The Cognitive Science of Religion

A Methodological Introduction to Key Empirical Studies

D. Jason Slone, William W. McCorkle Jr., D. Jason Slone, William W. McCorkle Jr.

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350033702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Psicología de la religión

The Cognitive Science of Religion introduces students to key empirical studies conducted over the past 25 years in this new and rapidly expanding field. In these studies, cognitive scientists of religion have applied the theories, findings and research tools of the cognitive sciences to understanding religious thought, behaviour and social dynamics. Each chapter is written by a leading international scholar, and summarizes in non-technical language the original empirical study conducted by the scholar. No prior or statistical knowledge is presumed, and studies included range from the classic to the more recent and innovative cases. Students will learn about the theories that cognitive scientists have employed to explain recurrent features of religiosity across cultures and historical eras, how scholars have tested those theories, and what the results of those tests have revealed and suggest. Written to be accessible to undergraduates, this provides a much-needed survey of empirical studies in the cognitive science of religion.

CHAPTER 1

WHY DO WE SEE SUPERNATURAL SIGNS IN NATURAL EVENTS?

Jesse Bering

Introduction

Shortly after my mother died, I began to experience certain events that challenged my otherwise skeptical beliefs about the afterlife. To any objective observer, these events wouldn’t seem particularly profound; some were in fact so subtle and mundane that they likely wouldn’t have even registered in my consciousness under normal circumstances. But in the wake of my loss, my mind freighted with grief, these banal happenings took on special significance. It was as though my mom—or rather, her spirit—was attempting to part the veil between this world and the next, intent on communicating with me, her stubbornly atheistic child, by delivering ambiguous messages from beyond the grave.

The morning after she passed, for instance, I awakened to the faint, melodious sounds of the wind chimes that hung from a tree branch just beneath her bedroom window. It was a still morning, but surely a breeze must have stirred it. My knee-jerk thought was not at all in keeping with my beliefs. “That’s her,” I said instinctively to myself. “She telling me she’s okay.”

One evening, as I lay reading in bed, I heard a loud crash—the sound of broken glass. Rushing downstairs to see what had caused it, I found that a stained glass window, an extraction from an old church that I’d propped up decoratively on a shelf, had somehow fallen and shattered on the concrete floor. My mind raced to find an explanation. The cat, perhaps? But the cat had been sleeping soundly at the foot of my bed and had jumped at the sudden noise just as I had. I still can’t be certain, but in all probability, I’d merely left it leaning precariously on the shelf, with an eventual disastrous tumble being inevitable.

Yet just as with the wind chimes, it wasn’t the logical explanation that first leapt to my mind. Rather, it was a supernatural one. My mother hated that stained glass window. “It’s not for me,” I recalled her saying when I first eyed it at an antique shop in Louisiana a few years prior. “But go on, get it if you like it.” And now there it was in a thousand broken pieces on the floor. I should add, this also happened on her birthday—the first since her death—and she’d been occupying my thoughts that whole somber day. In any event, the rationalist in me rejected any such supernatural attributions out of hand. Still, it certainly felt like a sign.

There were also the conversations we’d had on her deathbed. A secular Jew, she was agnostic about the afterlife. We enjoyed speaking openly about it, however. “Who knows,” she’d muse. “But it’s you I’d come back to . . . your brother and sister, they already believe. They wouldn’t need any proof. If I can, I’ll give you a sign.” So, was I just being dense now? The thought of my kind, gentle mother trying desperately to get my attention from the other side was emotionally evocative, and guiltily I began to feel like one of those stereotypical hardheaded—and hardhearted—science types who refuse to open their minds and acknowledge the numinous.

Ultimately, it’s a philosophical question, whether such things have a paranormal element to them. I didn’t believe they did then and I don’t believe they do now. But what does it matter what people say they believe? (See also Gendler 2008.) The fact that my mind so naturally gravitated toward seeing such events as if they were signs fascinated me. And as a cognitive psychologist, I wanted to get to the bottom of these strange subjective phenomena (see also Bloom 2007). What is it about the human mind that so effortlessly translates natural events into messages from another realm—even despite our best attempts to deny that there’s any message in them at all?

