WHEN IT COMES to making choices, most of us feel confident that we evaluate the evidence objectively, weigh the pros and cons, and act according to reason. Otherwise, we would have to concede that our decisions are unreasonable, and few individuals are willing to acknowledge this. But the truth is that human psychology is littered with many examples of faulty reasoning. This is why scientists are so interested in studying the mistakes we make and our biases and logical errors. They seem to fly in the face of reason and suggest that there must be underlying mechanisms responsible for controlling our thought processes. This is the mind design that I talked about in the last chapter. The aspect of mind design that interests me is the one that leads us to infer the presence of patterns, forces, and energies operating in the world where there may be none. This is what I mean by a supersense. Even if you deny having a supersense, you may still be susceptible to its influence, because the processes that lead to supernatural thinking are not necessarily under conscious or willful control. And as you will see later in the book, some researchers even question whether there is such a thing as conscious willful control.
I like to illustrate this point in the public lectures I give on the origins of supernatural thinking by talking about our reactions to memorabilia. These objects are the best example because most audiences immediately recognize what I am talking about when it comes to considering the hidden power of simple inanimate objects. To demonstrate the psychological impression created by objects I hand out a black fountain pen dating from the 1930s that once belonged to Albert Einstein. Okay, I lie to the audience about the provenance of the pen, but the belief is sufficient. The reverence and awe toward this object is palpable. Everyone wants to hold it. Touching the pen makes them feel good. Then I ask the audience if they would be willing to wear the cardigan I brought along. Given the oddity of the question and the tattered state of the cashmere garment, the audience is understandably suspicious. After a moment’s consideration, usually around one-third of the audience raise their hand. So I offer a prize. More hands are raised. I then tell them about Cromwell Street as an image of Fred West rises menacingly from the bottom of the PowerPoint display. Once they are told that the cardigan belonged to Fred West, most hands usually shoot down, followed by a ripple of nervous laughter. People recognize that their change of heart reflects something odd.
There are always the exceptions, of course. Some people resolutely keep their hand raised. Typically, they are male and determined to demonstrate their rational control. Or they suspect, rightly, that I was lying about the owner of the cardigan. What is remarkable is that other audience members sitting next to one of these individuals visibly recoil from their neighbor who is willing to wear a killer’s cardigan. How could someone even consider touching such an appalling garment? It’s a stunt, of course—a deliberate ploy set up to create a sense of revulsion in an unsuspecting audience.
Last year, this stunt earned me some notoriety in Norwich, England.1 I was presenting my theory on the origin of the supersense and why science and rationality will not get people to abandon such beliefs easily. The presentation took place at a major British science festival, and the world’s science press was there. Since every quality paper had a science correspondent present, I circulated an article outlining my ideas so that there would be a good turnout at the press conference. I argued that humans are born with brains that infer hidden forces and structures in the real world, and that some of these inferences naturally lead us to believe in the supernatural. Therefore, we cannot put sole responsibility for spreading supernatural belief on religions and cultures, which simply capitalize on our supersense.
The cardigan demonstration was meant to illustrate to an educated, intelligent, rational audience (albeit one that included journalists, who are always looking for a hook) that sometimes our beliefs can be truly supernatural but have nothing to do with religious indoctrination. Even atheists tend to show revulsion at the idea of touching Fred West’s cardigan. If it’s true that our beliefs can be supernatural but unconnected to religion, then it must also be true that humans will not necessarily evolve into a rational species, because a mind designed for generating natural explanations also generates supernatural ones.
News of the cardigan stunt and my comments spread like a virus across the world’s digital networks. I gave interview after interview, and the event generated web postings on both religious and secular sites with a mixture of ridicule and praise. Some colleagues didn’t like the showmanship, but I had made a point that got people talking. People were infuriated. I had touched a raw nerve. It was a sacrilegious stunt, even though no particular religion had been offended. But what had I demonstrated that upset the public so much? What did wearing a killer’s cardigan really show? Was it a demonstration of irrationality? How did this prove that humans will not evolve a rational mind?
