From Nature to the Divine: How Children’s Anthropomorphism of Non-Human Entities Relates to Concepts of God

Cognitive science of religion frameworks for understanding the development of religious concepts, like that of God, often highlight the important role of an underlying tendency to use an anthropomorphic heuristic. However, to our knowledge, research has yet to examine the extent to which individual differences in anthropomorphizing non-human non-religious entities (i.e. animals, nature, and technology) relate to anthropomorphizing God. In this study, we explored whether and how individual differences in children’s anthropomorphic reasoning (as measured by the IDAQ;) related to children’s concept of God while controlling for other factors previously found to be important (i.e. age, parental socialization, and social cognition). One hundred twenty-three parent-child dyads with children between the ages of 5 and 8 years from the Pacific Southwest of the United States participated. Overall, while children’s anthropomorphizing of animals was unrelated to their conceptualization of God as humanlike, children’s anthropomorphizing of technology and nature was significantly related. This study highlights the nuances in the domain-specific ways children may employ anthropomorphic reasoning to infer humanness in nonhuman religious entities. Further, our findings suggest that situational-contextual factors such as age, religious socialization, and social cognition play important roles in these reasoning patterns. Unpacking the domain-specificity of children’s anthropomorphic reasoning may improve the precision of frameworks for understanding religious concept formation.