The Faces of God in America

nivek

As Above So Below
For any Christians, does this seem representative of your view of what god's face may look like?...

The Faces of God in America

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.


The face of God across all American Christians

What does God generally look like to American Christians? Participants saw God’s face as more masculine, Caucasian, attractive, intelligent, and loving compared to His anti-face. God’s face was also rated as significantly younger than the alternative composite, and as no more powerful, consistent with a general tendency for Americans to believe in a God who is more loving than stern. Importantly, these differences were unbiased by the characteristics of the reverse correlation base image, since we compared faces that participants selected from those they did not select.


God’s perceived face (left) and anti-face (right) across American Christians.

Together, these results help paint a picture of an American God who may not resemble scriptural or historical depictions. The face of the modern American God appeared kinder and more approachable than the God of the Sistine Chapel, perhaps reflecting different cultural concerns of the 16th century versus today. However, these general results should be interpreted with caution, since participants’ ratings may have been biased by their conceptualization of Jesus.


The face of God across liberals and conservatives

Do liberals and conservatives see the face of God differently? To test this question, we generated composite images for those who self-identified as liberals versus conservatives. In our reverse correlation sample, conservative participants were more likely to be older, Caucasian, male, and more attractive, and so we covaried out these demographic factors when generating these composite faces in order to avoid confounding ideology and egocentrism.


Aggregates of the images that liberal participants (left panel) and conservative participants (right panel) associated with how they viewed God.

Independent ratings suggested that, as predicted, perceptions of God’s face are shaped by motivations tied to political orientation. The conservatives’ God was perceived as more masculine, older, more powerful, and wealthier than the liberals’ God, reflecting conservatives’ motivation for a God who enforces order. Conversely, liberals’ God was more African American and more loving than the conservatives’ God, reflecting their motivation for a God who encourages tolerance. Conservatives visualized a God who was better-suited to meet their motivation for social order, while liberals visualized a God who was better-suited to meet their motivation for social tolerance.


The egocentric face of God


Do people see a God who looks like them? Egocentrism suggests that people see the world and other people through the lens of the self. Perhaps the same is true with God, such that He shares not only people’s opinions, but also their facial features. We tested for the role of egocentrism in the perception of God by comparing God’s composite faces of (a) the youngest third of our sample with the oldest third of our sample, (b) the least attractive third of our sample with the most attractive third of our sample, (c) African American participants with Caucasian participants, and (d) men versus women.


Aggregates of the images that young participants (left panel) and old participants (right panel) associated with how they viewed God.

Independent ratings suggest that, as predicted, perceptions of God’s face are shaped by egocentrism. Older participants saw an older God, more attractive participants saw a more attractive God, and African Americans saw a marginally more African American God. Perceptions of God’s face did not vary across gender, both men and women saw God as similarly male.


What’s in a face? The face of God as a measure of God’s mind

Despite depictions in stories, films, and renaissance-era paintings, people do not have definitive information about what God looks like. Genesis 1:27 describes man as created in God’s image, but other verses portray God as embodied as non-human (Exodus 3:2), or as not embodied at all (John 4:24). Consequently, since God’s appearance is not consistently described in scripture, people may draw from their assumptions about God’s “mind”—His temperament, personality, and capabilities [28]—when they visualize His face.

Past research on face perception supports the idea that when people visualize faces, these faces reflect assumptions about the minds of those who wear them. For example, when people visualize welfare recipients (versus non-recipients), they view them as having dull eyes to reflect their perceived lack of mental acuity [9], and when people visualize atheists (vs. non-atheists) they view them as having smaller eyes and narrow chins to reflect their perceived lack of honesty [10]. By extension, believers may see God’s face as smiling since God is typically viewed as all-loving and may also see Him as appearing powerful since God is viewed as almighty [1112].

