Why We Get Riveted
I’ve described the basics of compellingness foundations theory, explaining, in turn, how each foundation of compellingness contributes to our understanding of the myriad things we find riveting. It’s easy to cherry pick evidence to support these ideas, so I took care to report any counterevidence I discovered. Now that we have reviewed the foundations, we can ask again: why do we get riveted?
Culture affects preference. But I hope that this book has persuaded you that evolution has had some influence. Evolutionary explanations themselves are really compelling—people tend to give evolutionary explanations more credibility than they should: people find genetic explanations immutable, determined, and natural.1 This is one reason many psychologists detest psychology based on evolutionary thinking—it’s easy to come up with evolutionary explanations of behavior, and the media and public often will uncritically accept explanations that weren’t scientifically tested. Because of this tendency we should exhibit extra care when evaluating evolutionary claims. Even if there is empirical evidence for a genetic influence, for example, we should ask how much influence is there? Answering that question is always complicated. Because many of these explanations involve evolutionary reasoning, it’s important to understand the complex ways evolution has affected humans and human behavior. The idea that evolution simply affects our genes, which in turn affect behavior, is too simple. The truth is more nuanced—culture can affect genes, as when the cultural tendency to drink milk in northern Europe resulted in people genetically changing so that they could digest milk into adulthood. It was the culture’s desire to drink milk that made the ability to digest it a force of natural selection.
I have discussed the arts mostly as a by-product of other evolutionary adaptations. That is, we like art because it satisfies desires that were evolved for something else. But it does not explain particularly well why people are driven to make art.
The creation of art involves expense. It requires free time, material resources, energy, hand-eye coordination, intelligence, creativity, and occasionally risk. It could be that art serves as an indicator of an adaptive trait, much like the male peacock’s tail is an indication of its health and ability to acquire resources, or the reason we find lustrous hair on a woman attractive. They are called “fitness indicators.” The hair itself might not help you survive, but it might help you reproduce. Similarly, it could be that the artistic ability of a person informs mate choice, as believed by every bassist who joins a band to pick up girls. Artistic ability predicts access to resources, and to some extent it also predicts intelligence. The higher your IQ is, the more creative you are, but only up to 120: having a higher IQ than this does not predict even more creativity.2
It is also an intriguing thought that artistic production might be an evolved trait in itself, and that art might be an “extended phenotype,” much like a beaver dam or a bower bird’s bower. Another possibility is that we have an instinct to create art to increase group cohesion, an argument put forward by anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake. Art that is communally made can draw people together. Interestingly, psychologist Jonathan Haidt and others have argued that religion evolved for the same reason.3
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What can the foundations of compellingness tell us about celebrity worship? Our fascination with celebrities—be they politicians, athletes, or artists of various kinds—is a curious phenomenon. It is clear that in arts and sports, we have a love for virtuosity. One reason is that when we see virtuosity, we see something rare, perhaps something we’ve never seen before. We remember unusual things better.
Second, we might find celebrities inspiring. One study by psychologist Jaye Derrick found that psychology students with low self-esteem felt closest to those celebrities who were similar to their ideal images of themselves.4 In our evolutionary history, highly variable environments favor an imitative strategy, because genetic evolution and learning how to do things all by yourself requires too much time. Imitating successful people is a great strategy, even though it can lead to perplexing fads and weird haircuts. Perhaps this is the reason there appears to be more celebrity worship in the young. They have more to learn and thus are drawn more to role models. This also explains why we like to see incredible failure. Rubberneckers have always looked at accidents, and in the Internet age “fail” videos (often of people getting hurt doing something dangerous) are very popular.
A third, related hypothesis that would apply to displays of physical skill is that we find it pleasurable to imagine ourselves doing what we are watching. Recall that, when watching dance, the motor areas of the brain are active. It could be that when we see someone do something amazing, we are, in our minds, doing it ourselves, and this is thrilling.
Fourth, our love for celebrities might be another ramification of positive contagion. Maybe we think that something good will “rub off” on us by being close to greatness.5 Of course, we observe most virtuosity on screen, but because most of our brain cannot tell the difference between representations and reality, the same greatness detector goes off in either case.
A related concept is that of “costly signaling.” The idea behind this is that obvious impediments to your survival are attractive because you must be fit indeed to be able to survive with such a handicap (“If he can live with that impediment, he must be strong!”). The peacock’s tail is a great example of this—if a male can grow a huge, healthy tail in spite of the fact that it makes him more vulnerable to predators and requires costly nutrition resources, he must be a good peacock to father the peahen’s chicks. This is the handicap principle. Likewise, it could be that personal expense is related to our admiration. Just as conspicuous consumption signals wealth, showing that you have the time and resources to make a costly piece of art can show fitness for reproduction.
Fifth, we might perceive the people we admire as our leaders or we might, subconsciously, want to make them our leaders. If we perceive that we are allied with those we watch, we might feel that our “team” is winning. Male sports fans get a surge of testosterone when their favorite sports team wins, according to a psychological study by Paul Bernhardt.6 A related concept is kin selection. We might feel particularly allied with people with whom we have a genetic overlap. This hypothesis would predict that people enjoy watching virtuosity in people who appear to be like us (e.g., the same race, hair color, or build) more than virtuosity in people unlike us. This is the same reason we are proud of our children when they do something wonderful—it feels good to us because it is an indicator of survival and reproductive fitness. To a lesser degree, we should have more care for nonfamily members who share more of our genes than for nonfamily members with whom we have no genetic overlap.
An interesting question is why we often do not feel the need to compete with people who display virtuosity. Recall the relative social status hypothesis: we will not feel in competition with people who are much higher or lower than we are in the perceived social hierarchy.
The relative-social-status hypothesis also predicts that, as in gossip, news stories about other people will be most compelling when they are about people lower than we are (on the social ladder) improving their lives, or about people higher than we are having some downfall. Poor people getting poorer appeals to our sense of danger, but not to our interest in our own place in the social hierarchy.
Many of us are hooked on the news. News agencies know that putting a “human face” on a “story” makes it sell. This practice reflects our desires to know about other people, preferably in some narrative form. Even stock market changes will be cast as “agentive,” that is, as though the stock was an agent capable of making decisions.
Should people follow the news? Some activities are pleasurable and doing them is inherently rewarding. Others are difficult to do, but pay off with happiness or pleasure in the future. Some other things are important to do, even if you never get much from it. I worry that news has none of the characteristics that make something worthwhile. It’s not fun, it causes anxiety, it gives you a warped sense of reality, and people who watch it are rarely going to do anything with the information they get. For most people, watching the news is like sharpening a saw that they will never use to cut anything.
So why do people watch it? Its sensational nature makes it feel important when it’s really not.
News reporters are often good storytellers. If someone is an excellent writer or a superb speaker, our guard will be down. Beautiful ideas are not always true, and when we encounter a compelling idea, we must take care.
