Beliefs in afterlife as a by-product of persistence judgments
George E. Newman a1, Sergey V. Blok a2andLance J. Rips a3 a1 Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520 george.newman@yale.edu a2 Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712 blok@psy.utexas.edu a3 Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208. rips@northwestern.edu
We agree that supernatural beliefs are pervasive. However, we propose a more general account rooted in how people trace ordinary objects over time. Tracking identity involves attending to the causal history of an object, a process that may implicate hidden mechanisms. We discuss experiments in which participants exhibit the same “supernatural” beliefs when reasoning about the fates of cups and automobiles as those exhibited by Bering's participants when reasoning about spirits.
