point of this is that people cannot store a text verbatim if it is longer
than a few sentences. What they do is form a memory of the main
episodes and how they connect. So when they recall the text, people
often distort the details of a story. Between the bits that are actually
preserved from the original they insert details of their own invention.
For instance, people read in Little Red Riding Hoodthat "she wentto
her grandmother's house" and a few hours later say that "shewalkedto
her grandmother's house." Minor changes of this kind or additions
reveal what concepts people use to represent the story. In this particu-
lar case, they show that people imagined the heroine walking rather
[88] than taking a bus or riding a motorbike, although the story did not
mention anything about how she traveled about.
So Barrett did two things. First, he asked his subjects to answer the
simple question, What is God like? People produced all sorts of
descriptions with common features. For instance, many of them said
that an important feature of God is that he can attend to all sorts of
things at the same time, contrary to humans who by necessity attend
to one thing and then to another. After this, Barrett had his subjects
read stories in which these features of God were relevant. For
instance, the story described God as saving a man's life andat the same
timehelping a woman find her lost purse. After a while the subjects
had to retell the story. In a spectacular and rather surprising way,
many subjects said that God had helped one person out and then
turned his attention to the other's plight.
So people both say explicitly that God could do two things at
once—indeed, that is what makes him God—and then, when they
spontaneously represent what God does, construe a standard agent
who attends to one thingafteranother. Barrett observed this effect
with both believers and nonbelievers, and in Delhi, India, in the same
way as in Ithaca, New York. These experiments show that people's
thoughts about God, the mental representations they use to represent
what God does and how he does it, are not quite the same as what they
say when you ask them. In fact, in this case, one contradicts the other.
In each person there is both an "official" concept—what they can
report if you ask them—and an "implicit" concept that they use with-
out being really aware of it.^10
Barrett coined the phrase "theological correctness" to describe this
effect. In the same way as people sometimes have an explicit, officially
approved version of their political beliefs that may or may not corre-
RELIGION EXPLAINED