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Minimal counterintuitiveness

General questions

Are certain concepts better than others at being transmitted and remembered? Do some
religious concepts have these properties?

Theory

Intuitive cognition is fundamental knowledge regarding certain aspects of the world, thought
to be largely inaccessible to conscious inspection of its guiding principles; relatively early-
emerging; largely invariant within and across populations; and, because of its low impact on
cognitive resources, commonly used in everyday reasoning and decision-making.
Developmental psychologists and cognitive scientists have identified several domains of
intuitive knowledge [1] such as those that deal with the representation of objects (especially
the properties of cohesion, continuity, and contact), agents (goal-directedness, efficiency,
contingency, reciprocity, and gaze direction), number (imprecision, abstractness, ability to be
compared and combined by addition and subtraction), and the geometry of the environment
(distance, angle, and sense relations among extended surfaces in the surrounding layout). In
addition, there is evidence for the intuitive understanding of biology [2].
Philosopher Robert McCauley [3] usefully distinguishes between maturationally
natural cognition (i.e., the natural product of human maturation – early-developing, high in
automaticity and fluency, and low in cross-cultural variability) and practiced natural
cognition (also automatic and fluent, but often requiring special artefacts and explicit
instruction, and high in intra- and inter-cultural variability). Intuitive cognition is invariantly
of the first kind.
In spite of the ubiquitous nature and high cognitive efficiency of intuitive knowledge,
many religious concepts appear to spread widely and become culturally successful in spite of
apparent violations of intuitive knowledge. Pascal Boyer [4, 5], appropriating Dan Sperber’s
insights on cultural transmission [6, 7] has been developing a cognitive optimum theory of
religious concept transmission, also known as minimal counterintuitiveness theory [8, 9].
Boyer’s idea is that while intuitive concepts transmit well, those that slightly deviate from
intuition may be transmitted even more successfully, while those that deviate from intuition a
great deal end up over-taxing cognitive processes and therefore being less likely to be
transmitted.
Maurice Bloch [10] has argued that if some supposedly CI representations are instead
repeatedly practiced they become very familiar and indistinguishable from intuitive beliefs.
McCauley’s distinction shows why this is not a problem; Bloch is referring to ‘intuitiveness’
deriving from practiced naturalness, while CI concepts cannot derive from maturational
naturalness.
Barrett [11] has recently attempted to develop a formal system for coding and
quantifying the counterintuitiveness of a concept. Barrett’s six-step technique for coding
concepts is as follows:
1. Identify the basic-level category [cf. 12];
2. Identify the intuitive ontological category that the object falls in;
3. Code ontological category property transfers;
4. Code ontological category breaches;
5. Code breaches within breaches;
6. Add up the number of transfers and breaches.

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This way of thinking about counterintuitiveness generates a number of as yet untested

predictions: multiple breaches of the same set of ontological expectations should be less CI
than multiple breaches of different domains; single property transferrals should trigger the
assumption that the entire set of properties associated with that ontological domain has been
transferred; highly CI concepts should see some of their CI properties discarded in on-line
thinking; etc.

Evidence

Boyer & Ramble [13] used free-recall tasks with French, Gabonese, and Nepalese
participants; in all three groups, minimally counterintuitive breaches and transfers of person
and artefact concepts were better remembered in the short term than their intuitive
counterparts. Barrett & Nyhof [14] obtained similar results with US American college
students. ‘Expectation-violating’ items were more likely to be present after three re-tellings
of the same story than either bizarre or mundane ones, even when the stimuli were presented
orally and recall took place three months after exposure. Pyysiäinen et al. [15] further found
that counterintuitive representations, and those involving a conscious agent in particular,
were more likely to be classed as religious by an international sample of students. Lisdorf
[16] found that lists of portentous events, known as prodigies, from the III to the I century BC
Rome are for the most part counterintuitive (though many bizarre, but not counterintuitive
prodigies are also reported), with 99% minimally so.
More recently, a group of studies [17-19] have argued for the role of context in
increased recall of MCI items. However, the authors do not characterize minimal
counterintuitiveness in the same terms as Boyer and Barrett. Barrett [11] notes that it is
unclear whether word pairs such as ‘drying comment’ and ‘sleeping parable’ [20], which
refer to abstractions rather than objects (broadly construed to contain humans, plants,
animals, living things, and artefacts) evoke true counterintuitive representations. Even when
objects are used as stimuli, the use of context-free word dyads – such as ‘thirsty door’ – is
risky as they may be interpreted metaphorically (in this instance, as an ordinary door that
soaks up paint). In spite of these reservations, Norenzayan et al. [20] found that intuitive
word pairs were better remembered than CI ones, but also that the degradation in
performance between immediate and delayed recall was far lower for CI than for intuitive
pairs.