I think the killer’s cardigan illustrates our common supersense. It says something about the sacred values of the group. It also says something about us as both individuals and group members. The repulsion to the cardigan could reflect a common supernatural belief that invisible essences can contaminate the world and connect us together, almost like some form of human glue. Or at least it feels as if there is something tangible that joins us together. In academic social psychology, “social glue” is the term to describe the mechanisms for the social connectedness of a group.2 Any behavior that causes members of a group to feel more connected can operate as social glue. This is conspicuous at sporting events where many different fans from all walks of life come together as one. Hundreds of complete strangers who would normally not interact with each other suddenly become a highly organized and unified collective. In 1896 the French sociologist Gustav Le Bon described this phenomenon of crowds: “Sentiments, emotions, and ideas possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes.” It is indeed as though something physical infects such groups. Unfortunately for English soccer, very often the power of this mass mentality can overwhelm normally law-abiding individuals who find themselves caught up in hooliganism and brawling with rival teams. Le Bon argued over one hundred years ago that social glue explains why supporters do not feel individually responsible for their actions and claim that they simply went with the crowd.3
I see this glue also operating at the individual level. Each of us can feel a special, intimate connectedness to another individual. I believe this mechanism can work at the level of a perceived inner essence. An essence is an underlying, invisible property that defines the true nature of something. It doesn’t really exist, but we think and behave as if there were some inner stuff inside people that makes them who they are. I examine this notion more thoroughly throughout the book because it explains a lot of our peculiar behavior toward others and their possessions. I examine the recent research on essentialist thinking in children and show that this type of thinking can lead us not only to perceive an invisible property that inhabits individuals but also to transfer that property to their objects. It might be natural to believe there is an essential connection or glue that can bind us to others or repel us from them, even though such a connection would be supernatural. That’s why I think the cardigan stunt revealed that some people believed that the essence of Fred West had contaminated his clothing.
This essential glue could provide a useful heuristic for interacting with others. Heuristics are simple shortcuts in reasoning that lend support for more complex decision-making processes. We use them all the time when judging other people. Have you ever taken an instant dislike to someone? What was the reason? Often you couldn’t say—it was just a feeling you got. When we meet someone for the first time, there’s a great deal of unconscious decision-making going on. Who is this person? What do I know about him? What do I feel about him? We may be able to reflect on some or all of these questions, but often we answer without being aware of doing so. We are relying on unconscious inferences and heuristics. Social psychologists have shown that, with the barest information, people can make judgments about others rapidly and effortlessly. And yet such fleeting impressions, or thin slicing, as it is known, can have a profound effect on our decisions. For example, students can accurately predict teaching evaluation scores for a lecturer based on as little as two seconds of silent video taken from one of the lecturer’s classes. They can even predict which surgeons will be sued for malpractice based on a couple of seconds of muffled speech. Something in the quality of the movements and sounds reveals surprisingly rich information about their social skills.4 Humans are exquisitely sensitive to judging others, even though we are often unable to say exactly what it is about them we are noticing.
INTUITIVE REASONING
Such unconscious thinking forms part of what I call intuitive reasoning, which to most educated ears sounds like an oxy-moron. How can reasoning be intuitive? By intuitive, I mean unlearned. As we shall see later in the book, there is good evidence that children naturally and spontaneously think about the unseen properties that govern the world. They infer forces to explain events they cannot directly see, understand that living things have a life energy, and reason in terms of essence when thinking about the true nature of animals. And of course, they begin to understand that other people have minds. These processes are not taught to children. They are reasoning, though it is not clear that they can necessarily reflect on why or how they are coming up with their decisions. That’s why their reasoning is intuitive.
Intuition is often called a “gut feeling.” Sometimes we get a “vibe” when we sense a physical feeling of knowing—like the 1960s hippies, whose talk of getting good or bad vibes was a shorthand for gut feelings. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls this the somatic marker: it indicates the way emotions affect reasoning in a rapid and often unconscious way. “Somatic” is derived from the Greek word for “of the body.” In his remarkable research, Damasio and his wife Hanna have shown that reasoning works by combining information from past experience and encounters and feeding that into decision-making related to the current situation. Past learning is stored as a response deep in the emotional centers of the brain known as the limbic system. Sometimes referred to as the “reptilian” part of brain because of our shared evolutionary history with reptiles, these centers relay signals into the frontal lobe areas that are concerned with decision-making. If part of this circuit is disrupted through injury, reasoning can be impaired. In one study, patients with damage to their frontal lobes took part in a gambling experiment in which they had to select cards from one of four different decks. Two of the decks paid out low amounts, and the other two paid out greater sums. However, unbeknownst to the players, there were more penalty cards in the high-reward decks compared to the low-reward decks. The frontal lobe–damaged patients were much poorer at learning to avoid the risky decks compared to normal players.