God’s face may be an especially useful measure of God’s mind because face perception measures are less susceptible to social desirability concerns than are verbal reports. For example, people will seldom admit that they assume welfare recipients are black but will choose darker faces when asked which of two alternatives looks more like a welfare recipient [9]. Similarly, people will seldom admit that they think of God as possessing human qualities—something Barrett [13] has termed “theological correctness”—but many believers implicitly describe God in humanlike terms [14] and may therefore project humanlike mental qualities onto God’s face. The question is: Which qualities will be conveyed by the face of God?
How do people perceive God’s mind? The roles of motivation and cognitive biases
If people project God’s mind onto His perceived face, what should God’s face look like? Views of God are certainly shaped by scripture—the Quran describes God differently than the Bible—but even people within a religion may see God differently. Indeed, Christians’ descriptors of God seldom overlap [11, 15] and religious scholars have argued that images of God are best seen as idiosyncratic across individuals rather than monolithic within religion or culture [1617]. A large body of research has documented the within-religion factors that might influence people’s views of God [18], including learning during socialization [1920], prayer [21], and transmission biases [22]. Much of this work indicates that psychological processes may play an important role in how people view God. In particular, historical and contemporary research strongly suggests that motivations and cognitive biases jointly shape how people conceptualize God’s mind.


Motivation.

The role of individual motivation in religious belief is a common theme of 19th and 20th century philosophy. Freud [23] claimed that belief in gods “derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires”—specifically the need to form an attachment with a powerful father figure. Becker [24] tied religion to the motivation to transcend death, writing that “man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.” Marx [25] viewed religion as the “sigh of the oppressed creature,” suggesting that it fulfilled the motivation for control and autonomy.

Contemporary psychological research has echoed these perspectives by identifying specific motivations that influence the way people view God’s mind. People who lack control in their lives tend to see God as more powerful and influential as a form of compensatory control [26]. People who feel threatened by intergroup conflict conceptualize God as more authoritarian and punitive, since this kind of God could better regulate a society at war ([27], see also [28] for a perspective on natural disasters and views of God). And people with a strong need for a secure attachment tend to view God as more loving to provide themselves with an attachment figure [29]. Together, these perspectives suggest that people ascribe traits to God that help fulfill salient motivations.

Cognitive biases.

While early philosophers emphasized the importance of motivation in religious belief, early anthropologists emphasized the importance of cognitive biases. Tylor [30] suggested that animism—the belief that natural phenomena possess agency—arose from conflating dreams with reality. Muller [31] also emphasized cognitive conflation in his explanation of religious belief, tying it to hyperactive anthropomorphism. Accounts like these inspired the modern cognitive science of religion, which views early religious belief as an accidental byproduct of evolutionarily functional tendencies, such as sensitivity to intentionality and agents in one’s environment [3234].

35]. Observations of religious egocentrism have a long history: the 6th century philosopher Xenophanes wrote, “Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw, and could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.” Yet recent studies find that people think even more egocentrically about God’s mind than other people’s minds, and that self-oriented regions of the brain show more activation when believers think about God than when they think about other people [3637].
The present research
We introduce a face-visualization approach to measuring God’s mind and validate this measure in a large sample of American Christians. These data not only reveal how people generally view the face of God, but importantly show how motivations and cognitive biases shape believers’ understandings of God’s mind.

Motivation was operationalized via participants’ self-reported conservatism. Compared to liberals, American conservatives are more motivated to maximize social regulation, emphasizing law enforcement [3841] and authoritarian leadership [42]. By contrast, liberals are more motivated to maximize societal tolerance, emphasizing intergroup harmony [38] and social justice [40]. These contrasting motivations suggest that conservatives may visualize an older, sterner, and more masculine God who is better suited to safeguard social order, whereas liberals may visualize a younger, kinder, and more feminine God who is better suited to encourage social tolerance.

Cognitive bias was operationalized by egocentrism, and we measured participants’ gender, age, race (African American versus White), and self-reported attractiveness. If people think egocentrically about God, they should visualize the face of God as being relatively like themselves for each of these qualities. We considered these superficial qualities to be particularly interesting because they would show that people view God as like them even in seemingly unimportant ways.

This study had two phases. In the first, we generated images corresponding to how people visualized God’s face and also measured individual differences. In the second phase, we asked separate samples of hypothesis-blind participants to rate these images of God’s face on (a) age, (b) gender, (c) attractiveness, (d) race, (e) happiness, (f) wealth, (g) intelligence, (h) lovingness, and (i) power. We predicted that that these hypothesis-blind ratings would reveal that, compared to liberals, conservative participants visualized an older, more masculine, whiter, wealthier, less loving, and more powerful God. We also hypothesized that the hypothesis-blind ratings would show that participants visualized a God similar to them in age, gender, attractiveness, and race. We included ratings of happiness, wealth, and intelligence as exploratory measures, with no a priori hypotheses.

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