series of careful experimental studies of both children's and adult
categories among Yoruba in Nigeria, and showed how intuitions
were not really affected by the presence of familiar counterintuitive
representations. People say for instance that a particular ritual that
includes the sacrifice of a dog was successful, although the animal
actually given to the gods was a cat. They claim that the animal
somehow magically changed species under the priest's incantations.
At the same time, however, people are quite clear that such transfor-
mations are excluded in normal circumstances, because species
membership is a stable feature of animals. Indeed, it is precisely that
principle that makes the ritual transformation an index of the priest's [87]
powers.^9
Theological correctness
Finally, let me turn to the way people produce inferenceson the basis
of ontological violations. As I said above, it seems to be a condition
for "good" supernatural concepts that they allow all inferences not
explicitly barred by the violation. So a spirit can very well go through
walls but should have the expected mental functions of a person.
Imagine what would happen if you did not preserve this default back-
ground. You are told that some trees can eavesdrop on people's con-
versations. You are not told anything else. If you do not maintain the
background, you can now imagine more or less anything about these
trees: that they move about, that they fly in the air when they want,
that they disappear when someone looks at them, and so on. But that
does not seem to be what happens.
This observation, too, could be tested experimentally. Here is a
simple example. People in America have a concept of God. That is,
they seem to have organized thoughts about what makes God special,
in what way God is different from a giraffe or a zucchini or a person
like you and me. If we had not learned our lesson from cognitive psy-
chology, we might be tempted to think that the best way to understand
how people think about God is just to ask them: What is God? Indeed,
this is what most students of religion have been doing for centuries.
Go see the believers and ask them what they believe.
Then Justin Barrett thought that there may be something more to
people's thoughts about God than they themselves believed. So he
used a very simple, tried and tested method. He got his subjects to
read specially prepared stories and to retell them after a while. The
WHATSUPERNATURAL CONCEPTS ARELIKE