The flip side of this is that just because someone is a terrible writer or speaker does not mean that he or she is wrong. This is a particular problem with nonnative speakers of any language, whose often poorer communication skills make their ideas seem unworthy. Use extra caution with the talented and be more generous with those lacking in rhetorical and linguistic skills.
Just as familiar ancient myths are known today because they were good enough to be copied and retold again and again, religious stories, ideas, and practices also survive because they are compelling. One of my goals of this book is to explain why we find religious and paranormal ideas riveting. It is my belief that supernatural beliefs are false, and the science backs that up. But some skeptics would have you believe that no well-conducted scientific studies have ever found evidence of the paranormal. This is wrong for a couple of reasons. First, anything that is repeatedly found to exist because of scientific studies is no longer considered paranormal, for example, hypnotism. Second, even for some paranormal phenomenon that does not exist, some percentage of studies will find statistically significant results nevertheless. This is an unavoidable consequence of using statistics in science.
There is variety in all psychological measures. This is why we use statistics. The scientist might have gotten a sample that was not representative of the group. For example, some children know more than some adults. How does the scientist know that her study, which found that adults know more than children, wasn’t due to having a weird sample, or, in other words, due to chance? When you hear a scientist report that there is a “significant” difference between two groups, it means that the differences observed are unlikely to be due to chance. Scientists set a threshold, say 1 percent. In this case if the statistics show that there is a 99 percent probability that the effect observed was not due to chance, then the study has “significant” results.
However, this means that one out of every hundred studies conducted will have significant results even if there is no effect at all, because the scientist set a 1 percent threshold for significance! This happens for the same reason as why a test that is 99 percent accurate will give an inaccurate result 1 percent of the time. To return to the paranormal, for every 100 well-conducted studies on clairvoyance (the ability to “see” what’s not visible with the eyes), we would expect one of those studies to come out with results that support clairvoyance. If a scientist runs 100 studies, she will likely only submit the one that found significance for publication, and never submit the rest—this is science’s “file drawer problem.”
The file drawer problem is amplified by the publication bias of journals to publish only significant results. So what ends up happening is that the few paranormal studies that actually find significance (the 1 percent that were due to chance) get published and the ones that fail don’t get accepted by the journal—if they get submitted at all. So if you read the literature, it might look like the paranormal is real!
All that is to say that the existence of a single study is not sufficient to prove that some effect is real (this applies to all science, not just those studies investigating the paranormal). What is needed are studies that find the same results over and over, and can be replicated by other scientists. Studies of paranormal phenomena fail in this regard, which is why scientists don’t believe in the paranormal.
Just as paranormal ideas have foundations of compellingness working in their favor, we have a great many biases working against our believing the scientific alternatives. Many well-supported scientific theories violate common sense. They might violate the common beliefs of a particular culture (one society believes that kids won’t learn to walk unless they are buried up to their waists in a standing position7), but also might violate things everybody believes. This is particularly true for things that are not medium sized (in this context, anything bigger than a flea but smaller than a planet is considered medium sized. Nonmedium-sized objects work according to rules that dominate at subatomic, atomic, or astronomical scales). Elementary particles can be in two places at once. Events happen without cause. Such things are hard to swallow, even for physicists. I still have to remind myself, watching a sunset, that it is the earth that’s moving, because we can’t feel the motion.
We evolved to make sense of the world we were in, and what I mean by “world” is what Richard Dawkins calls the Middle World, the set of objects we directly interact with. Our solar system is not a part of the evolutionary world of our ancestors in the same way that a forest is not a part of the smaller world of an earthworm. In both cases, these larger worlds were not relevant to the business of survival and reproduction. We evolved to understand the regularities in our world, and only recently (and by recently here I mean the last few thousand years or so) have we tried to understand things outside of the world we live in day to day. Unfortunately for democratic societies and science education, this world beyond—the very big, the very tiny, the very slow or fast—can be a little weird. Our minds just are not set up to understand it.8 Our intuitions about many things end up being wildly off. For example, imagine that our solar system was shrunk down so that the sun had the diameter of about half a meter (about the length from your elbow to your fingertips on one arm). At this scale, how far away from the sun would the earth be, and how big would it be? Take a guess before looking to the note for the answer.9 If you’re like most people, you find it very hard to accurately estimate very large and very small distances. Things we don’t understand well don’t “stick.”
Not “sticking” is just one of the problems that all ideas, religious ones included, must face in the marketplace of ideas. Another is simply communication—successful ideas have to be able to be efficiently communicated from one person to another over time. This is only possible with the successful religions of the world because they take advantage of systems of understanding that our minds already have. In religions the world over, gods and other supernatural creatures are often depicted with fangs and teeth, and have the power to protect or destroy us. Thinking of a god and people as being in a predator-prey relationship is something that makes sense to us; we don’t need to read whole books to grasp the basic idea.10 We hear brief descriptions and basically get it. Not so with quantum physics. Our minds, based on brains that evolved to understand what we can see and touch, fight to reject scientific explanations that violate our common sense, opening the door to false explanations that better fit with our preconceptions.
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Although belief in the paranormal and in traditional religion is not the same thing, a survey by psychologist Karl Peltzer showed that belief in one often predicts belief in the other.11 Religion is an extraordinary thing. Every culture has it. Even if you don’t like the word religion and think it’s too vague to mean anything, as anthropologist and cognitive scientist Scott Atran says,
In every society known, there is: 1. widespread counterfactual belief in supernatural agents (gods, ghosts, goblins, etc.) 2. hard-to-fake public expressions of costly material commitments to supernatural agents, that is, sacrifice (offerings of goods, time, other lives, one’s own life, etc.) 3. a central focus of supernatural agents on dealing with people’s existential anxieties (death, disease, catastrophe, pain, loneliness, injustice, want, loss, etc.) 4. ritualized and often rhythmic coordination of 1, 2, and 3, that is, communion (congregation, intimate fellowship, etc.).12
The academic discipline of religious studies is dedicated to understanding religion. Its value, and indeed whether or not the very existence of religion is a good or bad thing for the world, is a current matter of great debate in religious studies.
Trying to explain why we have religion is difficult in part because many people believe that they already know the answer (typically, people think it’s because it makes people happy or provides explanations for life’s mysteries). They suffer from “premature curiosity satisfaction.”13 Both of these oft-mentioned explanations have truth to them, in many cases, but it’s much more complicated than that.
We are attracted to religion for many of the same reasons we are attracted to the arts and other ideas. But aren’t there differences between fictional characters and gods, for example? Atran wants to know why some people believe in Vishnu but nobody believes in Mickey Mouse.14 This is an important question, but I think it’s telling that at one time many people believed wholeheartedly in the god Thor, but now he’s basically Mickey Mouse—a cartoon superhero. What made Thor compelling as a god in the past also makes him a compelling cartoon character in the present.
