We are all born believers

From New Scientist March 2012


We are all born believers

Our minds solve fundamental problems in a way that leaves a god-shaped space just waiting to be filled by religion

By Justin L. Barrett

Read more: “The God issue: New science of religion“

BY THE time he was 5 years old, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart could play the clavier and had begun to compose his own music. Mozart was a “born musician”; he had strong natural talents and required only minimal exposure to music to become fluent.

Few of us are quite so lucky. Music usually has to be drummed into us by teaching, repetition and practice. And yet in other domains, such as language or walking, virtually everyone is a natural; we are all “born speakers” and “born walkers”.

So what about religion? Is it more like music or language?

Drawing upon research in developmental psychology, cognitive anthropology and particularly the cognitive science of religion, I argue that religion comes nearly as naturally to us as language. The vast majority of humans are “born believers”, naturally inclined to find religious claims and explanations attractive and easily acquired, and to attain fluency in using them. This attraction to religion is an evolutionary by-product of our ordinary cognitive equipment, and while it tells us nothing about the truth or otherwise of religious claims it does help us see religion in an interesting new light.

As soon as they are born, babies start to try to make sense of the world around them. As they do so, their minds show regular tendencies. From birth children show certain predilections in what they pay attention to and what they are inclined to think.

One of the most important of these is to recognise the difference between ordinary physical objects and “agents” – things that can act upon their surroundings. Babies know that balls and books must be contacted in order to move, but agents such as people and animals can move by themselves.

Because of our highly social nature we pay special attention to agents. We are strongly attracted to explanations of events in terms of agent action – particularly events that are not readily explained in terms of ordinary causation.

For instance, Philippe Rochat and colleagues at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, conducted a series of experiments showing that in the first year of life children distinguish between the movement of ordinary objects and the movement of agents, even if the objects and agents in question are only computer-animated coloured discs. By 9 months old, babies showed that they were not just sensitive to the causal relationship between two discs that appeared to chase one another, they could also tell who was chasing whom (so to speak). The babies first watched either a red disc chasing a blue one or vice versa until they got habituated – good and bored, in other words. Then the experimenter reversed the chase. The babies noticed the difference and started watching again (Perception, vol 33, p 355).

Many of these experiments used animated discs that did not remotely resemble a human or animal. Babies do not need a person, or even an animal, present to get their agency reasoning up and running – an important point if they are going to apply their reasoning about agents to invisible gods.

See graphic: “Who believes what”

Babies also seem sensitive to two other important features of agents that allow them to understand the world but also make them receptive to gods. First, agents act to attain goals. And second, they need not be visible. In order to function in social groups, avoid predators and capture prey, we must be able to think about agents we cannot see.

The ease with which humans employ agent-based reasoning does not end with childhood. In an experiment I did with Amanda Johnson of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, we asked college students to narrate their actions while placing ball bearings over holes on a board. Periodically an electromagnet sent the ball bearings racing around in violation of intuitive physical expectations. Almost two-thirds of the students spontaneously referred to the ball bearings as if they were agents, making comments such as, “That one did not want to stay”, “Oh, look. Those two kissed”, and “They are not cooperating” (Journal of Cognition and Culture, vol 3, p 208).

This hair-trigger agent reasoning and a natural propensity to look for agents in the world around us are part of the building blocks for belief in gods. Once coupled with some other cognitive tendencies, such as the search for purpose, they make children highly receptive to religion.

What’s a tiger for?

Deborah Kelemen of Boston University has shown that from childhood we are very attracted to purpose-based explanations of natural objects – from monkeys and people to trees and icebergs. Four and 5-year-olds thought it more sensible that a tiger was “made for eating and walking and being seen at the zoo” than that “though it can eat and walk and be seen at the zoo, that’s not what it’s made for” (Journal of Cognition and Development, vol 6, p 3).

Similarly, when it comes to speculation about the origins of natural things, children are very receptive to explanations that invoke design or purpose. It seems more sensible to them that animals and plants were brought about for a reason than they arose for no reason. Margaret Evans of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has found that children under 10 tend to embrace creationist explanations of living things over evolutionary ones – even children whose parents and teachers endorse evolution (Cognitive Psychology, vol 42, p 217). Kelemen has also done experiments with adults that suggest we do not simply outgrow this attraction but that it must be forcibly tamped down through formal education (Cognition, vol 111, p 138).

