Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do people hold different kinds of beliefs about gods and spiritsthan they do about the everyday world? Many say no: that tothe faithful, gods and spirits are real in the same way that tablesand chairs are real. Yet experimental studies have found thatspeakers of American English tacitly distinguish between twocognitive attitudes—one for factual beliefs and one forreligious credences—through their differential use of the words“think” and “believe” (Heiphetz, Landers, and Van Leeuwen,2018). In three large-scale studies—conducted in fivestrikingly different linguistic and cultural-religious contexts(from west to east: the US, Ghana, Thailand, China, andVanuatu)—we demonstrate that such linguistic differentiationof factual belief and religious credence is cross-culturallyrobust. This lends support to the hypothesis that human theoryof mind includes nuanced distinctions among differentvarieties of “belief.”