The Cognitive Psychology of Belief in the Supernatural · The Cognitive Psychology of Belief in the...

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The Cognitive Psychology of Belief in the Supernatural Belief in a deity or an afterlife could be an evoluHonarily advantageous by- product of people's ability to reason about the minds of others Jesse M. Bering O ne hot summer day several years ago, I lay holed up in a suffocat- ing Fort Lauderdale hospital room— the result of an especially virulent bout of the flu. Having nothing but the buzzing of dying flies and the sound of muted television game-show applause to engage my interest, I turned my at- tention to the doleful lamentations of my elderly roommate, a handsome Navy veteran from World War U with a painfully defunct hip and, I gath- ered, an even more painful theological crisis on his hands. It seems that he had been yanked from the bedside of his aged wife, and he feared that she'd die without him being there. To make matters worse, he had the sneaking suspicion that his son wanted to jet- tison him off to a nursing home after her death, away from their cherished house and the beautiful garden they'd cultivated for the last 20 years. "I don't understand why God is doing this," he protested meekly to a sympathet- ic young nurse. "We've always been good people, my wife and me. What did we do to deserve this?" That's strange, 1 thought. Didn't I ask the same thing just the other day as I was crawling about on the bathroom floor, expelling bodily fluids that I didn't even know I had in me? Indeed, I could }essc M. Bering received his Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Florida Atlantic Uniivrsity. He is currently an assistant professor ofpsi/chobgy at the University of Arkansas and is an international fel- low at the Institute of Cognition and Culture ofthe Queen's Universit}/ Belfast. His research interests include intuitive perceptions ofthe afterlife, folk psychologies of souls, and the concepts of meaning and destiny. Address: Department of Psychology, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701. Internet: [email protected] distinctly recall the feverish mantra: "Oh, God, please, no more!" And I'm not particularly religious. Just what was this connection between suffering and God all about, anyway? This observation got me thinking about other existential experiences. The same way that I couldn't help thinking of God under dire circumstances, I've also found that 1 can't fathom what it would be like not to have an afterlife. I'm a materialist—I think consciousness ends with death. But nonetheless, try as 1 might, I run into a brick wall whenever 1 attempt to imagine what it would be "like" to be dead and not exist. I doubt I'm the oniy one. In the United States, as much as 95 percent of the population reportedly believes in life after death. At least from a purely naturalistic per- spective, one where we properly view ourselves as animals, such religious be- liefs are an odd sort of thing. Not many people would classify their beliefs in God or heaven as "supernatural," even though that's precisely what they are. Just what is it about the human mind that leads so many members of our species, across cultures and geographic distances, to hold such an unshakable, sober and highly personal belief in an in- visible, all-powerful being whom West- erners call God? On the face of it, this invisible being is a voyeur who knows all about you, an aloof sadist (as some people believe in the wake of personal misfortunes), a sexual totalitarian and a personal friend, all rolled into one. The fact that, normally, none of this strange mix seems to strike us as bizarre may indicate that this trait has somehow had a deeper benefit for our species. Mere desire to believe (or, using Sig- mund Freud's term, wish fulfillment) doesn't seem to cut it as an explanation of these traits. In studies I have con- ducted, people's levels of death anxiety didn't have much correlation with their types of religious beliefs—those with low fear of dying, for instance, are just as likely to be materialists as they are immortatists (who believe in conscious- ness after death). Religious beliefs could instead be a result of cultural indoctrina- tion, a simple matter of exposure from birth to such ideas. But maybe it goes back even further than birth: Perhaps human minds have a genetic predisposi- tion toward supernatural belief. To some, these questions are dis- tasteful, even silly, because they sug- gest that God and the afterlife are phenomenological products of mind rather than an objective reality. But in my view, a serious empirical analy- sis of the natural foundations of such supernatural beliefs is fair game for science. Being a psychologist, I began to wonder whether there was some way to collect empirical evidence to see whether belief in God and an af- terlife is somehow the natural, default state of human consciousness. But to understand why such a thing might have come about, we first must look at how evolution has influenced the human mind. Evolutionary Psychology As psychologists such as David M. Buss of the University of Texas at Aus- tin, Leda Gosmides of the University of Galifomia, Santa Barbara, and Ste- ven Pinker of Harvard University have been arguing for more than a decade, not only are our bodies a product of natural selection—for example our op- posabte thumbs for grasping and our bipedal posture for walking^—^but our minds bear the thumbprint of evolution 142 American Scientist, Volume 94

Transcript of The Cognitive Psychology of Belief in the Supernatural · The Cognitive Psychology of Belief in the...