There are differences, of course, in that there are lots of people who actually believe that Vishnu exists, but (I would hope) nobody believes that Mickey Mouse exists. Atran believes that cognitive theories cannot “in principle” distinguish the two, but it seems clear to me that some of the benefits of religion (providing explanation, comfort, etc.) only come if people believe in it. Muslims might find it interesting that some Mormons believe that they will become gods of their own planet after they die.15 For nonbelievers such a belief is interesting in the way that Mickey Mouse is. But you will not find this a hopeful thought for your future unless you actually believe those ideas. A cognitive reason for why Mickey Mouse is different from the belief in angels is that believing in Mickey Mouse does not appear to confer the same benefits to a person that believing in an afterlife does.
When you indicate that you believe a statement, religious or otherwise, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is particularly active, according to neuroscientist Sam Harris. This area is associated with emotions, rewards, and self-representation. This is the same for Christians and nonbelievers, supporting the idea that religious beliefs are believed the same way as other beliefs are.16 Indeed, the causes of peoples’ beliefs in religion are also the cause of other beliefs, be they scientific or superstitious.
The majority of people in the Western world believe in God. Even 40 percent of scientists are believers.17 One of the most striking things about religious belief is its pervasive anthropomorphism. That is, religion tends to personify things that modern science sees as impersonal objects or forces. This is explained by the social compellingness hypothesis, which holds that we have a built-in desire to find social relationships important. Explanations couched in terms of conflicting personalities are compelling for the same aesthetic reasons that good stories are compelling. They resonate with our minds, and we are more likely to believe them.
Even beliefs that do not personify natural forces often have something directly to do with people, either in their ability to heal us, hurt us, reincarnate, etc. We tend not to have religious beliefs about things that have nothing whatever to do with human beings. In contrast, there are lots of scientific theories that have nothing to do with people.
The autism spectrum quotient (AQ), which I discussed in chapter 1, is probably a decent indicator of how much you think in terms of people and their relationships. If you have a low AQ, you are probably more likely to believe in gods and other supernatural beings, and use them to make sense of the world around you.
In a way I feel bad for humanity. We are wired to relate everything to ourselves, and science has shown that the vast majority of the goings-on of the universe have nothing whatever to do with human goals. As science understands more of our universe, it whittles away at human prominence in the grand scheme of things.
Our desire to believe what we hope is true makes our minds fertile soil for ideas that allow us to believe that death is not the end. It helps us deal with our sorrow at the loss of loved ones, and also any anxiety we might have about our own deaths. But not all visions of an afterlife are rosy. The belief in ghosts is usually rather negative, as is the ancient Greek vision of afterlife in the underworld. However, many afterlife beliefs are relatively positive and involve a sense of justice (such as Christian ideas of heaven and hell and Hindu ideas of reincarnation) that further draws us in, because justice makes us happy. We like to see the good rewarded and the bad punished, and too often affairs in the real world don’t work out that way. We should not let our hope that the world is just interfere with our compassion.
We appear to have an innate idea of psychological continuity, the belief that certain mental states persist after death. This might be a side effect of person permanence, which allows us to know that people do not cease to exist when they are not physically present and are “out of sight.” These characteristics might have been a factor in the origin of beliefs about the afterlife.
We know some things about the areas of the brain that are involved with various forms of religious experience. The left hemisphere, for example, appears to tie our experiences into narratives, representing experience in terms of languagelike representations. When the left hemisphere is quieted, by, for example, a stroke or meditation, we can consciously experience the right hemisphere’s view of the world, which is more holistic, contextual, and uninterpreted. The quieting of the parietal lobe appears to have similar effects—feelings of being one with the universe and a loss of a sense of self.
Many of the so-called miracles of religious history would be considered psychotic experiences today. The Buddha (or his followers, anyway) claimed he was tortured by the demons of Mara the night before his enlightenment. Jesus emerged from the desert after, supposedly, meeting with Satan.
There are drugs (and perhaps Koren helmets—see chapter 5) that can induce experiences that are often interpreted as having religious significance.18 As tempting as it might be for a skeptic to view these findings as evidence of the illegitimacy of the metaphysical beliefs supporting these interpretations, the view is ill advised. Does finding the brain areas associated with revelatory experiences mean that interpretations of them as supernatural are incorrect? No. Interpreting the findings that way would be to assume that any experience of a god must not involve our brain, which is a hard position to defend. There are brain explanations for why we see peanut butter, but from that we would be unwise to conclude that peanut butter doesn’t exist. Just because I can make you experience light by pressing on your eyelids in a dark room does not cast doubt on the existence of light when perceived normally.
However, we should doubt certain interpretations of experiences if we have reason to believe that those interpretations are caused by something evolved or learned for something else entirely. When you talk on the phone to an automated system, you might get frustrated and angry and raise your voice when speaking to it. Talking on the phone is a social communication intended for dealing with other human beings, but we are applying it to a very simple computer system that (at the time of this writing, anyhow) cannot usefully perceive a caller’s anger. We act like we are speaking to a real person because we’re talking on the phone. What is happening here is that our perceptual system, evolved to recognize what it sounds like to talk to someone, is being activated by a machine. In this case, the perception is wrong. There is no person there. Likewise, if the reason we are interpreting a revelatory experience as supernatural is being caused by, say, an overactive theory of mind, we would have reason to doubt an interpretation of that experience as involving a god.
What these ideas also cast doubt upon are interpretations of some individual experiences. If someone has a revelatory experience that was caused by drugs, we can doubt interpreting it as being religiously significant for the same reason we doubt our natural interpretations of optical illusions and hallucinations. As the atheist joke goes, believing your own hallucinations is mental illness; believing other people’s is religion.
Personally, I believe that even these experiences for which we know of no physical cause do not warrant religious interpretation. We should not take religious experience as indicating something fundamental about the nature of the universe as a whole. We should take religious experience as telling us something about us.
People can have strange experiences, possibly induced by meditation, singing, ritual, or drugs, and people interpret those experiences according to their beliefs and culture. They misinterpret a psychological phenomenon as a divine experience. For example, the near-death experience appears to be a cross-cultural phenomenon, although the content tends to differ according to culture. Religious individuals are more likely to have spiritual interpretations of it. This supports the attributionist theory of religion—that when we undergo a strange experience, we interpreted it in a way that fits with our cultural beliefs. Of course the person undergoing the experience is unaware of this and uses the experience as further evidence for the beliefs he or she already has. One group, the Emil Society, even interprets falling asleep during church lectures to be a sign of religious experience!19
What’s happening can be understood with the old and new brain distinction. Unconscious processes “believe” one thing and at the same time your more logical processes might “believe” another. When you find yourself in this state, there’s no reason to worry that you’re being contradictory. When you look at an optical illusion that appears to be moving even when it’s not, you’re in the same state—your old visual processes detect motion; your new processes know it’s not there.
