The Role of Memory, Belief, and Familiarity in the Transmission of Counterintuitive Content

Cognitive scientists have increasingly turned to cultural transmission to explain the widespread nature of religious representations. One key hypothesis focuses on memory, proposing that that minimally counterintuitive (MCI) content facilitates the transmission of supernatural beliefs. We propose two caveats to the MCI hypothesis: 1) distinctiveness, and therefore memory, decreases as MCI concepts become familiar; 2) people do not believe counterintuitive content readily, therefore additional mechanisms are required to get from memory to belief. In experiments 1-3 (n=283), we examined the relationship between MCI, belief, and memory. MCI content was less believable than intuitive content. Individual differences in anthropomorphism negatively affected memory for anthropomorphic-MCI content, suggesting thinking chronically about MCI content reduces its memorability. In experiment 4, we examined a non-content-based cultural learning mechanism driven by credibility enhancing displays, and found that it was effective in increasing participants’ (n=70) belief in MCI content.