CGSC 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Pascal Boyer, Enculturation, Schizophrenia
10 Nov 2018
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We have subsystems for understanding different things in the world: contagion, persons, living things, tools, physical objects. We find fascinating things that belong to one category but have one (or close to one) thing from another. A ghost or god is a person with no body. A zombie is a person with no mind. A crying statue is an object with one biological property. Studies show that people find these one-violation concepts the most plausible (barrett) Our belief that people still exist when we can no longer perceive them. It seems that this does not shut off immediately when someone dies, leading to beliefs that their minds still exist. Studies show that most people, even self-described atheists, attribute mental states to the dead. If something is learned, we predict that it gets stronger during enculturation. The opposite happens with attributing mental states to the dead, kindergarteners were more likely to do this than older children.
