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      The faces of God in America: Revealing religious diversity across people and politics

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          Abstract

          Literature and art have long depicted God as a stern and elderly white man, but do people actually see Him this way? We use reverse correlation to understand how a representative sample of American Christians visualize the face of God, which we argue is indicative of how believers think about God’s mind. In contrast to historical depictions, Americans generally see God as young, Caucasian, and loving, but perceptions vary by believers’ political ideology and physical appearance. Liberals see God as relatively more feminine, more African American, and more loving than conservatives, who see God as older, more intelligent, and more powerful. All participants see God as similar to themselves on attractiveness, age, and, to a lesser extent, race. These differences are consistent with past research showing that people’s views of God are shaped by their group-based motivations and cognitive biases. Our results also speak to the broad scope of religious differences: even people of the same nationality and the same faith appear to think differently about God’s appearance.

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          Most cited references32

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          Perspective taking as egocentric anchoring and adjustment.

          The authors propose that people adopt others' perspectives by serially adjusting from their own. As predicted, estimates of others' perceptions were consistent with one's own but differed in a manner consistent with serial adjustment (Study 1). Participants were slower to indicate that another's perception would be different from--rather than similar to--their own (Study 2). Egocentric biases increased under time pressure (Study 2) and decreased with accuracy incentives (Study 3). Egocentric biases also increased when participants were more inclined to accept plausible values encountered early in the adjustment process than when inclined to reject them (Study 4). Finally, adjustments tend to be insufficient, in part, because people stop adjusting once a plausible estimate is reached (Study 5). ((c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)
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            Exploring the natural foundations of religion

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              Conceptualizing a nonnatural entity: anthropomorphism in God concepts.

              We investigate the problem of how nonnatural entities are represented by examining university students' concepts of God, both professed theological beliefs and concepts used in comprehension of narratives. In three story processing tasks, subjects often used an anthropomorphic God concept that is inconsistent with stated theological beliefs; and drastically distorted the narratives without any awareness of doing so. By heightening subjects' awareness of their theological beliefs, we were able to manipulate the degree of anthropomorphization. This tendency to anthropomorphize may be generalizable to other agents. God (and possibly other agents) is unintentionally anthropomorphized in some contexts, perhaps as a means of representing poorly understood nonnatural entities.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Formal analysisRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: Writing – original draft
                Role: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: InvestigationRole: ResourcesRole: SupervisionRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                11 June 2018
                2018
                : 13
                : 6
                : e0198745
                Affiliations
                [001]University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America
                Fordham University, UNITED STATES
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2947-9815
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3025-766X
                Article
                PONE-D-18-01667
                10.1371/journal.pone.0198745
                5995373
                29889879
                d2dd664e-69d3-4d55-adef-6f746194d7c1
                © 2018 Jackson et al

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 16 January 2018
                : 24 May 2018
                Page count
                Figures: 7, Tables: 0, Pages: 13
                Funding
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001, National Science Foundation;
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: Royster Society of Fellows
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001, National Science Foundation;
                Award ID: SES-1534083
                Award Recipient : Kurt Gray
                This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship to JCJ, the Royster Society of Fellows to JCJ, and the National Science Foundation grant no. SES-1534083 to KG. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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