Minimally Counterintuitive Recall
The minimally counterintuitive (MCI) recall paradigm is an experimental method in the cognitive science of religion that explains why some supernatural concepts spread and persist while others do not. Pascal Boyer and Charles Ramble's 2001 cross-cultural studies, conducted in France, Gabon, and Nepal, tested the hypothesis that concepts which breach a small number of intuitive ontological expectations - a statue that hears prayers, a person who passes through walls - are remembered better than wholly intuitive concepts and better than bizarre concepts that violate too many expectations at once. By embedding intuitive, minimally counterintuitive, and maximally counterintuitive items in narratives and measuring free recall after a delay, the method locates a 'cognitive optimum' of counterintuitiveness that favours cultural transmission, providing an empirical, memory-based account of the recurrent features of religious representations.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Boyer, P., & Ramble, C. (2001). Cognitive templates for religious concepts: cross-cultural evidence for recall of counter-intuitive representations. Cognitive Science, 25(4), 535-564. · DOI 10.1207/s15516709cog2504_2
- Boyer, P. (2001). Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books. · ISBN 9780465006953
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.