Experiences of possession and trance are partly due to brain malfunctions that disable our conscious connection to the motor control of our bodies. This might happen in schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities), and in somatoparaphrenia (denying the ownership of a limb or entire side of one’s own body). Often interpretations of these experiences are informed by one’s culture: hearing voices means an FBI chip is implanted in the head, or partial paralysis is attributed to a demon possession (this interpretation is called the delusion of passivity). There is also evidence suggesting that people report possession to describe shameful and all-too-real experiences such as rape.
Just as many metaphysical religious beliefs might have originated with the ideas of schizotypals, many of the rituals we see in religions might have started with people with obsessive-compulsive (OCD) spectrum disorders. Orthodox religions are replete with food and body cleansing, repetition of mantras, numerology, and rules about how to enter and leave places. It could be that people with OCD-spectrum problems become religious leaders: leaders are often the most fervent followers of religious rituals. Martin Luther might be retroactively diagnosed with some variant of OCD, having written “the more you cleanse yourself, the dirtier you get.”20 However, it doesn’t matter what religious belief or ritual somebody makes up if it does not conform to people’s preexisting tendencies to find certain kinds of things riveting. Some ideas just don’t take.
People who have tendencies toward obsessive-compulsive symptoms will be drawn to religious traditions and practices that dovetail with their symptoms, as evidenced by the fact that Catholics tend to have more OCD symptoms than Protestants.
It might sound implausible that people would listen carefully to and follow the religious ideas of the mentally ill. But their strange behaviors can be interpreted as divine intervention. Take, for example, work from anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse, which describes the case of Wapei, a man in Papua New Guinea. He experienced a violent trembling fit and had a vision of Jesus returning to his land, along with Wapei’s ancestors (reincarnated as Caucasians) bringing Western goods with them. This experience resulted in a short-lived cult called Noise. People believed him not so much because of what he said but because of the trembling that accompanied it.21
Another Papua New Guinea man started gesturing as though he could not speak. The others interpreted his gestures, encouraged by his smiles, as religious revelation. This was the beginning of yet another cult, this one called the Ghost cult. We know that it was his apparent inability to speak that sparked it, because the things he was communicating were not significantly different from the things the community had heard every day in religious services.
People often don’t understand mental illness or the behaviors that accompany it. They confabulate explanations, and it’s easy to confabulate a religious explanation when mental illnesses so often go hand in hand with religious experiences.
The circle becomes vicious, because the very contents of people’s hallucinations contain elements that are compelling to the rest of us: primal imagery such as the dead and snakes, and feelings of power and moral certitude. New religions don’t get started based on Pokémon or cars.
The same is true with ritual: the rituals that the OCD-spectrum religious originators came up with match pretty well with the day-to-day OCD tendencies many people have. They resonate with our minds. They’re compelling. People claim that their religious rituals give life meaning.
Temporal-lobe epilepsy is another brain disorder that might have been a factor in the origin of certain religious beliefs and practices. People who have it tend to be solitary, humorless, and rigid in their ways, and shy away from new experiences. They also tend to have hypergraphia, which is a compulsion to write, and an interest in religious subjects. Although such people might not be particularly religious, hyperreligiosity is a feature of some types of temporal-lobe epilepsy. Their seizures involve seeing colors and an intensified emotional experience, and sometimes euphoria, particularly with religious words and imagery. Stimulating the temporal lobe can cause a seizure or trigger hallucinations of paranormal phenomena. The experience of epilepsy can cause permanent changes to the temporal lobe. One can imagine how someone interested in religion and with a compulsive tendency to write could interpret the seizure as a religious experience and write about it, possibly changing the course of religious history. In fact, some neurologists suspect that Saint Paul himself had temporal-lobe epilepsy.22 Hallucinations from schizophrenia and temporal-lobe epilepsy might have inspired aspects of Islam and Mormonism in historical figures such as Muhammad and Joseph Smith. Drug-induced hallucinations are a part of many Native American traditions. There is reason to think that Joan of Arc also had temporal-lobe epilepsy.23
Some characters in myth and folklore might be based on archetypal personalities related to mental problems. For example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might be the origin of the trickster character that seems to turn up in stories around the world (e.g., Anansi, Br’er Rabbit, the coyote).24
I’ve described how people with mental illnesses might have been implicated in the origin of religions and how certain mental illnesses might be a factor in making or keeping someone religious. But we don’t need to go that far. Altered states of mind, not extreme enough to be considered an illness, play a crucial role in many world religions.
Whitehouse compared religious beliefs and practices indigenous to Papua New Guinea to the Christian practices in the same place after missionary involvement.25 He differentiates ways of spreading and maintaining religion as either “doctrinal” versus “imagistic.” You are probably familiar with the doctrinal way, because it is the primary means used by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It is characterized by sacred texts, a logical explanatory structure, beliefs that can be expressed and communicated with language, and repetitive, often daily, ritual. Sound familiar?
Religions that focus on the imagistic way have very infrequent, emotionally powerful rites. These rites are often horrifying, and can involve beating, years of isolation, pain, and sleep deprivation. Some people do not even survive them. These rites of terror result in realizations and experiences about the nature of the world that are difficult, and sometimes even taboo, to talk about with other people. In precolonial Melanesian fertility cults, for example, talking about the meanings of religious symbolism was punishable by death. These experiences and the meanings they generate for a person are unique, and often are remembered for a lifetime. You just have to experience them for yourself to understand.
Contrast this way of learning about one’s religion by sitting and listening to someone read from the Bible week after week, which relies less on a powerful experience and more on an intellectual understanding of the material. Although science is often pitted against religions like Christianity, science and these religions are similar in that they both feature knowledge structures that endeavor to be internally consistent, and both provide lots of answers delivered through language. This is quite different from gaining an understanding imagistically of, say, the relationship between the pigs, the birds, and your people that you got during an unforgettable rite of terror you experienced when you were twelve years old, one that involved mystery, extreme sensory stimulation, and mortal danger. It’s not that religions like Christianity are purely doctrinal, it’s that the doctrinal way is the most common method they use. Even primarily doctrinal religions can enter phases of imagism, as certain charismatic churches do when people speak in tongues.
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Religions can be thought of as sets of ideas—about the nature of the universe, how things should be done, etc. Like other aspects of culture, religious ideas spread, or don’t spread, based on a number of factors.
Because the religions we tend to hear about are the ones that are the most popular, it is easy to think that they are representative of religion in general. The religions people are most familiar with are Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism—the “big five.” However, there are far more than five religions in the world today. Depending on how finely you categorize them, there are hundreds or thousands (one estimate is 4200), and many, many more if you look over the course of human history and include religions that are no longer practiced.
There are too few comparativists in religious studies. The top five religions are so huge that they describe families of sects that we further subcategorize. Nevertheless, the fact that religions not in the top five get studied so much less is a great disservice to the scholarly pursuit of knowledge about religion.
