Surviving supernatural beliefs mildly violate intuitive expectations rather than wildly or never doing so

Evidence

Just as memorable or emotionally evocative ideas are more likely to spread, certain kinds of supernatural content are much more potent than others. For example, research shows that supernatural concepts that mildly violate intuitive expectations we have about agents, life forms, and physical objects are more memorable in the long run than those that are wildly counterintuitive or completely intuitive. Surveying the kinds of gods and spirits one finds in the ethnographic record, Pascal Boyer observes that there is an infinitely large set of possible supernatural beliefs. Yet the actual supernatural beliefs we observe around the world are but a narrow subset of the possible set. (Boyer offers many amusing examples that are not good divine candidates, such as: There is only one God! He is omnipotent. But He exists only on Wednesdays!) Existing beliefs correspond to a few basic templates that are specific to how we intuitively think about agents, living things, and inert objects: There is only a rather short Catalogue of Supernatural Templates that more or less exhausts the range of culturally successful concepts in this domain. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 127

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘minimal counterintuitiveness’ criterion — supernatural concepts that mildly violate intuitive category expectations are most memorable.
• CANDY: “God exists only on Wednesdays” is a fun, quotable example of why wild counterintuitiveness fails.
• XREF: Links to Boyer’s cognitive science of religion and the reader’s Big Gods analytical frame about which god concepts actually diffuse.