Page 1: The Cognitive Psychology of Belief in the Supernatural · The Cognitive Psychology of Belief in the Supernatural Belief in a deity or an afterlife could be an evoluHonarily advantageous

The Cognitive Psychology of Beliefin the Supernatural

Belief in a deity or an afterlife could be an evoluHonarily advantageous by-product of people's ability to reason about the minds of others

Jesse M. Bering

One hot summer day several yearsago, I lay holed up in a suffocat-

ing Fort Lauderdale hospital room—the result of an especially virulentbout of the flu. Having nothing but thebuzzing of dying flies and the sound ofmuted television game-show applauseto engage my interest, I turned my at-tention to the doleful lamentations ofmy elderly roommate, a handsomeNavy veteran from World War U witha painfully defunct hip and, I gath-ered, an even more painful theologicalcrisis on his hands. It seems that hehad been yanked from the bedside ofhis aged wife, and he feared that she'ddie without him being there. To makematters worse, he had the sneakingsuspicion that his son wanted to jet-tison him off to a nursing home afterher death, away from their cherishedhouse and the beautiful garden they'dcultivated for the last 20 years. "I don'tunderstand why God is doing this,"he protested meekly to a sympathet-ic young nurse. "We've always beengood people, my wife and me. Whatdid we do to deserve this?"

That's strange, 1 thought. Didn't I askthe same thing just the other day as Iwas crawling about on the bathroomfloor, expelling bodily fluids that I didn'teven know I had in me? Indeed, I could

}essc M. Bering received his Ph.D. in developmentalpsychology from Florida Atlantic Uniivrsity. He iscurrently an assistant professor ofpsi/chobgy at theUniversity of Arkansas and is an international fel-low at the Institute of Cognition and Culture oftheQueen's Universit}/ Belfast. His research interestsinclude intuitive perceptions ofthe afterlife, folkpsychologies of souls, and the concepts of meaningand destiny. Address: Department of Psychology,University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701.Internet: [email protected]

distinctly recall the feverish mantra:"Oh, God, please, no more!" And I'mnot particularly religious. Just what wasthis connection between suffering andGod all about, anyway?

This observation got me thinkingabout other existential experiences. Thesame way that I couldn't help thinkingof God under dire circumstances, I'vealso found that 1 can't fathom what itwould be like not to have an afterlife.I'm a materialist—I think consciousnessends with death. But nonetheless, try as1 might, I run into a brick wall whenever1 attempt to imagine what it would be"like" to be dead and not exist. I doubtI'm the oniy one. In the United States,as much as 95 percent of the populationreportedly believes in life after death.

At least from a purely naturalistic per-spective, one where we properly viewourselves as animals, such religious be-liefs are an odd sort of thing. Not manypeople would classify their beliefs inGod or heaven as "supernatural," eventhough that's precisely what they are.Just what is it about the human mindthat leads so many members of ourspecies, across cultures and geographicdistances, to hold such an unshakable,sober and highly personal belief in an in-visible, all-powerful being whom West-erners call God? On the face of it, thisinvisible being is a voyeur who knowsall about you, an aloof sadist (as somepeople believe in the wake of personalmisfortunes), a sexual totalitarian and apersonal friend, all rolled into one. Thefact that, normally, none of this strangemix seems to strike us as bizarre mayindicate that this trait has somehow hada deeper benefit for our species.

Mere desire to believe (or, using Sig-mund Freud's term, wish fulfillment)doesn't seem to cut it as an explanation

of these traits. In studies I have con-ducted, people's levels of death anxietydidn't have much correlation with theirtypes of religious beliefs—those withlow fear of dying, for instance, are justas likely to be materialists as they areimmortatists (who believe in conscious-ness after death). Religious beliefs couldinstead be a result of cultural indoctrina-tion, a simple matter of exposure frombirth to such ideas. But maybe it goesback even further than birth: Perhapshuman minds have a genetic predisposi-tion toward supernatural belief.

