Belief is due to Psychology

It's in your Psychology

Religion is a product of evolution, software suggests

God may work in mysterious ways, but a simple computer program may explain how religion evolved

27 May 2008
NewScientist.com

By distilling religious belief into a genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information, the program predicts that religion will flourish. However, religion only takes hold if non-believers help believers out – perhaps because they are impressed by their devotion.

"If a person is willing to sacrifice for an abstract god then people feel like they are willing to sacrifice for the community," says James Dow, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, US, who wrote the program – called Evogod (download the code here).

Dow is by no means the first scientist to take a stab at explaining how religion emerged. Theories on the evolution of religion tend toward two camps. One argues that religion is a mental artefact, co-opted from brain functions that evolved for other tasks.

Aiding the people
Another contends that religion benefited our ancestors. Rather than being a by-product of other brain functions, it is an adaptation in its own right. In this explanation, natural selection slowly purged human populations of the non-religious.

"Sometime between 100,000 years ago to the point where writing was invented, maybe about 7000 BC, we begin to have records of people's supernatural beliefs," Dow says.

To determine if it was possible for religion to emerge as an adaptation, Dow wrote a simple computer program that focuses on the evolutionary benefits people receive from their interactions with one another.

"What people are adapting to is other people," he says.

Religious attraction
To simplify matters, Dow picked a defining trait of religion: the desire to proclaim religious information to others, such as a belief in the afterlife. He assumed that this trait was genetic.

The model assumes, in other words, that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others. They passed on that trait to their children, but they also interacted with people who didn't spread unreal information.

The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people – those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.

Under most scenarios, "believers in the unreal" went extinct. But when Dow included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished.

"Somehow the communicators of unreal information are attracting others to communicate real information to them," Dow says, speculating that perhaps the non-believers are touched by the faith of the religious.

Ancient needs
Richard Sosis, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, US, says the model adds a new dimension to the debate over how religion could have evolved, which has previously relied on verbal arguments and speculation. But "these are baby steps", he cautions.

Sosis previously found that in some populations – kibbutzim in Israel, for instance – more religious people receive more assistance from others than the less faithful. But he notes that the forces that maintain religion in modern humans could be very different from those that promoted its emergence, thousands of years ago.

Palaeolithic humans were probably far more reliant than modern humans on the community they were born into, Sosis says. "[Now] you can be a Lutheran one week and decide the following week you are going to become a Buddhist."

Journal reference: Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Stimulation, vol 11, p 2

New study on the comfort of imaginary friends

National Secular Society
18 January 2008

In terms of companionship, God may function like a Yorkie with a hairbow. This is the conclusion of a new study which finds that both God and anthropomorphised pets can represent attempts to populate one's environment with pseudo-people, and that the impulse to do this appears to be reinforced by loneliness. The paper, to be published in next month's Psychological Science, concludes that "social disconnection increases the tendency to create humanlike agents...."

This makes good evolutionary sense. Even moderate isolation from other people can compromise one's immune system, while also elevating blood pressure, stress hormones and even the incidence of clinical depression. Taken together, the effects of loneliness turn out to be as damaging to the health as smoking cigarettes. Thus anything that decreases the feeling of isolation is going to be a survival benefit, regardless of whether the "friend" is non-human or even non-existent.

In experiments where people are subjected to extreme isolation, they quickly begin holding conversations with imaginary people, animals or deities. Recent surveys suggest that people feel more connected to God when praying alone than in a group. And the lonely are more likely than others to report having a personal relationship with God. The death of a loved one also tends to increase religious beliefs.

In the new study, these results from previous ones were checked experimentally by artificially inducing a sense of social isolation in both believers and non-believers. As expected, this resulted in increased expressions of belief in the religious and even, to a lesser extent, in the doubters. As the psychologists noted, “Social disconnection does not turn atheists into fundamentalists, of course, but it may nudge religious belief for believers and non-believers alike.”

Many studies have shown that both believers and pet owners tend to be happier and healthier, but until now no one had pointed out a connection: the comfort of imaginary friends.

Source: N. Epley et al., "Creating Social Connection Through Inferential Reproduction", Psychological Science, February 2008.

The higher the price, the more we like it

Researchers use wine tasting to show how marketing tactics can trick the brain to find more enjoyment in costlier products.

Los Angeles Times
January 15, 2008

When it comes to wine tasting, pleasure is in the price.

Using brain scanners to monitor the minds of wine drinkers, scientists found that people given two identical red wines got more pleasure from tasting the one they were told cost more.

The study, reported Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrated for the first time how marketing tactics -- such as raising the price of a product -- can cause the brain to play tricks on itself.

Researchers led by Antonio Rangel, associate professor of economics at Caltech, asked 20 volunteers to rank their enjoyment of small sips of five differently priced Cabernet Sauvignon wines while a functional MRI machine monitored the brain response. Volunteers also were asked to rate the flavor intensity of the wines.

Unbeknown to volunteers, two sets of wine samples were identical: the $5 and $45 wines ($5 actual price) and the $10 and $90 wines ($90 actual price). The fifth wine was identified by its actual $35 price.