The focus on the big five is a mistake, perhaps most crucially because characteristics of most religions prevent them from becoming wildly popular, resulting in a skewed view of religion in general. One reason is that all the top five are primarily doctrinal and in that sense similar. For a religion to spread all over the world, it must have special characteristics of its own, and these characteristics make it unlike the less popular religions and to that extent uncharacteristic of religion in general.
Because imagistic means are individualized, as a religion spreads it can change greatly from town to town. One of the reasons why doctrinal religions have spread so successfully is that sacred texts can be copied with high fidelity, and intellectualization and language-based practice can enforce uniform interpretations. Indeed, such religions often actively stamp out religious innovation, sometimes through exile or excommunication of the innovators. This powerful combination helped primarily doctrinal religions spread across the world in a way that primarily imagistic religions could not, since, without doctrinal reinforcement the religion would change so much as it passed through different cultures and conditions that it would become unrecognizable as the original religion. This is why all the major religions of the world have scripture, and why the layperson would be forgiven for not even knowing about the ones that did not.
Sociologist Max Weber noticed that even staid doctrinal religions have outbursts of charisma, with a return to primal feelings and evocative ritual involving trance, revelation, and so on.26 Doctrinal religions try to keep heretical outbursts from spreading, because nondoctrinal information is hard to codify and control. But codified, controlled information can be boring, increasing the chances of imagistic phases. Such oscillations have been documented for Islamic, Hindu, Christian, and Buddhist movements.
Many religions have supernatural ideas about very specific things, such as species of plants or animals, or particular mountains. For example, there is a Sudanese cult that believes that a certain species of tree, the ebony tree, can overhear conversations conducted in its shadows, and that these conversations can be extracted with particular rituals.27 Think about how this might go over in places without ebony trees. Likewise, if a particular mountain must be climbed, then followers of the religion must be within a certain geographical distance. This too would hinder the spread of the religion. (Islam is rather exceptional in this regard in that it requires a pilgrimage to Mecca. However, there are caveats. The pilgrimage is not required for people who cannot afford it and it is required only once in a lifetime.)
As a result, I would expect that popular religions would culturally evolve to exclude these geography-limiting factors. If they did not, they would be outcompeted by other religions. My theory predicts that the most popular religions would have fewer tenets involving species and location-specific things.
Compelling religious ideas spread for the same reasons other compelling ideas spread. The ideas resonate with people on a deep level. They get repeated and communicated through public discourse. In modern times, mass communication spreads ideas very rapidly. Repeated exposure to their ideas makes them seem more plausible, due to the availability heuristic. When we’re surrounded by people with the same beliefs, we tend to agree with them, due to the bandwagon effect and the herd instinct.
Once ideas are believed, we seek evidence to support those beliefs and interpret ambiguous things we see as supporting evidence. For example, we might see God as responsible for helping someone recover from a disease, but not as the cause of that disease in the first place.
* * *
Recall that evolution (by natural selection) occurs in any medium that has variation, heritability, and selection. New religions constantly pop up. People and groups of people explore the space of possible religions in this way. Thus the variation criterion is fulfilled. Religion is spread by enculturation, usually from parent to child, that is, it is replicated. Most religions, however, fade away. Only some last. That is, they are selected.
It’s clear that people tend to take up the religion of the society around them. However, societies vary regarding how many religions are available to their constituents. In countries where there are lots of religions (or branches of the same religion), people can choose the one that’s best for them. With more choice, people should be more likely to be religious. After all, if they don’t like the dominant religion, they can go next door to another one. And this is exactly what happens. In countries with more religious “competition,” people tend to be more religious. Monopolies impede religious markets just as they do nonreligious ones.28 It should be noted that it’s not clear from these particular findings whether religiosity causes competition or vice versa. The freedom of religion that Americans enjoy is one explanation that has been offered for why Americans are more religious than their European counterparts—it’s not that there’s something fundamentally different about Americans, it’s just that there is more religious choice in the United States.
If there is evolution happening for religions, we would expect that, just as in animals, certain traits that are good for a religion’s survival would be common in successful religions. There are other traits, such as the prohibition of having children, which are so bad for the replication of a religion that no successful religions have them.
Various scholars have come up with some good hypotheses regarding what some of these traits of successful religions are:
I would suggest that the wilder and less commonsensical are the teachings of the religion, the more likely that religion will be to have the above traits.
* * *
There is a popular belief that religion is a top-down kind of organization. That is, that people get their religious beliefs from religious leaders. But religious leaders (we’ll call them priests for purposes of this discussion) as we know them are, historically, relatively recent. Studies by anthropologists Stephen Sanderson and Wesley Roberts show that societies that do not have writing, that are small, and that use hunting-gathering to get food tend to not have priests, exactly, but shamans, who are distinguished from priests in that they work part-time, often for a fee, and are not considered the final authority on the supernatural world.34
Societies tend to change in a predictable way, going through the same steps in the same order: from egalitarianism, to the differentiation of social status, to having full-time craft specialists, to economic markets, to legal codes. Similarly, as societies change, their religions tend to change too. The order tends to be: shamanistic, communal, polytheistic, and finally monotheistic.
Shamanism is characterized by having shamans as the center of religious practice and conduit to the supernatural, a belief in animism (that objects and animals have spirits, and perhaps that people are descended from animal totems), and a lack of calendrical rites (having to do with seasons). Sixty-two percent of shamanistic societies appear in foraging societies, and 90 percent of them in places with no writing or record keeping. 35
As societies begin to farm, they tend to enter the communal religious phase, characterized by calendrical rites and groups or people (perhaps in addition to shamans) being conduits to the supernatural. This is most common in agricultural societies, and 93 percent of them are in nonliterate societies. The idea is that farming brings about anxieties that hunter-gatherers do not have and that religious rites are created to attenuate them.
When a society gets bigger, it enters the polytheistic phase, with priests and a pantheon of distinct gods. The priests are often in alliance with political leaders.
At some point in the polytheist or monotheist stage, societies become literate. Monotheism is like polytheism, but with a single, usually all-powerful, god. Monotheism is most often found in literate societies with intensive agriculture that uses metal plows. The impact of literacy is great—as the sacred texts get more complicated and incomprehensible over time, the priests are “needed” more and more for interpretation. This monopolization of doctrine helps the priestly class gain power and influence. Priests are only possible in societies rich enough to support people with a full-time religious occupation. The domination of the world by monotheistic religions is a fairly recent phenomenon—only since 600 BCE. There is no agreed-upon explanation for this “monotheistic great leap forward.”
But even in societies with religious leaders, it might be that religious authorities, being more educated about science, will be less prone to some of the more extreme claims of religions. However, religious authorities cannot simply make their followers believe anything they choose. Because the universal themes of religion are innate, religious leaders must temper their intellectual claims to match what people are expecting or else they will be ousted. Perhaps, if people listened to their educated religious leaders more, some kinds of supernatural beliefs would diminish over time.
