized in some con texts, perhaps as a means of representing poorly understood nonnatural entities. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.