To some, these questions are dis-tasteful, even silly, because they sug-gest that God and the afterlife arephenomenological products of mindrather than an objective reality. But inmy view, a serious empirical analy-sis of the natural foundations of suchsupernatural beliefs is fair game forscience. Being a psychologist, I beganto wonder whether there was someway to collect empirical evidence tosee whether belief in God and an af-terlife is somehow the natural, defaultstate of human consciousness. But tounderstand why such a thing mighthave come about, we first must lookat how evolution has influenced thehuman mind.

Evolutionary PsychologyAs psychologists such as David M.Buss of the University of Texas at Aus-tin, Leda Gosmides of the Universityof Galifomia, Santa Barbara, and Ste-ven Pinker of Harvard University havebeen arguing for more than a decade,not only are our bodies a product ofnatural selection—for example our op-posabte thumbs for grasping and ourbipedal posture for walking^—^but ourminds bear the thumbprint of evolution

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rf:

Figure 1. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the ghost of Banquo appears to the king as a rehuke of his murderous ways. Such conjuring-up of super-natural beings may have its roots in the evolution of human minds. The ahility to attribute consciousness to invisible, supernatural agents mayhave come about as a by-product of people's ability to reason about other human minds. But belief in such omnipotent forces could have thenincreased human genetic fitness by preventing cheating behaviors that could result in social repercussions.

as well. In many cases, the wai/ we thinkabout a particular class of events (theso-called structure of our psychology)reflects u'hif we think that way (the so-called function of our psychology).

Take, for instance, our preferencefor sweet and fatty foods or our fear ofheights and snakes or the fact that wego "ctXKhie-ctKx:hie-coo" whenever wesee a cute baby. These behaviors are all,according to evolutionary psychologists,caused by unconscious mental forcesthat helped our ancestors to survive andthrive in the remote past. We may notknow why we do, think or feel as wedo, but as biologist Richard Dawkinsargues in his btxjk The Selfish Gene, fromour genes' point of view, this ignoranceis entirely moot anyway, so long as wework on their behalf. Beha\ ior is there-

fore one of tlie primary currencies usedby natural selection, and it is psychologi-cal states that drive behavior.

Recognizing the evolutionary rootsof much of human behavior, I began towonder whether a psychological sus-ceptibility to belief in God is the resultof adaptive design. That hypothesiswould only make sense if indeed therewere behaviors associated with suchsusceptihility that made us geneticallysuccessful. Just as canine teetii evolvedto help peopie rip the flesh off bones,could a belief in God have evolved tohelp people tear off bits of meaning froman otherwise meaningless existence? Orperhaps God is simply a spandrel—anarchitectural term (for an ornamentalarch) adopted by Stephen Jay Gould andRichard Lewontin to indicate a biologi-

cal feature that is passed down part andparcel with another trait and is not on itsown a product of natural selection. Godmight be an accidental by-product of hu-man cognitive evolution, a functionlessleftover of the capacity to reason aboutother human minds in the everyday so-cial world, as cognitive scientists such asPascal Boyer of Washington Universityin St. Louis believe. There's a third op-tion, which 1 favor: that religious belief isan exaptatioii—a spandrel that turned outto be useful and so was subsequently se-lected for by evolutionary pressures.

Types of MindsOne way to assess the impact of evolu-tion on supernatural beliefs is to shjdydifferent types of minds. In 1996,1 maderegular excursions to a small town in

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Figure 2. What kind of mind does it take toentertain supernatural beliefs? If evolutionhas affected supernatural beliefs, variants ofthese traits should be apparent in minds thathave a recent shared ancestry with our own.

Florida called South Piialeah, to see oneof the most famous residents of greaterMiami. He was called simply "King."Legend has it that he was bom, one ofa set of twins, somewhere in the denseAfrican rainforest, but when his motherwas murdered he was made an orphanand shipped off to the States to performwith his brother in a traveling circus. Itwas in these early circus days that theringmaster allegedly had King's teethknocked out with a hammer.