As we have seen, there are interesting regularities across the religions of the world. Some might see this as a kind of common denominator of an underlying reality, as evidence of the actual nature of the supernatural world. Another way to look at the patterns is that we are all human, with human minds, and the religions that spread and survived are those that our ancestors, and we today, find compelling.
Art and religion work on the mind in similar ways. This is why it is not surprising that religion often uses art explicitly (paintings, songs, dances, etc.) and that we often use old religions that nobody believes in anymore (such as ancient Greek religion) as art. The very stories that the ancients believed were real we now read for entertainment.
The fact that religion changes over time indicates that it, in some sense, “evolves.” But this does not mean that we have a genetic predisposition to have religion, nor does it mean the even stronger claim that religion has been adaptive in our evolutionary history and has been selected for.
* * *
Science and religion have two important things in common.
First, they have generated beliefs that people endorse or reject, and the beliefs of science can be in conflict with those of religion. The facts you learn in school and hear on the news are what most people consider to be “science.” We can say that science and religion both have their own “bodies of knowledge.” Science’s body of knowledge is not universally agreed upon. At the cutting edge of science, there are vigorous debates. Scientists try to come up with tests to show that one hypothesis is better than another. Between scientific fields there is even more disagreement. Cultural anthropologists and behavioral geneticists often have very different scientific views, as do economists and sociologists, even though they might be studying the same phenomena. Although there is a great deal of agreement about what the body of knowledge is, there is disagreement too.
However, the disagreement in science pales in comparison to the divides in the body of knowledge of religion, so much so that it’s hard to justify religion in general has having a body of knowledge. Different religious traditions can have vastly different, mutually contradictory views of the world and will sometimes go to war over them (when it comes to resolving intellectual disagreements, I prefer running experiments to violence, but maybe that’s just my bias as a scientist). Some religions believe that your behavior in this life will determine what kind of creature you will be reincarnated into. Others believe that your soul will live in some parallel world after death. Yet others believe that your ghost will haunt this world for a time and then just vanish. They can’t all be true. I have a friend who majored in religion to find “the common denominator.” Those who seek some kind of underlying truth in all world religions will only find similarities at the grossest, most abstract level, such as “there’s something more out there.” It’s probably best to view religion’s body of knowledge as specific to each religious tradition. When we speak of “science versus religion,” in terms of bodies of knowledge, it makes more sense to speak of science’s body of knowledge versus the body of knowledge of some particular religion.
Second, just like religion, science is more than a collection of beliefs, and both religion and science have a method for generating those beliefs. Anthropologist Pascal Boyer reports that according to the Fang religion, ghosts exist,36 and physics claims that electrons exist, but both enterprises had some means of coming up with those beliefs in the first place, and (often) further justifications for why someone should believe them to be true today. The Fang and physicists have different ways of knowing. Philosophers would say that these are different epistemologies.
I have heard religious apologists attack science’s body of knowledge on the grounds that scientists of the present believe things (and expect us to believe things) that contradict the beliefs of scientists of the past. How can we trust science if its body of knowledge is changing? How do we know that today’s scientists are right?
There are two responses to this critique. First, although a given religion might feel eternal and unchanging, it is certainly not. You can read about any religion that has been studied historically and find out how the accepted beliefs have changed over the years. So any critique of science’s beliefs changing over the years can be equally applied to any religion.
Second, I would think we would have more justification for worry if science didn’t change. There are more scientists working today than ever before. There is still so much that we do not understand about this world. And yes, some things we thought we understood will get replaced with better explanations and theories. This is a strength, not a weakness, of science.
If you look at all the scientific ideas that there ever were, you’d probably have to say that many of them got things wrong, or at the very least not completely right. So the probability of some random scientific idea from all of history being correct is not good. But what about current scientific ideas? Well, even scientists will admit that much of our understanding of how the world works will likely be overturned in the future by better understandings. We just don’t know which ones, nor what they will be replaced with, which makes our understanding of dubious value—the best we can do is to have a general humility. So we continue to believe scientific consensus on a particular issue even though in the back of our minds we know that it might be wrong. This gives some people reason to doubt all of science’s body of knowledge.
So is the epistemology of science better than the epistemology of religion? Scientific practice has its problems, but even so I think the answer is a definite yes. Scientific ideas might start out on equal footing with religious ones, but the beautiful thing about science is that it requires testing. Many scientific theories make predictions in the world, ideally unexpected ones, that anybody can test—and should get the same results. If you fail to get the predicted results, or even if you are the only one who gets the predicted results, science will (eventually) weed that idea out. One thing I’ve learned in being a scientist is that no matter how convinced you are of an idea’s rightness, experimentation gives the universe an opportunity to show you that you are completely wrong. No degree of conviction or even careful reasoning will save you. Science has a self-correcting mechanism built into its epistemology that religion lacks. That is why it is a superior epistemology.
To say that science has a superior epistemology is not to say that everything scientists are saying today is right. Far from it. It is to say, however, that what scientists are saying currently is what is most rational to believe until they come up with something better.37
How do religious beliefs come into existence? The answer is complicated, and I hope that this book has shed some light on how it happens. But to some extent it doesn’t matter. Great scientific ideas can come into existence for silly reasons, as in the apocryphal apple that fell on Newton’s head. What matters is what comes after. How do religious ideas change? Again, I have tried to describe some ways in this book. But religious beliefs don’t change using the same mechanisms as science.
In conclusion, the sciences provide a better epistemology than religions do, and as a result we should put more trust in the scientific body of knowledge than any religious one. If your goal is to believe things that are closer to the truth, science is the way to go.
But truth isn’t everything. If you’re looking to endorse beliefs that will help hold society together (as a result of people believing them), well, even science shows that science doesn’t fare so well.
* * *
Atheists often explain religion as evolutionary cheesecake: we didn’t evolve with cheesecake in our evolutionary environment, but we evolved with other foods that have qualities similar to cheesecake (sugar, fat, etc.). Similarly, some believe, people only find religion compelling because it has elements that we evolved to like for other reasons. Is religion just a function of a bunch of other cognitive quirks that spreads like a mental epidemic? Atheists also typically see religion as irrational. But as psychologist Jonathan Haidt persuasively puts it, they are missing the point of religion.38 For Haidt, “Religion cannot be studied in lone individuals any more than hivishness can be studied in lone bees.” He and others have argued that religion is adaptive for societies because it helps to maintain social order. Indeed, religious people give more to charity, but this might be only because they give more to religious charities. Also, people are more likely to think that supernatural agents have “socially strategic” knowledge of when people break rules, supporting the idea that religion is there to foster group cohesion. According to this view, religion is an innovation (either genetic or cultural or some combination of the two) that promotes order and in-group loyalty that help groups compete with other groups. Human beings appear to be the only animals that will sacrifice themselves for groups of others they are not related to.39
There are some compelling reasons to believe this. Religious people tend to have more children than the nonreligious. In one study of 200 nineteenth-century American intentional communities (communes), Richard Sosis found that after 20 years, only 6 percent of the secular communes were still functioning, in contrast to the 39 percent of the religious communes. The biggest factor in predicting the success of the commune was the number of costly sacrifices people were required to make (e.g., not drinking alcohol, dress codes). The more sacrifices religious communities required, the longer they lasted. Not so for the secular communes, for which there was no correlation between sacrifices and commune longevity. Why? The theory is that religions make the sacrifices feel sacred.40 Some things are done, or believed, and are not subjected to the normal cost-benefit analysis that other decisions are, such as picking which brand of almond butter to buy. According to Sosis and Haidt, by making things sacred, religion solves the inevitable problem communities face: how do you get people who are unrelated to not cheat each other? Members of secular communities, on the other hand, who are more likely to see self-sacrificing gestures in a more tit-for-tat way, will not be as likely to blindly help other people in the commune. Without something to make sacrifice sacred, people will think of most decisions in terms of costs and benefits, and societies (at least the size of communes) will fail.