Inspired by my mom’s ostensible phantom presence, this was the question I sought to answer in a study I published a few years after her death, conducted when I was still an assistant psychology professor at the University of Arkansas. My colleague Becky Parker and I started off with a simple premise: seeing meaning in natural events (colloquially, what most people would call signs or omens) requires a special form of human social intelligence (Bering & Parker 2006). The technical term for the psychological capacity in question is called theory of mind.

In the everyday social world, we use our theory of mind constantly, and it’s especially easy to grasp the concept when applied to other people’s unexpected behaviors. Let’s say, for example, that you’re out for a stroll at the park one sunny day, minding your own business, when you notice a naked man staggering out from behind some bushes ahead of you. He’s now heading your way. Now, consider the dilemma. Does this person need help—perhaps he’s the victim of a crime or is caught in the grip of a psychotic episode—or is his strange appearance and behavior more sinister? What you see is a body with all its sinews and muscles and eyes darting this way and that. What you don’t see, what you can’t see, is the mind that stirs behind those eyes, causing the curious body before you to behave the way it is.

After all, mental states are abstractions that cannot be directly perceived; similar to other causal properties such as gravity and mass, they’re just theoretical constructs. Intuitively, your theory of mind kicks in, and probably frantically in this case, with you trying to infer what’s going on in that head of his. Essentially, this social cognitive capacity allows you to think about what others are thinking. (In case you’re wondering, I’ve no idea why this man was naked in the bushes and is making a beeline in your direction; I’ll leave that mystery to you.) Hopefully you get the idea. With a theory of mind, we’re better able to explain and predict other people’s actions because we’re putting ourselves in their shoes (or bare feet) and trying to see the world from their perspective. We may get it wrong—we might assume he’s a pervert when in fact he’s the subject of a cruel prank—but the fact that, all day long, we’re busily trying to decipher unobservable mental states such as emotions, intentions, and beliefs is why the evolutionary scholar Nicholas Humphrey referred to our species as the animal kingdom’s “natural psychologists” (Humphrey 1976).

What does all of this have to do with the human habit of seeing meaningful signs in natural events? Becky and I suspected that theory of mind strikes at the heart of it. It’s perhaps not a sine qua non, but a common feature of most supernatural agents, be they God or ghosts, is the presumed presence of a consciousness without a physical body. And since they lack bodies, we can’t reason about what’s on their mind by inferring things from their overt behaviors, facial expressions, or words. Instead, we perceive them as communicating with us through symbolic events. In the absence of a theory of mind, wind chimes are just wind chimes, and the rude cacophony of glass suddenly breaking is, well, just that. But with it, when the emotional climate is just right, these types of things can take on special significance. They seem to be about the communicative intent of an immaterial being. They jumpstart our psychological theorizing. “What is she trying to tell me?” we may find ourselves asking. “What does she mean by this?”

To investigate, we decided to take a developmental approach to the issue, building on previous research showing that theory of mind emerges cumulatively over the course of childhood (see Newman et al. 2010). Whereas children younger than about four years of age struggle to understand that others have beliefs differing from their own, older kids are increasingly able to take opposing, and often complex, recursive perspectives (Perner & Howes 1992). At what age, then, are children cognitively advanced enough to be superstitious in the ways I’ve been referring to, attributing deeper meaning to anomalous occurrences that trigger their theory of mind?

In an attempt to map out these unknown age patterns, I decided to invite my mother’s “ghost” into my research lab at Arkansas and introduce her to a bunch of kids.

Methodology

We didn’t refer to her as a ghost, of course. Our intention certainly wasn’t to scare small children. The whole thing was quite innocuous. I’ll get to that shortly. For now, let me explain the basics of how it all worked. After getting ethics approval, we used advertisements in the local newspapers and parental word of mouth and recruiting from nearby schools to rustle up about 150 kids ranging from three to nine years of age.

Based on what we knew going in about the development of theory-of-mind skills (that they get increasingly sophisticated), we divided the sample into three distinct age groups. The “youngest” group consisted of the three- to four-year-olds, the “middle” group was represented by the five- to six-year-olds, and the “oldest” group was the seven- to nine-year-olds.

