God is Not Always Bright: Explicit and Implicit Associations between Brightness/Darkness and God in Bai People

Abstract

ABSTRACT Across many languages and cultures, people tend to explicitly and implicitly associate brightness with God and darkness with the Devil. In the current research, we used an explicit Brightness-Godassociation test(Study 1) and an implicit reaction-time task (Study 2) to investigate religious cognitions in Bai people, an ethnic minority group in southwest China. While Bai people were faster to categorize Devil-related words appearing in a black font versuswhite font, they showed no significant differences in categorizing God-related words when the words presented in a white font versus black font, consistent with their explicit conventions that link“God”with both“brightness”and “darkness”. This pattern of God representations seems to contrast sharply with many other metaphorical associations documented to date. These findings are consistent with the worship of Mahakala (known as “Black Sky god”) in Benzhuism, a local religion in Bai people. Such results cannot be accounted for by valence correspondence such as both concepts of darkness and God having positive meanings. This is because Bai people demonstrate a strong preference for the color white versus black in their culture. We provide the first empirical evidence that light-dark metaphors in religious representations can show variations across cultures.