Volunteers were asked to rank the pleasantness of the wines. They liked the $90 wine best and the $5 wine least.

Brain scans showed that activity in the part of the brain that detects pleasure also moved in lock step with price. The medial orbital prefrontal cortex, which is located behind the eyes, showed the greatest activity when volunteers drank the wine marked $90 and the least activity when they sipped the wine priced at $5.

Prices had no effect on flavor intensity ratings. Volunteers said the $5 and $45 wines and the $10 and $90 wines were identically sweet.

Rangel said the findings showed that pleasantness of consuming a product relied not only on the product's intrinsic properties, such as flavor in the case of wine, but also on certain beliefs, such as the notion that expensive wines will probably taste better, he said. By manipulating prices "we can change how wine tastes without changing the wine," Rangel said. "It's mind-blowing."

Two weeks after the experiment, volunteers were asked to rate the wines in the absence of price data. They liked the wines originally marked $5 and $45 best and the samples labeled $10 and $90 second best.

George Loewenstein, professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study, said the findings supported research on consumer behavior.

"People pay high prices for water from Italy, and we know that water tastes about the same wherever it comes from," he said. "Price is one of the many attributes that people pay attention to, and it affects how we perceive things as a consumer."

God the Father
a book review by Kenneth W. Krause
July 2005

Surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted, wrote Sigmund Freud in his 1927 The Future of an Illusion. Men cannot remain children for ever; they must in the end go out into the hostile life. We may call this education to reality. Freud, of course, was referring to the infantilism of religion or as he so bluntly labeled it, the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.

In The Psychological Roots of Religious Belief, M.D. Faber (Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature specializing in literature and psychology at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and former Special Fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington D.C.) takes issue with Freuds ultimate conclusion. In the religious context, men and women apparently can and often do remain children forever, thanks in large measure to Abrahamic monotheisms reliance on the omnipotent Parent-God.

Faber affirms that we are born fundamentally free from religious predilections, liberated to pursue a reasoned, constructive, and cooperative existence. How is it, then, that throngs of us slump into the swift stream of monotheistic superstition at every widening bend to be whisked away, perhaps forever, like so much like loose sand, despite our natural tendency toward firmly-grounded, rational thought? What is it about the human experience following the moment of birth that renders us so vulnerable to the Parent-Gods charms?

According to D. Andrew Kille, former pastor and lecturer in psychology and spirituality, and the author of The Bible Made Me Do It (in The Destructive Power of Religion, ed. J. Harold Ellens, Praeger Publishing, 2004), Psychologists of religion have long recognized the close connection between early childhood development and later religious images and behavior. In the earliest experiences of mother and care lie the roots of God images and emotionally charged attitudes and reactions to spirituality and religious thinking. Such is the general theme of Fabers book, a theme he argues quite convincingly and in copious detail.

According to Faber, the caregiving parent begins laying the groundwork for the childs eventual religiosity shortly after birth during what Faber calls the basic biological situation. Over and over, literally thousands of times per year, the needful infant cries out for and immediately receives nourishment, warmth, comfort, and care from the apparently omnipotent parent, usually the mother. The infants crying, or supplication, in response to crises constitutes proto-prayer. The omni-benevolent and all-powerful mother, in turn, becomes the childs proto-deity.

According to Faber, The basic biological situation gives rise at the implicit, unconscious level to the perceptual, emotional scheme from which emanates our deepest emotional longings and perceptual inclinations. The pattern of supplication and provision becomes internalized, literally rooted into the neural fabric of the childs brain. Like muscles, synaptic connections grow stronger after repeated use. The pattern becomes permanently imprinted into unconscious memory. Faber identifies this process as mnemonic priming for eventual mapping onto the religious narrative and projection onto the illusionary Parent-God.

In most cases, neither the child nor the parent will ever comprehend what has occurred. The process is an entirely implicit one, relegated to the realm of what Freud dubbed infantile amnesia. Later in life, in response to external religious stimuli, for example, these implicit memories of the basic biological situation will be cued, played, and repeated as efficiently as can be: The religious realm into which the child gradually enters mirrors unconsciously, associatively, perceptually, and affectively the presubjective reality that the child has been internalizing and installing neurally as the basis of his gradually emerging identity. The religious realm, in two words, corresponds implicitly to the childs mind.

During the earliest stages of development, the child conceives of no existence apart from its parent. It finds an image of itself only in the caretaker, and thus, it participates in the world only through the caretaker. The child, writes Faber, cannot at this stage say to the parent, You misunderstand me, because no me exists apart from the parents understanding. Thus the reality of the caregiver does not become a reality for the child; it becomes the only reality, the only place in which he has existence. As such, the child attributes the provision of care and security not to the mother alone, but to itself as well. It is the childs heady estimation of its own omnipotence, then, that marks the symbiotic phase, which peaks in intensity at about six to nine months.

Thereafter, as the child embarks on the process of separation from the caregiver, it will begin to implicitly suffer the terrifying loss of worldly hegemony. This movement away, writes Faber, is attended by powerful anxiety and by the irrational wish to have it both ways: separateness and symbiotic union.