Normally when faced with risk, we sweat. It’s a telltale sign of emotion. To understand the role of the emotions in the learning involved in the gambling experiment, the Damasios measured how much sweat each player produced by placing electrodes on their skin. This measure, known as the galvanic skin response, detects changes in skin conductance as a measure of underlying arousal. It’s the same principle used in lie detectors. What they found was astonishing. Both normal and frontal lobe–damaged patients showed the same skin conductance before each card was turned over at the beginning of the game. However, as the game progressed and normal players began to learn that some decks were more risky, they became more aroused just before they chose a card from these piles. They were starting to sense the patterns. Bells and lights were going off in their emotional systems to warn them that their decision was wrong. This happened before they were even consciously aware that the odds were stacked against them. Intuition was telling them to be careful. More remarkably, frontal lobe–damaged patients showed no anticipatory arousal whatsoever! Past experience and learning may be vague and unconscious, but they provide a “feels right” marker that enables individuals to be sure about their decisions. In the Damasios’ study, the frontal lobe–damaged patients, who didn’t have these markers, were either paralyzed with indecision when having to make a choice or completely careless and unconcerned about the consequences of their actions. This was because they had no somatic marker to help them decide or to warn them to be more careful. They could not feel the answer.5
The Fred West cardigan stunt dramatically revealed that my listeners’ rapid and automatic intuition kicked in before they had time to consider why they would not wear it. Sadistic killers disgust most of us, and without even thinking about it, we would not want to come into physical contact with them or their possessions. Not all of us, however, feel this way. Psychopaths and sociopaths do not feel any connection with their fellow humans, and that’s what enables them to do the inhuman things they do. They don’t show the same emotional arousal the rest of us have.6 However, not everyone who could wear the cardigan is psychotic. Some are simply not sentimental about objects. They may decline the invitation to wear the cardigan, but only because they do not want to stand out from the crowd. Whether we feel the presence of Fred West or simply do not want to be seen to be different, most of us refuse the invitation. Anyone who boldly insists on wearing the cardigan can argue the illogical nature of the association, but that person is still going to lose friends. Would you associate with someone who was not bothered about doing something that most others find repugnant?
I think the main reason the stunt annoyed critics who read about the event was that they probably experienced the same clash between intuition and logic that my audience felt. They initially considered how they would have responded using their intuitive processes, and then, with their rational mind, they realized the logical inconsistency of either a yes or no answer. Also, there is simply no correct answer to the question, making it all the more vexing. Would you wear a killer’s cardigan for $1? What about $10,000? There is a point at which most people would change their mind, but what is so undesirable in the first place about touching items owned by evil people or living in houses where murders were committed? Why do the majority of us have these reservations?
The idea for the Fred West cardigan stunt came from the work of Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania.7 Rozin’s experiments are some of the most interesting and provocative examples of the peculiar nature of human reasoning. Much of his work concerns the complex human behavior of disgust. Disgust is a universal human reaction triggered by certain experiences that elicit a strong bodily response. Anyone can recognize that nose-wrinkling, revolted, nauseous, retching, stomach-churning sensation we get when we have been disgusted. It’s a powerful and involuntary response that can be difficult to control.