“When it comes to the origin of natural things, children are very receptive to explanations that invoke design or purpose”

It appears that we all share an intuition that apparent order and design such as we see in the world around us requires an agent to bring it about. A recent experiment by George Newman of Yale University supports this view. Twelve to 13-month-old babies viewed two animations: a ball knocking over a stack of blocks (obscured by a barrier during the actual striking), and vice versa with the blocks starting in a disordered heap and finishing in a neat stack. Adults would immediately see something unexpected in the second scenario: balls cannot stack blocks. Babies were also surprised, in that they looked longer at the second animation. This suggests that babies find a ball creating order more surprising than a ball creating disorder.

More interesting still was a second experiment. In this, a ball-shaped object with a face moved purposefully behind the barrier and either apparently ordered or disordered the blocks. In this case, the babies found neither display more surprising (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 107, p 17140).

The most straightforward explanation is that babies have the same intuitions as adults: people, animals, gods, or other agents can create order or disorder, but non-agents, such as storms or rolling balls, only create disorder.

Of course gods do not just create or order the natural world, they typically possess superpowers: superknowledge, superperception and immortality. Surely these properties of gods – because they differ from and exceed the abilities of people – are difficult for children to adopt?

If anything the opposite appears to be the case. In a series of studies with other researchers, children appear to presume that all agents have superknowledge, superperception and immortality until they learn otherwise.

For example, in a study in Mexico led by Nicola Knight of the University of Oxford, Maya children aged 4 to 7 were shown a gourd that usually holds tortillas. With the opening covered, the experimenter asked children what was inside. After answering “tortillas”, they were shown – much to their surprise – that it actually contained boxer shorts. The experimenter then covered the opening again and asked whether various agents would know what was inside. The agents included the Catholic god, known as Diyoos, the Maya sun god, the forest spirits, a bogeyman-like being called Chiichi’ and a human. In Mayan culture, Diyoos is all seeing and all knowing, the sun god knows everything that happens under the sun, the forest spirits’ knowledge is limited to the forest and Chiichi’ is just a nuisance.

The youngest children answered that all the agents would know what was in the gourd. By age 7, the majority thought that Diyoos would know that the gourd contained shorts but the human would think it contained tortillas. They were also sensitive to the shades of difference in the other supernatural agents’ level of knowledge (Journal of Cognition and Culture, vol 8, p 235). Similar things have been found with Albanian, Israeli, British and American children.

I may be wrong, but my interpretation of these findings is that young children find it easier to assume that others know, sense and remember everything than to figure out precisely who knows, senses and remembers what. Their default position is to assume superpowers until teaching or experience tells them otherwise.

This assumption is related to the development of a faculty called “theory of mind”, which concerns our understanding of others’ thoughts, perception, wants and feelings. Theory of mind is important to social functioning but it takes time to develop. Some 3-year-olds and many 4-year-olds simply assume that others have complete, accurate knowledge of the world.

A similar pattern is seen with children’s understanding of the inevitability of death. Studies by my collaborator Emily Burdett at the University of Oxford suggest that the default assumption is that others are immortal.

The finding that the younger Maya children thought all the gods would know what was in the gourd is important for another reason: simple indoctrination cannot account for it. Whatever some people say, children do not need to be indoctrinated to believe in god. They naturally gravitate towards the idea.

My contention is that these various features of developing minds – an attraction to agent-based explanations, a tendency to explain the natural world in terms of design and purpose, an assumption that others have superpowers – makes children naturally receptive to the idea that there may be one or more god which helps account for the world around them.

It is important to note that this concept of religion deviates from theological beliefs. Children are born believers not of Christianity, Islam or any other theology but of what I call “natural religion”. They have strong natural tendencies toward religion, but these tendencies do not inevitably propel them towards any one religious belief.

Instead, the way our minds solve problems generates a god-shaped conceptual space waiting to be filled by the details of the culture into which they are born.

The Santa delusion

IF RELIGION comes naturally to children, doesn’t that put God on the same footing as Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy – a being that children should outgrow? And does it not also mean that belief in God is childish?

Let’s examine these claims. The analogy begins to weaken when we recognise that many adults come to believe in God having rejected the idea as children, or after rethinking their childhood beliefs and embracing them as adults. That is, they sometimes reason their way to religious beliefs. People do not begin or resume believing in Father Christmas in adulthood.

Santa and the Tooth Fairy also fail to fully fit the conceptual space that children (and adults) have because of their natural cognition. They do not readily account for perceived order and purpose in the natural world, for great fortune and misfortune, for matters concerning morality, life, death and the afterlife and they have little relevance in day-to-day matters outside their very limited ranges of concern – that is, Christmas presents and compensation for lost teeth. Their superknowledge and superperception is circumscribed in curious ways. Santa knows if you’ve been bad or good but does he know all that you do? The Tooth Fairy knows when you have lost a tooth but not where you have put your car keys.