Now, under a canopy of palms, this450-pound gorilla with calcified gums

leaned imperiously against the wall ofhis enclosure and stole wary glances atme as I scribbled down my notes. Soon,King's trainer would have him put onhis trademark show for shouting school-children, performed three times a dayfor the past 17 years, in which he wouldsedately climb on top of a 20-gallondrum and belly dance for the modestprice of a crisp head of lettuce. Over sub-sequent months. King and I had interac-tions that were both mutually unsettlingand reinforcing: On some occasions, hewould pound his chest and charge atme, or projectile-vomit on me; on othershe would stick out his enormous feet be-tween the steel bars, inviting me to ticklehis plump, rubbery toes, purring withguttural affection, through all his eclec-tic behaviors, one question remainedin my mind: After a life so profoundlymuddled by humans, would King thinkto ask God why this was his lot in life?

Could King think of God at all? AsDarwin stated in The Descent of Man,"There can be no doubt, that the differ-ence between the mind of the lowestman and that of the highest animal isimmense.... Nevertheless, the differencein mind..., great as it is, certainly is oneof degree and not of kind." If so, then weshould find some psychoiogicai statesin King that are evolutionary variants ofhuman belief in souls or the afterlife.

Although it may be difficult to getKing to discuss his thoughts on thesematters, there is another way to figureout what kinds of minds are needed toentertain existential beliefs: by seeinghow these traits appear in children ofdifferent ages. Other mental systems.

such as empathy, have been found toemerge piecemeal, with precursorycomponents of the end state coming upgradually during a child's development.If humans are naturally inclined to be-lieve in God and the afterlife, there isgtx)d reason to think that children willexhibit signs of these traits before receiv-ing any cultural indoctrination.

This is the question that I exploredfor my doctoral dissertation, for which1 presented children ages 4 through 12with a puppet show—which we agreedwas just a game—that portrayed an in-nocuous little mouse being eaten by agrumpy alligator. Afterward, I askedthe children a series of questions. Nowthat the mouse was dead, did it miss itsmom? Was it still hungry? Was it stillangry at its brother? Could it still tastethe grass it ate right before it died? Curi-ously, the younger the child, the morelikely he or she was to endow the deadmouse with the capacity to experiencevarious mental states, despite the factthat even preschoolers generally un-derstood that the mouse's body hadstopped functioning after death. This isprecisely the opposite of the pattern thatone would expect to find if the origins ofsuch beliefs could be traced exclusivelyto cultural indtKtrination. In fact, "reli-gious" answers—such as Heaven, Godor spirits^—among the youngest chil-dren were extraordinarily rare. If beliefin an afterlife is entirely cultural, olderchildren would have had more expo-sure and become more socially alignedto prevailing metaphysical beliefs, andtherefore would be expected to attributemore traits to the afterlife.

Figure 3. In a study designed to determine whether human beings are bom with a tendency to form supernatural beliefs or acquire- tliis .ibilitythrough cultural exposure, children of various ages were told a story in a puppet show wherein a young mouse is suddenly eaten by an alliga-tor. The children were then asked to describe the mouse's ability to feel or know things after its death (see Figure 4 for results).

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Some of the most striking findingsfrom this study involved a disconnec-tion between closely related bodily andpsychological processes. For instance,many of the youngest children reasonedthat the dead mouse needn't eat or drinkafter death while simultaneously reason-ing that it retained the capacity for hun-ger and thirst. Such responses droppedoff when children better understood thebiology of life. This seemed to show thatchildren have naive theories about psy-chological functioning after death thatinitially include all psychological states,which are gradually pruned to a morerestrictive range of functioning. For in-stance, even the youngest children knewthat the brain stopped working at death,but most children, even the oldest, re-fused to say that the mouse stopped lov-ing its mother at death.

The Intuitiveness of the AfterlifeBy claiming that psychological statessurvive death, or even alluding to thispossibility, one commits to a radicalform of mind-body dualism, in which eachappears to be able to exist without theother. But what, exactly, does the braindo if mental activities can exist indepen-dently of it? The devil, it seems, is in thedetails. In cognitive science, this devilis welcome; indeed, it makes frequentappearances, asking very specific ques-tions. My colleagues and I call this devilredtictionism and invite others to watch itplay a game of wits with what are per-haps some of their most sacred beliefs.Aft:er the devil has had its say, it makes apretty con\ incing case. The distinctivelyhuman ideas of God, souls and meaningare at once absolutely seductive and yetso disarmingly irrational.