Each child was tested separately in a kid-friendly lab, typically while their mom or dad watched the session live on CCTV from an adjacent room. After a brief warm-up period in which the friendly experimenter (Becky) got to know the child—chatting about family or pets, playing together with blocks, drawing pictures on the blackboard—they were asked if they’d like to play a fun game. If they said “yes,” and of course they all did, they were led to the front of the room, where on a table before them sat two large blue boxes side by side. The tops of the boxes were hinged, such that they could be flipped open front to back, revealing the contents by looking down into them. Becky stood on the side of the table facing the front of the boxes, and the child on the opposite side.

Playing the game

“Now,” Becky said. “Two rules, OK? First, you have to stay on that side of the table. And second, only I can open the boxes.” Once the child agreed, she went on. “See this?” Becky asked while holding up a red plastic ball. “I’m going to hide this ball inside one of these two boxes. While I’m hiding it, you’re going to go to the corner and face the wall so that you don’t see where I put it. Then you’re going to come back and guess where the ball is by placing your hand on top of the box that you think it’s inside—like this.” Becky demonstrated by placing a flattened palm on the top of one of the two closed boxes. “Now, if you change your mind,” she added, “you can move your hand to the other box. So, let’s say at first you think the ball is in this box, and then you think, no, maybe it’s in this other box, then you can move your hand, like this.” Again, she demonstrated accordingly, moving her hand from the top of one closed box to the other. “You can change your mind as many times as you want. But wherever your hand is when I say ‘Time’s up!’ is your final choice. If you get it right, then you get to pick a cool sticker. [Every experimenter worth their salt knows that stickers are basically heroin for grade-schoolers.] But if you get it wrong, you don’t get a sticker that time.”

Each kid then got a practice run at the game, just to make sure they understood the ground rules. “Now go hide in the corner,” Becky would say. “And remember, no peeking!” While they were doing that, and after a few seconds of loudly opening and closing both of the lids—just to throw off some of the cleverer little ones who might try to localize the sound—she’d say, “Okay, pick whichever box you think the ball’s in!” Once the child put their hand on one of the boxes, Becky started her timer and stared down at the ticking clock for fifteen seconds, offering them no help. “Time’s up!” she’d announce. “Let’s see where the ball is!” She’d then ceremoniously open the box that they didn’t pick. “Aw, it was in here this time, look,” she’d say, inviting them to have a peek inside. All the while, she kept the other box—the one they’d actually selected—closed.

A rigged system

Here’s the secret. There were in fact two identical balls, so that each of the boxes contained a ball at all times. The kids didn’t know it, but the game was totally rigged. After the practice trial, each child got a total of four tries at the game, but we’d decided in advance whether they’d get each attempt “right” or “wrong.” Furthermore, on a random half of the test trials, something unexpected or surprising (from the child’s perspective, at least) happened in the room as soon as their hand first made contact with one of the boxes.

There were two varieties of these “unexpected events,” as we referred to them in the study. In one case, a desk lamp behind Becky would switch on and off a few times. We didn’t need Industrial Light & Magic to pull this off, just a remote control operated by a research assistant in that adjacent room with the parents. In the other case, a picture hanging on the back of the door to the lab would come crashing to the floor. This was made possible by the research assistant simply lifting a magnet on the other side. By contrast, for the other two trials—the “nonevent trials”—nothing surprising happened.

To keep up morale, everyone was told they guessed correctly on these two nonevent trials. But to win that coveted sticker prize for the two unexpected-event trials, the child’s hand had to end up on the opposite box from the one they’d first chosen.

Introducing Princess Alice

That was the basic setup. Now comes the interesting part. Each child had also been randomly assigned to either the control condition or the experimental condition. The former played the game just as I’ve described. Those in the latter condition, however, got some additional information: someone very special, they were told, would be helping them.

“See this picture?” we asked half of the kids, pointing at a portrait hanging from the back of the door (the same one I mentioned before) of a friendly, smiling woman bedecked in jewels and a crown. If you’re trying to visualize the scene, she bore an uncanny resemblance to a certain Disney character, including being two-dimensional. So, not exactly the stuff of nightmares. “This is a picture of Princess Alice,” said Becky. “Isn’t she pretty? Princess Alice is a magic princess. Do you know what she can do? She can make herself invisible. Do you know what invisible means? It means you can’t see her, even though she’s there.” For those who needed a bit of clarification on the matter, Becky would ...