gested that they are produced by recipes that would work in any nor-
mal human mind. But we could not automatically rule out the possi-
bility that our experimental results had been biased by all sorts of cul-
tural factors. The way European and American subjects recalled sto-
ries might be influenced by the use of literacy, a formal schooling sys-
tem, the cultural influence of scientific theories, the existence of mass
media as sources of information and fiction, the presence of institu-
tional religion, and the like. This is why cross-cultural replications are
indispensable in this kind of investigation.
Replicating an experiment in different cultures involves more than
just transporting a protocol to a different location. For one thing, some [83]
of the stories would make no sense at all to people used to very differ-
ent kinds of fiction and fantasy. More important, the very notion of
"testing" someone's memory, indeed of testing anyone on anything, is
alien to most people who have had no formal schooling. As many cross-
cultural psychologists have noted, there is something deeply unnatural
in the idea of academic tests, and of experimental protocols too. In such
contexts, the person who is in a position to know the answers (the
teacher, the experimenter) pretends not to know them; while the per-
son who is in no such position is supposed to provide them! It takes
years of formal schooling to get used to this odd situation.
We first adapted our stories to test recall with Fang people in
Gabon, both in the capital city Libreville and in several villages in the
forest. Doing this kind of work with Fang people actually turned out
to be quite easy. Many Fang people take particular pride in being able
to recall very long stories in precise detail. Such people, traditional
storytellers, often challenge others to recall what happened at what
point in this or that story. So all we had to do was to present our tests
as a not-too-serious version of such challenges. In one of the villages
this actually turned into a competition between the research assistants
(Fang university students) and some local youths, to determine which
group had the "better minds." Obviously, one might fear that this too
would introduce a special bias... but remember, we do not and in fact
cannot eliminate all bias. All we can do is vary the situations so the
sources of bias push the data in different directions and therefore can-
cel each other out. In any case, these experiments were of interest
because of the contrast between the Fang and Europeans/Americans
in terms of exposure to religious and supernatural concepts.
As far as religion is concerned, our Western subjects were used to
rather sober versions of Christian concepts. They were also familiar
WHATSUPERNATURALCONCEPTSARELIKE