A few years ago, I published the re-sults of a series of interviews with col-lege students who were asked to reasonabout the fate of the mind after death,much as I had asked the children in thestudy with the puppet show. The ques-tions I asked were of the reductionistvariety: Could a man who was instan-taneously killed in a car accident still ex-perience lust? How's his sense of taste?Is he still angry at his wife about theirspat the previous night? As expected,those students who reported that theyhad some belief in God were morelikely to attribute mental states to deadagents. The big surprise was that peoplewho categorized themselves as cxtinc-tivists—those who stated that personalconsciousness is snuffed out entirely atdeath—often betrayed their real tliink-

ing about the afterlife during the inter-view. For example, when asked whetherthe dead protagonist knew that he wasdead (a feat demanding ongoing cogni-tive abilities), one young extinctivist'sanswer was almost comical: "Yeah, he'dknow, because I don't believe in theafterlife. It is nonexistent; he sees thatnow." Despite himself, this alleged ex-tinctivist was a dualist.

The results of this study, taken withthe data from the puppet-show ex-periment, indicate that, because no oneknows what it's like to be dead, peopleattribute to dead agents the mental traitsthat they cannot imagine being without.The results also provide evidence thatbelief in supernatural agents pirates thebrain's mental inference systems that aredesigned to reason about everyday in-tentional (living) agents. People loiowthat other people have mental traits andactions, even when the other people arenot being directly observed. So it may bethe default cognitive state to give thesetraits to unseen dead agents.

Some psychologists, such as Boyer,have put forward the idea that supernat-ural beliefs arose through culture aloneand that religious ideas are pervasivebecause they are counterintuih\'e—theyviolate the mind's understanding of theworld, which in fact makes them easierto remember. My view is that afterlifebeliefs are the default state, and it is infact counterintuitive for people to denythem. In the students' and the older

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children's mental representation of deadagents, some traits were more easily lostthan others. The students had to thinkabout twice as long before answeringquestions about emotional or epistemic(feeling and knowing) states over bio-logical or psychobiological (hearing orhunger, for instance) states after death.To humans, dead agents are thereforenot just invisible beings but have a nar-rower range of experience than in life.Therefore, it seems that it's natural forhuman beings to reason about death asa transitional state of consciousness, andcultural communication serves to me-ter—either to enrich or degrade—theseintuitive conceptior\s of the afterlife.

There are se\'eral other developmentalpsychologists who have recently beguninvestigating the natural foundations ofreligion using empirical methods fromcognitive science, and their results arecomplementary to what I have found.For example, in a recent study, ValerieKuhlmeier, a psychologist at Queen'sUniversity in Ontario, and her colleaguespositioned identical-twin experiment-ers behind different partitions. This wasdone in order to test five-month-olds'ability to reason about the law of con-tinuous motion as it applies to humanbodies. Infants are known to show sur-prise at unexpected events by lookingat them for longer periods of time. Forinanimate objects, infants look longerwhen the object disappears behind onebarrier and then seems to reemerge from

type of state

Figure 4. !n the experiment described in Figure 3, children of different ages were asked aboutbiological and mental states after death. Adults were asked to answer the same questions for thepurpose of comparison. Questions were in biological (need to eat, brain function), psychohiologi-cal (hunger, thirst), perceptual (hearing, tasting), emotional (love, anger), desire (wish, want) andepistemic (believe, know) categories. Data indicate the prevalence of discontinuity responses,where respondents denied the dead mouse's ability to experience these states. Younger childrenwere more likely to attribute all abilities to the dead mouse than were older children and adults,the opposite of what would be expected if supernatural beliefs were from cultural indoctrination.

