into the role of cultural differences in embracing the counterintuitive—even if
we cannot run experiments withfirst century Christians.
One of thefirst studies that tested Boyer’s hypothesis of the memory effects
of counterintuitiveness has been carried out in three different cultural envir-
onments, that is, in France, Gabon, and Tibet (Boyer & Ramble, 2001). The
experiments demonstrated the advantage of counterintuitive ideas consistently.
The only real surprise was that for Tibetan monks, the minimally counter-
intuitive features of artifacts contributed a greater advantage in retention (as
compared to other artifacts) than was the case with minimally counterintuitive
persons. The experimenters speculated that this could be due to the monks’
frequent exposure to ideas about counterintuitive agents, somewhat lowering
the salience of such ideas for them (Boyer & Ramble, 2001, pp. 556–7). As we
have seen in sections 4.7 and 6.4, the violation of cultural conventions can also
have positive effects on memory. However, counterintuitive ideas (that is,
ideas violating maturationally natural ontological categories) always have
a further advantage when they include agency (such as“a car that likes to
watch movies”).
A recent study examined conceptions of personhood after death among
novice Buddhist monks in Mongolia, comparing their intuitions with official
Buddhist teachings (that they actually studied) as well as with intuitions of
older monks and lay people (Berniūnas, 2012). When tested about their
intuitions (rather than asking them to report their explicit knowledge), parti-
cipants in all three groups (although to different degrees) attributed mental
states as well as some bodily functions to a person who reached Nirvana and
died. This was consistent with folk-intuitions found across cultural boundaries
but went against the teachings of Buddhism about Nirvana. The results of the
study suggest that culture shapes how we deal with information when we
manipulate it consciously and explicitly, but has less effect on how people deal
with information intuitively and without conscious effort. It has been shown,
for example, that statisticians do not use their expertise when making statis-
tical judgments in everyday situations, making the same mistakes as lay
people do (Groome, 1999, p. 116).“Theological incorrectness”has also been
observed in a Christian context: when people have to make judgments about
situations that involve theological elements (without being tested on doctrines
formally) their answers are based on intuitive, anthropomorphic notions of God
(Barrett & Keil, 1996; Slone, 2004). The lesson from these experiments is that
complex ideas acquired by cultural learning (in this case, official theology or
scientific theory) are useful only under certain conditions. Minimally counter-
intuitive ideas are“intuitive”in the sense of being better remembered and
easily transmitted. Anthropomorphic ideas of God and dead persons will take
over whenever the situation permits.
Let us considerflying as an example of a counterintuitive trait in a human
being. It only makes sense that our ontological expectations of humans
136 Cognitive Science and the New Testament