Even if the atheists are correct that religious beliefs are not rationally justified, an argument could be made that they are practically justified, because it seems that people following religious rules blindly can be good for societal order. As Jonathan Haidt puts it, behaviors that are irrational at an individual level can be thought of as rational at the group level.41 Believing in religious facts might well be irrational, but it seems that these irrational beliefs were the means by which evolution, cultural or otherwise, got us into functioning societies. Creating a secular society is trying to outsmart evolution and, as such, we can expect it to be damn well difficult. (One strange ray of hope shows that thinking about science also makes people exhibit more morally good behavior!) This is not to say that religion is the only way to make people behave well in a community.42 It’s just the one that humans have tended to use for at least 10,000 years.
In this book I’ve discussed religion as though it consists of a set of beliefs and practices that individuals accept or reject, which might be missing the point if the function of religion is to help people get along well in groups. I treat religion as a set of beliefs and practices because no matter what the function of religion is for a society, each individual has to be “sold” on the religion that they are exposed to. The psychological reasons for which they find religion compelling are somewhat independent of the larger societal reasons the religion exists in the first place.
* * *
Well, perhaps religion is good for society but is it good or bad for the individual? Should people be rational all the time, or can belief in things not supported by some combination of science and reason sometimes be beneficial?
I realize that I’m assuming here that believing in religion isn’t rational, which will probably make my religious readers bristle. But note that I’m talking about all religions, not (just) yours. You can’t consistently believe in all religions, nor (I imagine) do my religious readers believe that it is rational for a given individual to believe in whatever religion their family happens to have. Your religion might very well be perfectly rational, but one can’t rationally believe many at the same time, because they are mutually contradictory. So if you’re religious, you can read this book as though I’m not talking about your religion, but one of the thousands of others that have existed now and in the history of humanity.
Back to the subject. Is rationality all it’s cracked up to be? As much as I adore the idea of being rational all the time, there are some instances when being irrational is actually good for you.
Many of these cases involve beliefs about one’s self and one’s abilities. For example, people who have a very realistic view of their abilities have “depressive realism,” which people with clinical depression tend to have. These people are also less prone to the magical thinking of schizotypals described in chapter 3. Being very skeptical about supernatural events correlates with an inability to experience pleasure. In a study of competitive swimmers, those who were more honest with themselves and didn’t deceive themselves tended to perform worse in the competitions.43 So even though being rational might be better in terms of being right, being right isn’t all there is to life. It’s not always better to be realistic if your goal is happiness or success.
Even belief in the supernatural can sometimes be helpful. The Mayan belief in protecting forest spirits helped the Mayans to protect their forests. A study by psychologist Lysann Damisch found that good luck charms (when you know you have them) increase performance by 50 percent. People with faith are less likely to panic under pressure, and prayer helps people deal with their negative emotions, reduces stress, lowers blood pressure and feels good, due to the release of dopamine.44
Religion seems to make people make better health choices: they exercise more, get married, have friends, drink less, and don’t smoke. These things lead to a longer life. Mormons, who tend to have community support, which reduces stress, and who don’t drink or smoke, tend to live ten years longer than the average American, at least in part just due to health. Attending church correlates positively with health (but, interestingly, having religious beliefs does not). On the other hand it has been found that people with HIV who believe that God decides the fate of disease are less likely to take their medicine. What’s going on here? It turns out that going to church is good for your health if you are uneducated, but not if you’re educated. Church is good for getting you off of drugs and smoking, which both educated and uneducated people benefit from. But it can also have the problematic effect of undermining belief in evidence-based medicine and science, which exacerbates the problems that tend to face the educated, who are more likely to have access to medical diagnoses and treatments.45 There is an overall healthful effect on the population as a whole simply because uneducated people are more likely to go to church. Church has similar effects on the rich and poor, but that effect ends up helping the poor and hurting the rich because of their different circumstances.
Being orthodox reduces the chances that a people will have their children vaccinated but also reduces anxiety in general. People who believe in past lives have less stress about dying. Religious people tend to have lower activation in the part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which is associated with self-regulation and the experience of anxiety. Indeed, studies show that the deeply religious experience less anxiety when committing errors. Even just hearing about religion can have this effect. The ACC is associated with critical thinking in general, so that’s the tradeoff. Religious people tend to be happier, but that might be because they have more social interaction, because they believe they have meaning in their lives, or because they are more certain of their beliefs in general. People with weak religious conviction are less happy than agnostics or the strongly religious. Also, the increase in happiness goes away in societies in which religion is not highly valued.46 In America, for example, it’s highly valued.
It is tempting for atheists to make the following argument: belief in any known religion is irrational; therefore anybody who believes in a religion is irrational. There is an unstated premise in this argument, though, and that is that if someone believes in some things that are irrational, then they can be classified as generally irrational people. But this is silly, because all of us believe irrational things at one time or another, and this does not render us forever untrustworthy with thinking in general. The terms rational and irrational are better suited for particular instances of thinking rather than broad stokes used to describe people.
Further, there is some evidence that people use different kinds of reasoning when thinking about religion than they use when thinking about ordinary things. For example, someone might truly believe that the communion host is the body of Jesus without being willing to put it to any empirical tests, but at the same time work as a biochemist and be very rigorous in his or her laboratory when testing materials. Religions would not have survived if believing in them made people generally irrational in their day-to-day lives. As Scott Atran eloquently puts it, “The trick is in knowing how and when to suspend factual belief without countermanding the facts and compromising survival.”47 Just because someone believes in God does not mean they can’t be a rigorous, skeptical thinker when it comes to mundane aspects of life, such as figuring out why someone is late to dinner or where they left their umbrella.