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•̂!̂ '

type of state type of stafe

Figure 5. Levels of discontinuity responses for each category of biological or mental h'aits varied with afterlife belief type: extinctivist (consciousnessends at death), agnostic (uncertain what happens after death), other (consciousness survives death but uncertain what happens afterwards), eclectic(combination of immortalist and reincamationist beliefs), immortalist (consciousness survives death and lasts forever) and reincamationist In all cas-es, people were most likely to deny that biological traits existed after death and were least likely to deny the persistence of epistemic (knowing) traits(a). However, even about 30 percent of extinctivists paradoxically claimed that desire and epistemic states continue after death. The average amountof time required for participants to deny that dead agents possess traits more than doubled from biological states to epistemic states (l>). This resultindicates that endowing supernatural agents with mental states is the default of the human mind, and countering this trait takes mental effort

another nonadjacent barrier. Seeing aperson who violates the law of continu-ous motion, however, five-month-oldsare not surprised. The authors specu-late that "infants do not readily viewhumans as material objects" but mayfirst think of people only as intentionalagents. An "appreciation that people arejust objects may be a developmental ac-complishment."

Societal AdvantagesThe studies discussed so far have shownthat existential beliefs require a certainlevel of cognitive development to befully expressed. Afterlife beliefs thus de-pend on other cognitive systems to exist.Therefore, they are likely not an inde-

confrol inmemoriamcondition

ghoststory

Figure 6. On a competitive task, studentswho were told of sightings of a ghost weresignficantly quicker to resist the temptationto cheat than students who were told only ofthe recent death of one of the task's creators("in memoriam") or told no story at all.

pendent adaptive trait, but more likelya spandrel or an exaptation. But to theo-rize further betw een the latter two possi-bilities, one needs to detennine whetherthere has been an evolutionary advan-tage to believing in the supernatural.

Once humans developed speechand societies, selfish behavior such as\'iolence or cheating could be reported.Such behaviors could therefore result inretaliation, such as social marginaliza-tion. This punishment would have phys-ical impact: People labeled as poor co-operators might be considered to be poorreproductive partners. Thus, keeping inline became genetically adaptive. Butmaybe human intelligence couldn't berelied on to follow the rules. In st̂ me n oone-will-ever-know instances, the threatof detection may appear deceivingly low,so individuals are tempted to profit fromcheating tactics. But such temptationswould be less attractive if there was a"Santa Claus" effect, where individualsthought that they were constantly be-ing watched by invisible beings. I thusreason that the idea of supernatural ob-ser\ation may serve to counteract suchdangerous risk miscalculations, per-suading the person to refrain from socialde\'iance and, subsequently, to preservetheir genetic fitness.

People in most hunter-gatherer societ-ies have a fear of ancestral ghosts whotiiey think are constantly watching them,but to gather empirical evidence for thistlieory, my colleagues Katrina McLeod,Todd K. Shackelford and I set up a studyof undergraduate students where we

tempted them to cheat on a competi-tive computer task. Students were toldthat they were evaluating a new test ofspatial intelligence, but that there werestill some glitches in the program, so oc-casionally the correct answer would ap-pear on the screen. The students wereinstructed to immediately hit the spacebar to clear the answer. Unbeknownst tothem, the answer's appearance was notaccidental. We were timing how long ittook for students to hit the space bar, sowe had a way to measure whether or notthe students were cheating on the test.Students were left alone in a room dur-ing the task, but one group was told a"ghost story" beforehand—that a gradu-ate student invoK'ed in the study haddied suddenly, and sightings of his ghosthad recently been reported in the testingroom. A second group of students wasgiven an "in memoriam" statement atthe end of the test instructions, indicat-ing that the test was dedicated to thedead student, but they were not told theghost story. A third group of studentswas not told either of these stories. Wefound that students who were told theghost story hit the space bar significantlyfaster than the other two groups, resist-ing the opportunity to cheat on the task.

So how does all this connect back toGod and suffering? If it were evolution-arily advantageous for human beings tobelieve that omnipotent deities wouidpunish them if they did wrong, theywould always do right. It's possible thathuman logic might have then flippedthis around, so that people began to be-

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Figure 7. Across cultures and distances, people see messages fromsupematural agents. In a festival, Bavarians dress as demons to protectagainst evil spirits (top left). In India, women pray to appease a seagoddess they believe caused the 2004 tsunami (top right). In Pennsylva-nia, a statue depicts Padre Pio, who was said to have bleeding stigmata(bottom left). In the United States, conflicting beliefs fuel debates oversexual orientation (bottom right). (Pbotograph at bottom right reprintedby permission of Repent America, wTvw.RepentAmeHca.com.)

lieve by extension that if they do not dowrong, the supematural being will notpunish them. In other words, they be-lieve that they have a "social contract"with the deity, who must adhere to theserules. Indeed, tliis belief has become soingrained that if misfortune occurs, somecultures take this to mean that the personhas done some unknown wrong.