Disgust is interesting because we all develop nausea reactions to specific things such as human excrement and putrid corpses. However, there is also room for learning: certain substances and behaviors can be deemed disgusting if others say so. The diversity of food preferences, personal hygiene, and sexual practices across different cultures proves this. It is well known that Asian cuisine includes insects and reptiles that are considered unpalatable by Western standards. Less well known is the beverage Kopi Luwak, a rare gourmet coffee from Indonesia that is made from beans passed through the digestive system of a palm civet, a dark brown, tree-dwelling, catlike creature found throughout Southeast Asia. Kopi Luwak is sold mainly to the Japanese at up to $600 a pound, making it the world’s most expensive “crappacino.” Or take phlegm. There are few things more revolting than someone else’s creamy mucous. In the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the city officials tried to outlaw the commonly accepted Chinese practice of clearing phlegm in public by spitting and sinus-clearing, which are nauseating practices to most Westerners. Ironically, the Western practice of blowing the contents of one’s nose into a handkerchief and putting the handkerchief, with its contents, in one’s pocket could bring on dry-heaves in many Japanese, who consider it disgusting to carry such fluids around on one’s person. I guess we in the West would think the same of other bodily excrements kept in our pockets. Or consider sex with animals. Like many others, I had thought bestiality to be universally taboo until I discovered that intercourse with donkeys is acceptable in the northern Colombian town of San Antero, where adolescent boys are alledgedly encouraged in this practice. They even have a festival to celebrate this bestiality; particularly attractive donkeys are paraded in wigs and makeup.8 (I am still hoping that this last example is an elaborate hoax.)
There’s a saying in the north of England, “There’s nowt [nothing] as queer [strange] as folk,” and these few examples demonstrate how society and culture can shape what we find disgusting and what we find acceptable. In later chapters, we will see that all of us experience feelings of disgust. Our responses to some disgusting things are automatic and largely unlearned, but the people around us shape others, such as the violation of taboos. In this way, gut-wrenching disgust can be triggered to prevent behaviors that threaten the sacred values of our society.
WHY DON’T WE WANT TO WEAR THE CARDIGAN?
Rozin’s work on contamination shows that adults do not want to come into physical contact with disgusting items even after they have been washed. (One of the items he used was Hitler’s sweater. It didn’t take much ingenuity to adapt this to Fred West’s cardigan for a modern audience, as the principles are the same.) Rozin identified at least four reasons why we refuse to touch evil items, and he found that adults endorse each of these reasons to varying degrees.
Social conformity, the first explanation, is sensible, but only when we imagine what others would think of us. In other words, why does society regard touching certain items of clothing as so unacceptable? Why is the physical contact more wrong than simply saying the name or painting a picture of the culprit? The answer lies somewhere in the remaining three reasons.
Many Web critics argued that my cardigan stunt demonstrated simple association only and that there was no need to talk about contamination. However, an explanation based on association rings hollow to my ears. How and why should a cardigan come to represent the negative association with a killer? If I had chosen a knife or noose, the association account would have been adequate. A cardigan is not an item usually linked to murderers. It is something that offers warmth and comfort and, most importantly for my demonstration, intimacy. This combination was meant to jar and shock. The infamous photo of a snarling Fred West taken at his arrest produces a strong association, but personal items such as clothing trigger stronger negative responses. Images are powerful, but objects are even more so. Intimate clothing is more powerful still. That’s why you never see someone else’s underwear for sale in secondhand clothing stores no matter how well they might have been cleaned and sterilized. This is what Rozin has shown in many similar experiments in which he presents adult subjects with items that have been contaminated. In spite of efforts to sterilize the items, adults still feel disgusted. Something persists in the clothing. More people would rather wear a cardigan that has been dropped in dog feces and then washed than one that has also been cleaned but worn by a murderer.
What about the explanation based on physical contact? It goes without saying that no one wants to get real close to a serial killer. Maybe you fear for your life, but it could also be that we treat evil as a physical contaminant that could be transmitted by touch. Not touching something contaminated by evil could be another heuristic to avoid having bad things happen to us. Perhaps Mother Nature provided us with a quick and easy rule of thumb: “If something is bad, do not touch. You might catch it too.” After all, we don’t know why someone becomes a psychotic killer. It could be that something they touched or ate drove them mad. In September 2000, twenty-three-year-old Jacob Sexton murdered a Japanese female exchange student in Vermont following a two-month binge on LSD.9 After beating the girl to death with his bare hands, he lay down in front of the state police car when the authorities arrived and confessed that he had felt like killing because he “wanted to gather souls.” His defense was temporary insanity due to drug-induced psychosis. Physical substances like drugs can alter our minds and make us do crazy things. Sexton had willingly ingested the drug, but Albert Hoffman, who first synthesized LSD back in the 1950s, also experienced mind-altering trips when he unknowingly absorbed the compound through his fingertips. Simply by touching the drug, his mind was changed. Many toxins can be absorbed by skin contact, and minute quantities of harmful particles can present an invisible threat. Not only do murder and ghosts have to be declared when stigmatized homes are put up for sale, but many U.S. states require that houses that previously contained methamphetamine manufacture labs be identified and certified clean because of the residual threat of contamination. So when we behave as if houses or clothing could transmit psychosis, we are not being entirely irrational.
