league boots or a talking wolf disguised as a grandmother, or a woman
who gave birth to an incarnation of a god after a visit from an angel,
you would certainly remember these themes; not just because they
were in the story but also because they were familiar to start with. Our
studies were supposed to track how memory stores or distorts or dis-
cardsnovelmaterial.Recall, counterintuitives and odditiesAlthough the results of such experiments may be fascinating, the
[80] details of implementation are invariably tedious. This is why I give
only a brief report here of the relevant findings as far as supernatural
material is concerned. Our first finding was that violations or transfers
fared much better than standard items. Long-term recall (over
months) shows that violations were much better preserved than any
other material. In these artificial conditions, then, people recall
descriptions of artifacts or persons or animals that include violations of
intuitive expectations much better than descriptions that do not
include such violations. Violations are certainly distinctive; that is, they
are surprising given people's expectations. When a sentence begins
"There was a table... ," you do not expect to hear "... that felt sad
when people left the room"; and this is certainly part of the reason
why such combinations are recalled. But that is not the only reason.
Barrett and I also found that violations of ontologicalexpectations—as
found in the templates for supernatural concepts—are recalled better
than what we called "mere oddities." For instance, "a man who walked
through a wall" (ontological violation) was generally better recalled
than "a man with six fingers" (violation of expectations, but not of
those expectations that define the ontological category PERSON). Or "a
table that felt sad" was better recalled than "a table made of chocolate"
(equally unexpected, but not an ontological violation).
This last result should interest many others besides slightly obses-
sive experimental psychologists, because it explains some aspects of
supernatural notions in the real world. We can now explain in a much
more precise way why it is misleading to think of religious concepts as
"strange" or "unusual." We have kind-concepts ("giraffe") and we
have ontological categories ("animal"). You can create strange new
concepts by contradicting some information associated with either of
these. If you say "There was a black giraffe with six legs," this violates
people's expectations about the kind-concept. If you say "There was a
RELIGION EXPLAINED