Outstanding issues

• In addition to the predictions noted above, according to Barrett’s theory some breaches
and transfers are going to be better recalled and transmitted than others, based on the
ontological distance between domains, but there’s still no empirical evidence for this
claim.
• The interactions of level of counterintuitiveness and ontological domains also need to be
assessed: for example, is a MCI transfer from object to human more or less memorable
than a more CI transfer from living things to human?
• Studies have so far focused on memory effects, but other cognitive aspects of MCI
concepts need to be investigated – for example, those relating to attention.

See also

God concepts

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References

1. Spelke, E.S. and K.D. Kinzler, Core knowledge. Developmental Science, 2007. 11: p.
89-96.
2. Medin, D. and S. Atran, eds. Folkbiology. 1999, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.
3. McCauley, The naturalness of religion and the unnaturalness of science. forthcoming.
4. Boyer, P., The naturalness of religious ideas: a cognitive theory of religion. 1994,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
5. Boyer, P., Religion explained: the evolutionary origins of religious thought. 2001,
New York: Basic Books.
6. Sperber, D., Explaining culture: a naturalistic approach. 1996, Oxford: Blackwell.
7. Sperber, D., D. Premack, and A.J. Premack, Causal cognition: a multidisciplinary
debate. 1995, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
8. Barrett, J.L., Exploring the natural foundations of religion. Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 2000. 4: p. 29-34.
9. Barrett, J.L., Why would anyone believe in God? 2004, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira
Press.
10. Bloch, M., Are religious beliefs counter-intuitive?, in Essays on cultural transmission.
2005, Berg: Oxford. p. 103-121.
11. Barrett, J.L., Coding and quantifying counterintuitiveness: theoretical and
methodological reflections. Forthcoming.
12. Rosch, E., et al., Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 1976. 8:
p. 382-439.
13. Boyer, P. and C. Ramble, Cognitive templates for religious concepts: cross-cultural
evidence for recall of counter-intuitive representations. Cognitive Science, 2001. 25:
p. 535-564.
14. Barrett, J.L. and M.A. Nyhof, Spreading non-natural concepts: the role of intuitive
conceptual structures in memory and transmission of cultural materials. Journal of
Cognition and Culture, 2001. 1(1): p. 69-100.
15. Pyssiäinen, I., M. Lindeman, and T. Honkela, Counterintuitiveness as the hallmark of
religiosity. Religion, 2003. 33: p. 341-355.
16. Lisdorf, A., The spread of non-natural concepts. Journal of Cognition and Culture,
2001. 4: p. 151-174.
17. Gonce, L.O., et al., Role of context in recall of counterintuitive concepts. Journal of
Cognition and Culture, 2006. 6(3-4): p. 521-547.
18. Tweney, R.D., et al., The creative structuring of counterintuitive worlds. Journal of
Cognition and Culture, 2006. 6(3-4): p. 483-498.
19. Upal, M.A., et al., Contextualizing counterintuitiveness: how context affects
comprehension and memorability of counterintuitive concepts. Cognitive Science,
2007. 31: p. 415-439.
20. Norenzayan, A., et al., Memory and mystery: the cultural selection of minimally
counterintuitive narratives. Cognitive Science, 2006. 30(531-553).

© 2008 University of Oxford