Signs from BeyondIf human beings have evolved to believethat dead agents are watching them, itwould not be surprising to find thatthey are looking for messages from theirobservers, perhaps as reminders thatthey are indeed under surveillance. Andit turns out that communing with thedead does come with well-oiled ease formost people. Granted, it's an ambigu-ous and one-sided conversation, but

for many, the environment is filled withsigns from the great beyond.

Cognitive psychology has some ex-planations for this behavior as well. Ithjms out that understanding the "mes-sages" of unseen agents is directly re-lated to how we comprehend the mindsof other human beings. Consider, forinstance, that one day all human beingsbecame hard-core solipsists (a philoso-phy that denies the existence of otherminds). Imagine, say, that everyone wasstruck down with autism or otherv\'iselost the capacity to think about otherminds, what would happen then? I'dventure that church attendance wouldreach an all-time low next Sunday. Herethen is one key ingredient for belief inGod or spirits: an innate disposition tosee others not just as ambulant objects orbrain-dead sacks of meat, but as think-

ing, feeling beings that, just like oneself,are causal agents who do things inten-tionally. Once children are able to reasonabout the mental lives of others, devel-opmental psychologists refer to them aspossessing a tlieory of mind.

People and animals behave throughtheir actions, whereas God is believedto "behave" through \'arious events. Forexample. New Orleans mayor Ray Na-gin recently made comments—whichhe later retracted—suggesting that Hur-ricane Katrina was God's wake-up callto African-Americans about rampanturban violence: "Surely God is mad atAmerica. Surely He's not approving ofus being in Iraq under false preter\se. Butsurely He's upset at black America, also.We're not taking care of ourselves."

In the case of people or deities, we ap-peal to other minds to explain and pre-

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diet behaviors, to understand why oth-ers do what they do. Whether you admitit or not, just like the rest of us, you'veprobably asked yourself the question,"Why me?" If you've answered this bysaying "Things happen for a reason,"then you're using your everyday socialpsychology to think about God.

I've experienced firsthand this phe-nomenon of finding supematural mes-sages in everyday events. The morningafter my mother died, my siblings and Iwere sitting in her living rtxim, emotion-ally drained and drowned in our grief.Just then, the wind chimes outside mymother's window started to sound. Welooked at one another, and I, the familyskeptic, knew exactly what was goingtlirough everyone's heads: "That's her!She's telling us not to worry!" I knew be-cause I was thinking precisely the samething. How strange: Although 1 didn'tbelieve in the afterlife, I still couldn'thelp but make such automatic infer-ences about my dead mother's attemptsto commimicate with me.

From an experimental psychologist'sperspective, this was very inspiring. Theability to see natural events as symbolicshould also bootstrap on stages of cog-nitive development such as a growingability to read intentions and desires ofothers. So, naturally, 1 decided to invitemy mother's ghost into my laboratory tosee how children of different ages wouldrespond to her antics.

For the sake of the children {andtheir parents) I had to alter my moth-er's identity somewhat, calling her"Princess Alice" rather than my "DeadMother Alice," and telling them thatshe was a friendly magic princess whocould make herself invisible. Also, myresearch assistants had to give her ahelping hand in her attempts to com-municate, rigging a picture with a mag-netic device so that it would fall "unex-pectedly" to the ground, and affixing aremote control adapter to a table lampso that it would "spontaneously" flashon and off during the experiment.

Figure 8. In an experiment designed to deter-mine wbether cbildren will see supernaturalmessages in everyday events, children weretold that a magic, invisible princess wouldsomebow tell tbem if tbey cbose tbe box thatdid not contain the ball (a). Once the cbil-dren seiected a box (b), the princess's picturewas made to fall off the wall. Only tbe oldestchildren in the study interpreted the picturefalling as a message from the princess andchanged their selection of boxes as a result (c)(see Figure 9 for results).

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Figure 9. Only the oldest cbildren wbo weretold tbe story of Princess Alice (experimental)saw the picture falling as a message fromPrincess Alice that they had made the wrongchoice in a guessing game. Children in anyage group who were not told any story (con-trol) did not switch their choice.

