#3999. God is Not Always Bright: Explicit and Implicit Associations between Brightness/Darkness and God in Bai People

September 2026publication date
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Journal’s subject area:
Linguistics and Language;
Communication;
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology;
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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. 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. Such results cannot be accounted for by valence correspondence such as both concepts of darkness and God having positive meanings. We provide the first empirical evidence that light-dark metaphors in religious representations can show variations across cultures.
Keywords:
God; the Devil; Bai people; metaphorical associations; cultures; interpretations

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