However, the fear of contamination does not require something physical. Just the thought of doing something immoral can make us feel physically dirty. It doesn’t have to be murder. When adults were asked in a recent study to think about cheating someone, they felt the need to wash their hands afterward.10 The researchers found that the brain areas that were active when subjects were feeling disgust from physical things like dirt and germs were the same as those that were active when they considered acts of moral disgust. This “Macbeth effect” reveals that tricks of the mind can be just as powerful as the real thing. So thinking that something could be physically contaminating seems a good reason not to touch it. It is as though we suspect that something like an electric shock could leap from the object. This is why the Fred West cardigan stunt triggers mostly a sense of spiritual, not physical, contamination. You can’t wash away such contamination as though it were dirt, but in a kind of balancing of evil with good, it can be canceled or “exorcised” by contact with someone good like Mother Teresa. The Vatican university, the Regina Apostolorum, has devised a two-month course on how to carry out an exorcism. From what I understand, these exorcism rites closely follow what was depicted in the classic horror film The Exorcist: a combination of prayers, rituals, and commands for the demons to leave the afflicted.11 The exorcism rite is usually performed in cases of individual possession, and sometimes the sufferer’s home is also cleansed with holy water and blessings.
I think that an audience responds as it does to the Fred West cardigan demonstration because most of us would treat the cardigan as if were imbued with evil. In the same way that some of us revere holy sites, priests, and sacred religious relics, we also shun places, people, and objects that are taboo. To do that, however, we have to attribute something more to them than just their physical properties. They must transcend the natural and become supernatural to elicit a disgusted response from us.
WATER COOLER CONVERSATIONS
I have just finished reading Quirkology by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman.12 It’s an enjoyable collection of curiosities and factoids about human behavior, from the search for the world’s funniest joke to studies on finding the best opening line when speed-dating. The book is filled with examples harvested from psychological studies, which provide the curious sort of material that people love to discuss in so-called “water cooler conversations.”
At the end of the book, Wiseman reports the outcome of a series of “experimental” dinner parties at which people were asked to rate a list of factoids described throughout the book on a scale from 1 (“Whatever”) to 5 (“When does it come out in paperback?”). He identifies the top ten factoids that people found most interesting. Here are just the top three most interesting facts. In third place was:
The best way of detecting a lie is to listen rather than look—liars say less, give fewer details, and use the word “I” less than people telling the truth.
In second place was:
The difference between a genuine and a fake smile is all in the eyes—in a genuine smile, the skin around the eyes crinkles; in a fake smile it remains much flatter.
Guess what the number-one factoid was?
People would rather wear a sweater that has been dropped in dog feces and not washed, than one that has been dry-cleaned but used to belong to a mass murderer.
Now you know why people find this one of the most curious facts about human nature.
WHAT NEXT?
They say that hindsight gives you 20/20 (perfect) vision, and in the cold light of day it is easy to dismiss our reactions to cardigans and pens as irrational when we have all the facts in hand. Whether we knock on wood, wear special tennis shoes, believe we heard a ghost, or avoid objects that may be contaminated with evil, the supersense can be found in many of us.
Some of us are better than others at controlling these thoughts and urges, but we should recognize that they are natural. I think that those with a strong supersense believe that there is more to the human body than simply the physical and that there is a soul or spiritual essence that can leave the body. These are self-confessed supersensers who talk about ghosts and spirits and consult with mediums. However, many of us just feel uncomfortable at the mention of the supernatural. Maybe this is an urge inside most of us that we have to suppress.
