Violations remain circumscribedBarrett and I also tested strange combinations of concepts not usually
found in human cultures. This was not just for the sake of running
more experiments. If we want to explain why particular supernatural
concepts are found in human cultures, we also need to explain why
other types are not found. Here is an example of that kind of
approach. If what makes a concept salient and potentially well pre-
served is the violation, then material that combines several violations
might be even better recalled. Consider for instance these two viola-
tions: some being has cognitive powers such that it can hear future [85]
conversations; some artifact can understand what people say. It would
seem that an even better concept could be produced by combining
these two, for example, an amulet that can hear what people will say
in the future. Other such combinations could be: Someone who sees
through opaque walls and only sees what does not happen behind
them (combining two violations of intuitive psychology); a dishwasher
that gives birth to offspring but they are telephones, not little dish-
washers (combining a transfer of biology to an artifact with a breach
of biological expectations); a statue that hears what you say and disap-
pears every now and then (combining a transfer of psychology to an
artifact with a breach of intuitive physics); and so on.
Such combinations are certainly counterintuitive, but they are not
usually recalled very well, and certainly not as well as single violations.
Again, individual performance in the lab is analogous to cultural
spread in time and space. Anthropologists know that combinations of
counterintuitive properties are relatively rare in culturally successful
supernatural concepts. When they occur, this is mostly in the rarefied
intellectual atmosphere of literate theology. They are all but absent in
popular, culturally widespread forms of supernatural imagination.
Indeed, most culturally widespread concepts in this domain are in fact
rather sober and generally focus on one violation at a time, for one
particular category.
To illustrate this, consider a familiar situation. Many people in
Europe are Christians. Their concept of God includes the explicit
assumption that God has nonstandard cognitive properties. He is omni-
scient and seems to attend to everything at the same time: no event in
the world can be presumed to escape God's attention. This means that
prayers addressed to God but also to such agents as Christ or the Virgin
Mary can be uttered anywhere. The god will hear you, regardless of
WHATSUPERNATURAL CONCEPTS ARELIKE