Note, too, that adults do not typically eat sacrifices placed out for gods and pretend that the gods ate them the way they eat Santa’s cookies. If indoctrination and theatrical acts of deception were the bulk of what gods had going for them conceptually, adults would outgrow them too.

It is easy to be sympathetic to the idea that we should abandon “childish” thinking in adulthood. But why does labelling an idea childish automatically make it bad, dangerous or wrong? It is true that children know less than adults and make more mistakes in reasoning, so their judgements are not as trustworthy. But what follows from this is only that we should more carefully scrutinise the beliefs of children than those of adults, particularly if they deviate from what adults believe.

But adults generally do believe in gods. That such belief begins in childhood and typically endures into adulthood places it in the same class as believing in the permanence of solid objects, the continuity of time, the predictability of natural laws, the fact that causes precede effects, that people have minds, that their mothers love them and numerous others. If believing in gods is being childish in the same respect as holding these sorts of beliefs, then belief in gods is in good company.

From New Scientist - March 2012

Religion is the key to civilisation

As early humans expanded beyond hunter-gatherer groups, religion was the glue that held societies full of strangers together

By Ara Norenzayan

Read more: “The God issue: New science of religion“

ON A hilltop in what is now south-eastern Turkey rests the world’s oldest temple of worship. With its massive, T-shaped stone pillars carved with images of animals, Göbekli Tepe is challenging long-held assumptions about the origins of civilisation. While archaeologists are unearthing clues and debating their meaning, the significance of the site escapes no one.

No evidence of agriculture has been found at the site, which may be explained by the fact that it dates back about 11,500 years, making it old enough to have been built by hunter-gatherers. Yet the monumental architecture of Göbekli Tepe would have required the participation of many hundreds, possibly thousands, of people (Documenta Praehistorica, vol 37, p 239). It may therefore hold clues to two of the deepest puzzles of human civilisation: how did human societies scale up from small, mobile groups of hunter-gatherers to large, sedentary societies? And how did organised religions spread to colonise most minds in the world?

The first puzzle is one of cooperation. Up until about 12,000 years ago all humans lived in relatively small bands. Today, virtually everyone lives in vast, cooperative groups of mostly unrelated strangers. How did this happen?

In evolutionary biology cooperation is usually explained by one of two forms of altruism: cooperation among kin and reciprocal altruism – you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. But cooperation among strangers is not easily explained by either.

As group size increases, both forms of altruism break down. With ever-greater chances of encountering strangers, opportunities for cooperation among kin decline. Reciprocal altruism – without extra safeguards such as institutions for punishing freeloaders – also rapidly stops paying off.

The second puzzle is how certain religious traditions became so widespread. If you are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or an agnostic or atheist descendant of any of these, you are the heir to an extraordinarily successful religious movement that started as an obscure cultural experiment.

“Many are called, but few are chosen,” says the Gospel according to Matthew. This might as well describe the law of religious evolution, which dictates that while legions of new religious entities are created, most of them die out, save a potent few that survive and flourish.

“While legions of new religions are created, most of them die out save for a potent few that survive and flourish”

In the long run, almost all religious movements fail. In one analysis of the stability of 200 utopian communes, both religious and secular, in 19th century America, Richard Sosis of the University of Connecticut in Storrs found a striking pattern. The average lifespan of the religious communes was a mere 25 years. In 80 years, 9 out of 10 had disbanded. Secular communes, most of which were socialist, fared even worse: they lasted for an average of 6.4 years and 9 out of 10 disappeared in less than 20 years (Cross-Cultural Research, vol 34, p 70).

Göbekli Tepe suggests an elegant solution to both puzzles: each answers the other. To understand how, we need to revisit the lively debates about the evolutionary origins of religion.

A growing view is that religious beliefs and rituals arose as an evolutionary by-product of ordinary cognitive functions (see “The God issue: We are all born believers”). Once that happened, the stage was set for rapid cultural evolution that eventually led to large societies with “Big Gods”.

Some early cultural variants of religion presumably promoted prosocial behaviours such as cooperation, trust and self-sacrifice while encouraging displays of religious devotion, such as fasts, food taboos, extravagant rituals and other “hard-to-fake” behaviours which reliably transmitted believers’ sincere faith (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 30, p 244), and signalled their intention to cooperate (Evolutionary Anthropology, vol 12, p 264). Religion thus forged anonymous strangers into moral communities tied together with sacred bonds under a common supernatural jurisdiction.