I think belief can operate with the same intuitive reasoning that helps us to understand the natural world by letting us make rapid decisions that feel right. The supersense is about these thoughts and behaviors and how they work to bind us together through a belief in invisible forces or essences. They don’t all have to be about unearthly experiences. We can use the supersense to connect with each other. Our physicalizing of the spiritual explains our need for contact with those we want to be intimate with, but it also explains how we can castigate others as unclean.
Over the coming chapters, I will tell you unsavory facts about individuals that will repulse you and make you feel queasy. Such negative reactions reveal that we behave and think as if we can connect with others at a physical level. This in turn produces feelings and emotions that have real consequences for behavior. In some societies, we may force others to sit on different seats on a bus or keep a certain distance from contact. Segregation and apartheid have been the shameful attempts of some societies to instigate supernatural beliefs about the subjugated members of a group. Such thinking, however, also enables us to see ourselves as connected to our family and ancestors, giving a sense of origin and direction. It explains why heirlooms and birthplace are objects and locations that give us a deeper sense of continuity with the past. I think that we do all these strange things because we are social animals bound together by our sense of physical connection. Our thoughts and behaviors extend our individual selves to the group because being a social animal requires reaching out to and joining with others. Giving gifts, exchanging objects, owning possessions, and making pilgrimages are all examples of our need to make physical contact with others. These connections are not all permanent, but I believe that they are helped by supernatural thinking as we form new bonds and break others. This need is so basic that I am skeptical that rational reasoning could ever get us to abandon it.
Such thinking provides a fertile ground for belief in supernatural phenomena. If you willingly believe in the supernatural, then you are in good company. In a Gallup poll conducted in June 2005, more than one thousand adults were asked whether they “believed, were not sure or did not believe” in the ten phenomena listed here.13 The percentage of believers is reported in parentheses. Take a look at this list. Do you believe any of these phenomena are real?
Extrasensory perception (ESP) (41%)
Haunted houses (37%)
Ghosts (32%)
Telepathy (31%)
Clairvoyance (26%)
Astrology (25%)
Communication with the dead (21%)
Witches (21%)
Reincarnation (20%)
Spiritual possession (9%)
Taken together, most U.S. adults (73 percent) believed in at least one of the items, while only one-quarter (27 percent) did not believe in any of them. These figures have hardly changed over the last fifteen years and are more or less the same as those produced by the polls conducted in 1990, 1991, 1996, and 2001. Here’s my prediction. The figures will be much the same five years from now, and five years after that. I would happily place a large bet on that. I am not a psychic. People are just remarkably consistent and predictable.
To prove this, let me demonstrate my psychic power to read your mind. I bet that you, the reader, also believe in at least one of the items from the list. Go on, be honest. How do I know? First, there is a good chance that you are one of the 73 percent of the general population who believe. Also, skeptics generally don’t bother reading books like this one. In contrast, believers and those who are not so sure want to know whether there is any truth to any of these notions. They understand that their beliefs are considered flaky, and they want to find out whether there is any evidence for things that seem so possible.
There are two reasons to read on. First, supersense is in us all, and I hope to prove that to you over the coming pages. Second, the idea that supernatural beliefs are a product of our own mind design makes it necessary to rethink the origin of beliefs. By examining the evidence mostly from developmental psychology, we can see how such beliefs could emerge in the growing child and how they could continue to influence our thinking as adults even when science tells us to ignore them. This is important, because the development of such notions has relevance to the claim that culture and religions are primarily responsible for creating supernatural belief in the first place.
But don’t worry. This book is not meant to make you feel foolish or to encourage you to abandon your supersense. Many facets of our behavior and beliefs have no rational basis. Think of everything that makes us human, and you soon realize that there is much that calls into question our ability to be rational. Love, jealousy, humor, and obsession, for instance, are present in all of us, and even though we know that our beliefs and actions stemming from them can be unbalanced, we would still not want to lose our capacity to experience them. The same can be said for the supersense. So embrace it, learn where it comes from, and understand why it refuses to go away.
Oh, and if you are a skeptic reading this book, thanks for getting this far.