It could be that religious believers do not justify religious beliefs according to rationality, but rather emotional satisfaction. Rather than using observations and evidence as religious beliefs’ primary justification, Atran holds that they are justified by how they satisfy primary emotional drives such as the desire for justice and order, as well as relief of anxieties.48 This is not to say that people do not eventually draw upon observations and rationality to further justify their beliefs—they certainly do—but to say that religion is primarily justified emotionally.
What about morality? Religious people commonly wonder how atheists could have any morality at all. Indeed, religious people give more to charity. Reminding people about God makes them more charitable, but interestingly this has the same effect on religious believers as atheists, and a similar effect can be produced by reminding people of secular moral institutions, such as the law. Perhaps this is because one of the roles religion has played in human societies is keeping us from being too selfish.
The morality that is presumably from God is not as crystal clear and unambiguous as it might first appear. All Christians are “grocery store” Christians, choosing what from the Bible they believe. There is a lot in the Bible that Christians of our modern era do not accept. Why? It does not sit right with our modern sensibilities. Why don’t we burn witches anymore? People have opinions of what God thinks, even with the Bible and religious leaders as general guides. What morals Christians take and don’t take from the Bible are based on culture and personal preference, and atheists choose their morals in the same way. Certainly religion can affect people’s morality, but for the most part people get it backward: it’s not religion that shapes people’s morals, but people’s morals that shape religion.
How do we know this is true?
In most places in the world people do not get to choose their religion in the way we think of doing in the Western world. Most people are born into a cultural context in which the tenets of the culture’s religion are presented as facts along with other, nonreligious information, such as what plants are safe to eat. But readers of this book might be in a place where there are many religions that one could potentially take up.
Even within a religion, people will often change denominations, perhaps because the first one was too serious, or not serious enough. I have Jewish friends who have chosen to attend a Conservative synagogue and others who attend a Reform synagogue, and they both say that they do it because they are more in agreement with the practices of whichever one they chose. This anecdotal evidence is only suggestive, but is presented as an easily understood example that readers might be familiar with of how the expressed beliefs of a branch of a religion are expected to align with people’s personal ideas of the right way to do something.
Similarly, we all probably know people who are part of religious groups, but do not agree with some subset of that group’s moral beliefs.
If you are religious, reflect on how your morals might have changed over the course of your life, or perhaps over the course of the lives of people you know. Sometimes a religious teaching can convince someone that something is right or wrong, but you might also have experienced the opposite, where people change their minds about whether something is morally acceptable or not (e.g., using curse words, birth control) and then claim that God agrees with their new moral stance. What’s interesting is that in the past they believed that God agreed with their old moral stance. What seems to be happening is that people attribute their own moral beliefs to God, rather than trying to change what they think is right or wrong according to some objective judgment about what God thinks.
Indeed, experimental evidence by business researcher Nicholas Epley has shown that this is the case. In fact, when people’s beliefs were manipulated in the laboratory (the subjects were given persuasive essays to read), their ideas about what God believed changed too! People think God agrees with them even more than they think other people agree with them. The same study showed that when thinking about God’s beliefs, your brain’s activation looks more like it does when thinking about your own beliefs than it does thinking about other people’s beliefs.49
Just about all of us have morals. Like most things, people’s morality probably has a strong genetic component. The difference is that atheists do not try to justify their morals with a religion.
* * *
In the introduction I described the impossibility critique, that understanding things like art and religion is too complicated and varied for science. Scholars in general can be broken down into two groups: lumpers and splitters. The splitters enjoy showing the diversity of the world and delight in finding exceptions to generalizations. Lumpers, on the other hand, like to see things as being the same, to find commonalities, and to classify things. In fact, fitting all scholars into just two groups like lumpers and splitters is a very lumper thing to do.
This book is super lumpy. What I have presented here is not a knock-down set of experiments showing that all things we love are compelling for the same reasons. I have described in general terms a possible research program, a way to look at these phenomena that ties them together. My hope is that compellingness foundations theory will encourage future researchers to explore some of the theory’s many testable predictions, and to give nonscientists a new way to examine their lives and the things they find riveting.
What we find compelling is to a great extent preprogrammed into our brains. Just as we inherited earlobes and toenails, we also inherited brain processes that helped our ancestors thrive. Although we are fascinated by the differences between the ways of one society compared to another, successful cultural ideas must conform to these inborn brain processes as they are. In this book I’ve explored six dimensions that influence what we find compelling in what we experience and shown that these same dimensions have ramifications for what we find compelling in a variety of things, including art, religion, sports, and explanations. Those six dimensions are the social compellingness theory; hopes and fears; the fact that we delight in patterns; our motivation to explore incongruities; psychological biases; and biological influences.
Some of these processes leave us ill-equipped to deal with the ways of our modern world, such as our love for eating sugar. They also leave us ill-equipped to deal with propagandists and advertisers who play to these tendencies deliberately to get what they want from us. History is full of cultural problems that were manufactured by companies selling the solutions. The practical application of compellingness foundations theory is twofold.
First, we can use knowledge of what’s compelling to help us make more compelling art. The empirical study of the arts complements the folk wisdom that teachers of the arts have passed down through the ages. It can reveal, first of all, whether or not these teachers have been right. But more than that, it can control variables so that we can know very precisely what is working and why. Although much of art making involves subconscious processes, art training (including books on how to paint or write fiction) includes explicitly articulated advice that students take to heart.
Second, we can use knowledge of what makes ideas compelling to help us make decisions about what to believe (to the extent that we are able). When we encounter ideas, we have our habits and old-brain processes weighing in on the quality of those ideas. Our old brain (to personify it) has opinions and biases and, when it speaks up, our knowledge of its biases can help us evaluate the quality of its opinion. Does my old brain like this idea simply because a beautiful woman is telling it to me, or because it’s written beautifully, or because I’m being exposed to an anecdote framed in the form of a compelling story? Or maybe all at once?
Or does the old brain dislike the idea only because it’s being spoken by someone who does not speak the language well, or because it is presented as only numbers, without a human angle, or because the idea is boring? None of those things mean it isn’t true, even though it can feel less compelling.
The mind is an association maker. Every bit of information it takes in, it feeds into its huge, unconscious pattern-detecting machinery. With this in mind, one should be wary of the kind of input this machinery receives. Just as you would not want to put data into a spreadsheet or computer model that is not representative of the system you are trying to understand, exposing yourself to too much anomalous information will give you a skewed take on our world. If you expose yourself to lots of horrible stories, you will be scared.
Be wary of compelling ideas that play on our biological natures or on the various biases we have in our psyches, whether they are based on evolution or cultural learning. Be wary of compelling ideas that are framed in terms of people and relationships, are easy to understand, present an intriguing puzzle, or play to our hopes and fears. Belief systems are often accepted or rejected not by evidence, but by how they suit our psychological needs.
But all the while, revel in that great feeling that compellingness provides. Love art, love ideas, whether you accept them or not. Let yourself get riveted. It is one of the exquisite joys of being human.