In turn, such groups would have been larger and more cooperative, and hence more successful in competition for resources and habitats. As these ever-expanding groups grew they took their religions with them, further ratcheting up social solidarity in a runaway process that softened the limitations on group size imposed by kinship and reciprocity.

From there it is a short step to the morally concerned Big Gods of the major world religions. People steeped in the Abrahamic faiths are so accustomed to seeing a link between religion and morality that it is hard for them to imagine that religion did not start that way. Yet the gods of the smallest hunter-gatherer groups, such as the Hadza of east Africa and the San of the Kalahari, are unconcerned with human morality. In these transparent societies where face-to-face interaction is the norm, it is hard to escape the social spotlight. Kin altruism and reciprocity are sufficient to maintain social bonds.

However, as groups expand in size, anonymity invades relationships and cooperation breaks down. Studies show that feelings of anonymity – even illusory, such as wearing dark glasses – are the friends of selfishness and cheating (Psychological Science, vol 21, p 311). Social surveillance, such as being in front of a camera or an audience, has the opposite effect. Even subtle exposure to drawings resembling eyes encourages good behaviour towards strangers (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 26, p 245). As the saying goes, “watched people are nice people”.

It follows, then, that people play nice when they think a god is watching them, and those around them (see “In atheists we distrust”). The anthropological record supports this idea. In moving from the smallest scale human societies to the largest and most complex, Big Gods – powerful, omniscient, interventionist watchers – become increasingly common, and morality and religion become increasingly intertwined (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 24, p 126).

Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and Harvey Whitehouse of the University of Oxford have found a similar shift in ritual forms: as societies get larger and more complex, rituals become routine and are used to transmit and reinforce doctrines (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 32, p 50). Similarly, notions of supernatural punishment, karma, damnation and salvation, and heaven and hell are common in modern religions, but relatively infrequent in hunter-gatherer cultures.

Several lines of experimental evidence point in the same direction. In one study, children were instructed not to look inside a box, and then left alone with it. Those who had been told that a supernatural agent called Princess Alice was watching, and actually believed in her existence, were much less likely to peek (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol 109, p 311).

Economic games have also been used to probe prosocial behaviour. The dictator game, for example, involves two anonymous players in a one-off transaction. Player 1 is given some money and must decide how much of it to give to player 2. Player 2 receives the money (or none) and the game ends. Experiments by Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and his colleagues found that, across 15 diverse societies from all over the world, believers in the Abrahamic God gave away more money than those who believed in local deities who are not as omniscient and morally concerned (Science, vol 327, p 1480).

My colleague Azim Shariff and I planted thoughts of God in people before they played the dictator game by subtly exposing them to words such as divine, God and spirit. Other participants played the game without religious prompts. The reminders of God had a powerful effect. Most people in the unexposed group pocketed the lot but those primed to think of God were much more generous (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 803). My colleague Will Gervais and I found that religious reminders heightened believers’ feelings of being under surveillance (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol 48, p 298).

Religion, with its belief in watchful gods and extravagant rituals and practices, has been a social glue for most of human history. But recently some societies have succeeded in sustaining cooperation with secular institutions such as courts, police and mechanisms for enforcing contracts. In some parts of the world, especially Scandinavia, these institutions have precipitated religion’s decline by usurping its community-building functions. These societies with atheist majorities – some of the most cooperative, peaceful and prosperous in the world – have climbed religion’s ladder and then kicked it away.

Subtle reminders of secular moral authority, words such as civic, jury and police, have the same fairness-promoting effect as reminders of God in the dictator game. People have discovered new ways to be nice to each other without a watchful God.

In atheists we distrust

One of the most persistent but hidden prejudices tied to religion is intolerance of atheists. Surveys consistently find that in societies with religious majorities, atheists have one of the lowest approval ratings of any social group, including other religions (American Sociological Review, vol 71, p 211).

This intolerance has a long history. Back in 1689, Enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote in A Letter Concerning Toleration: “Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the Being of a God. Promises, Covenants, and Oaths, which are the Bonds of Humane Society, can have no hold upon an Atheist.”

Why do believers reject atheists, who are not a visible, powerful or even a coherent social group? The answer appears to be the same force that helped religions expand while maintaining social cohesion: supernatural surveillance.

My colleagues Will Gervais, Azim Shariff and I have found that Locke’s intuition – that atheists cannot be trusted to cooperate – is the root of the intolerance (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 101, p 1189). Outward displays of belief in a watchful God are viewed as a proxy for trustworthiness. Intolerance of atheists is driven by the intuition that people behave better if they feel that a God is watching them.

While atheists think of their disbelief as a private matter of conscience, believers treat their absence of belief in supernatural surveillance as a threat to cooperation and honesty.