During what some psychologists identify as the practicing phase, eleven to fifteen months, the infant becomes more engaged in its burgeoning mental and physical world. Even so, it always returns to the mother for emotional refueling. At about thirty months, during the rapprochement phase, the separation process culminates; the child begins to fully comprehend the solitary nature of its existence. The toddler will first demand attention from its parental caregiver and then turn to other persons, including the father, and to transitional objects, including toys, pets, blankets, etc., in an attempt to maintain emotional constancy.

Some have characterized the childs separation from the parental caregiver as a life-long mourning process that triggers an endless search for replacement. According to Faber:

[T]he passing of the rapprochement crisis simply means that one is now in a position to act out among others this basic human dilemma It means that one can now seek for omnipotence, fusion, and narcissistic gratification in the wider world We have in this remarkable situation the living seed of the faith-state, of the believers hallucinatory, heartfelt conviction that his invisible, mysterious, transmundane Parent-God is there. Not only does the will to believe, to accept the veracity of religious narrative, push upward ineluctably toward consciousness from an inward source one affectively recognizes yet cannot directly detect, but the narratives wishful, alluring core holds the promise of attachment to a loving provider, to a Spirit through Whom one may lessen the pain of precisely the separation just described For most human beings the combination is irresistible, and its effects persist with varying degrees of intensity throughout the course of the life cycle.

The childs desire to have it both ways to separate, yet preserve emotional union or dependency on a caregiver is what eventually results in the central motivational goal of the religionists spiritual commitment. By the time religious narratives exert themselves, the child has already been primed and prepared for initiation into the divine, supernatural realm.

Implicit memories of these symbiotic and post-symbiotic states, then, are abundant and immediately accessible for stimulation by monotheistic narratives. Young children are encouraged, if not threatened and bullied, to conform their beliefs to such narratives before their rational faculties have ripened, before they can critically evaluate their churches claims, before they can possibly fathom the overwhelming power of their unconscious minds.

Religion, in this theory, is anything but a passive recipient of immature minds. According to the author:

[Churches] strive to trigger state-dependent memories of the early period through formal, diurnal practices [Religion] has shrewdly played into mans most childlike needs, not only by offering eternal guarantees for an omniscient powers benevolence (if properly appeased) but by magic words and significant gestures, soothing sounds and soporific smells an infants world Thus religion is a cunning, unconscious method of preserving the tie to the original mother and father We can play the game of life in two directions, staying put and moving on And so it is with religion Not only does one get the caregiver back, but one gets the caregiver back in an idealized form. One is not alone, and one has nothing to fear from a just and merciful God.

The basic biological situation, the implicit memories, the desperate anxiety associated with separation, and every churchs deliberate and clever attempt to seduce innocent minds such factors travel a great distance in explaining monotheisms virtually irresistible attraction for humanity, including the most intelligent and educated among us.

Faber wisely stops short, however, of claiming that religiosity is inherent to the human condition:

The widespread notion that we are wired for God or genetically endowed with a need for faith emerges from our psychodynamic context as a misperception of human behavior an understandable, wishful, natural misperception to be sure, but inaccurate nonetheless. Are the many millions of people throughout the world who do not believe in God the products of faulty wiring? Has their elemental, primal nature been somehow distorted or suppressed? I dont think so.

Indeed, if any reasonable person were to compare the relative difficulties of two hypothetical tasks first, remaining utterly non-religious for one day, and second, remaining completely non-rational for but one minute such a person would surely conclude that humanity is naturally rational and not naturally religious. No conscious and able-minded person, after all, could possibly elude the process of collecting evidence, weighing it, and drawing conclusions based on that evidence even if the only conclusion she ultimately draws is that she remains safe where she is.

Freethinking adults have found the religious program irrelevant or unengaging, argues Faber, largely because, by the time of religious exposure, that program has already been replaced by other neural, perceptual connections, by other narratives, by other theoretical outlooks and conclusions. A rigorous and liberal education is critical, it would appear, if parents wish for their children the rewards of a rational life.

Nevertheless, people of reason have abundant cause to be hopeful. The situation is not irremediable. Because all humans are inherently rational and freedom loving, they possess every tool required in the effort to resist the mapping process. If and when they do, according to Faber, both flock and earthly shepherds are apt to disappear. Faber affirms our ultimate hopes without reservation: Because religion must confront the realm of reason through its truth claims, it, religion, is not merely vulnerable but mortal: it can die.

Yet, regrettably, Faber is unable to resist at least one of his own irrational vices. Without conveying a legitimate basis for doing so, Faber shamelessly panders to desperate monotheists by offering them a rusty hook upon which to hang their tattered hat: The entire psychological pattern I am working to depict here may have been conceived and initiated by a supernatural Almighty and Ultimate First Cause.

Is this Fabers way of implying that anything is possible? What would be the point of such a meaningless gesture? The issue, after all, is not the existence of some abstract and undefined entity that we might characterize as a god if we were ever to encounter it. The real issue concerns the idiosyncratic gods of Abrahamic monotheism, which, according to logic and a clear preponderance of all available evidence, simply does not exist. Rather than compromising himself for the approval of a substantial but unreasoned audience, Faber should have remained true to his principal scientific arguments.