After being told that Princess Alicewould help them play a game, in whichthey were to guess the location of a ballhidden inside one of two boxes, "by tell-ing you, somehow, when you pick thewrong box," only the oldest children inthe study, the seven-year-olds, chose theopposite box in response to the unex-pected events. One of these second grad-ers even thought that the bell chiming inthe nearby uruversity clock tower wasPrincess Alice "talking" to him. The five-year-olds, too, thought it was PrincessAlice doing these things, but they didn'tsee any communicative attempts in theevents (maybe she thought the picturejust kx)ked better on the ground?), andso they stuck with their initial choice.They could detect agency, but not mean-ing, Ln the unexpected events. The three-year-olds only shrugged their shoulders,or gave physicai explanations for theevents, such as the picture not beingsticky enough to stay on the door.

Unlike the puppet-show study, thechildren here were more susceptibleto attributing abilities to supematuralagents because in this case, it requiredthat they had developed cognitively tohave what's called second-order reasoning.They had to be able to understand that"Alice knows that I don't know wherethe ball is" in order to be susceptible tothe "hidden messages."

So, just what was my mother tryingto tell me from beyond the grave, any-how? Although it's open for debate, Iinterpreted her message as follows:When combined with a cognitively ripe

enough mind, and when the emotionalclimate is just right, there is no shapethat evidence cannot assume in order totempt the most recalcitrant of skeptics.In the words of one such wide-eyed littledisbeliever who had just seen the lightsinexplicably flicker: "I thought invisiblewas just make-believe; maybe it is real!"

Some investigators, such as JustinBarrett of the Institute of Cognition andCulture in Belfast and Scott Atran of theUniversity of Michigan, theorize thatthere are evolutionarily advantageousreasons for such a ready susceptibilityto believing that any activity in the en-vironment was actively caused by somekind of agent. It is better for children tomistake a branch falling in the forcst fora predator than it is for tliem to misinter-pret signs of danger as a product of theweather, for instance. Such In/pervigihmccmechanisms kept people alert and ready,but they may also make them overlyinclined to attribute a natural event assome kind of intentional act.

Increasing ImpactIt is clear that when it comes to the bigquestions in life, our brains have evolvedso that science eludes us but religioncomes naturally. There are still manypieces to fill in on the hig picture of hu-man cognitive evolution as it relates tosupernatural beliefs. But I helieve thatthis area of research could have a posi-tive impact on society. Bringing such dis-cussions into a context where they couldbe understood by a large range of peoplecould have immense benefits in decreas-ing the divide that many people feel sep-arates science from everyday life.

There are a number of scholars cur-rently working on novel evolutionarytheories of religion, but there are also alot of exciting discoveries taking placein this field that have yet to strike theright chord with the educated public.I recently taught a graduate seminaron this topic by starting off with Boy-er's excellent book. Religion Explained,which uses numerous anthropologicalexamples to accoimt for the origins ofreligious thought. One student toldme, "It's all good in theory, and may-be it does explain religion, but I can'tsee what it has to do with nn/ belief inGod." Although it is absolutely criticalto study a variety of cultures and differ-ent species if one aims to illustrate thecommonalities of behavior across seem-ingly diverse groups, researchers in thisarea should increasingly begin talkingabout God and Western souls rather

than, for instance, the ancestral spiritsof the Tupi peoples, or the concept ofevil among the Igbo of Nigeria.

If one could answer what have tradi-tionally been solely philosophical ques-tions using testable means and place theresults in a plausible theoretical context,areas that have historically been out ofbounds for scientists could be rightfullyclaimed hy psychological science. De-spite the social quagmire surroundingall things religious, the rigorous studyof supernattiral beliefs could be neces-sary for a complete understanding ofhuman cognitive development. 1 believethat these new applications of cognitivescience are particularly important to hu-man understanding. Perhaps this fieldof experimental research has the poten-tial to teach us—with minimal humanbias—how we really, truly fit as indi-vidual "souls" in this world.

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For relevant Web links, consult thisissue of American Sdentist Online.

http://wwvtf.americanscientist.Qrg/lssueTOC/issue/821

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