Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion

The cognitive literature on child development usually distinguishes three phases in the development of understanding of agency. Abundant research documents children&s;s acquisition of human agent concepts over the first several years of life, but there is little work available on the development of non-human agent concepts. Therefore, to probe children&s;s representational understanding of agency whether they have a conception of belief it is necessary to ascertain that they figure out that people can have false beliefs and that these beliefs can motivate behavior. Very little available research addresses the generalizability of children&s;s understanding of agency to non-human agents in general, and to God in particular. The vast majority of developmental studies of false-belief understanding in reference to humans focus on samples of Euro-American and East Asian children, often from relatively high socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds The present results, however, clearly demonstrate that Yukatek young children, as well as American young children, do not treat God as merely human.