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BeliefinGod.pdf
https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721418754491
Current Directions in Psychological Science 2018, Vol. 27(4) 263 –268 © The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0963721418754491 www.psychologicalscience.org/CDPS
ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
At one point in the prehistory of our species, no one believed in a god. Today, an estimated 80% of humans are theists (P. Zuckerman, 2007). Why did the belief in gods become so broadly and powerfully held? Religion has fascinated psychologists since James (1902), but a recent body of research has sharply focused on the reasons people believe in gods—defined here as “supernatural beings believed to have created or [to] govern all reality, intervene in human affairs, and enforce or support human morality” (Botero et al., 2014, p. 16784). Here, we separate these reasons along Mayr’s (1961) ultimate versus proximate categorization of causal explanations. Ultimate explanations focus on why a behavior evolved—its functional origins as an adaptation or evolutionary by-product. Proximate expla- nations focus on the immediate factors influencing how and when a behavior is performed. For example, the proximate explanation for a bird undertaking its yearly migration is the experience of changing daily hours of sunlight, but the ultimate explanation is that because of the scarce winter food supply, better survival and reproductive opportunities were afforded to those who migrated to warmer climates.
Ultimate and proximate causes thus provide comple- mentary—rather than competing—explanations for a behavior. Although not without critics (see Vromen, 2017, for a discussion), the ultimate-proximate distinction has proved useful for preventing confusion about different
types of causation (Scott-Phillips, Dickins, & West, 2011). For example, a question posed at one level of explanation cannot be answered at another level of explanation. An ultimate question about why cooperation exists requires an explanation for the evolution of cooperation, such as that it provides a selective advantage by increasing the fitness of one’s kin. It cannot be answered with a proxi- mate explanation for cooperation, such as concerns for praise and blame (Scott-Phillips et al., 2011). This ultimate- proximate distinction thus provides a useful organizing framework for recent research on the belief in God.
Ultimate Reasons for the Cognitive Features Making Belief in God Intuitive
Features of the human mind have arisen as evolved adaptations to environmental challenges throughout our prehistory. However, many authors have argued that these cognitive adaptations have, as a by-product, made humans prone to the conception of supernatural agents (Norenzayan et al., 2016). An early, oft-cited example of such a cognitive adaptation is our hypersensitivity to
754491CDPXXX10.1177/0963721418754491Mercier et al.Belief in God research-article2018
Corresponding Author: Azim F. Shariff, University of California, Irvine, Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, 4558 Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway, Irvine, CA 92697 E-mail: [email protected]
Belief in God: Why People Believe, and Why They Don’t
Brett Mercier1, Stephanie R. Kramer2, and Azim F. Shariff1 1Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, and 2Department of Psychology, University of Oregon
Abstract Belief in a god or gods is a central feature in the lives of billions of people and a topic of perennial interest within psychology. However, research over the past half decade has achieved a new level of understanding regarding both the ultimate and proximate causes of belief in God. Ultimate causes—the evolutionary influences on a trait—shed light on the adaptive value of belief in God and the reasons why a tendency toward this belief exists in humans. Proximate causes—the immediate influences on the expression of a trait—explain variation and changes in belief. We review this research and discuss remaining barriers to a fuller understanding of belief in God.
Keywords belief, God, evolution, religion
264 Mercier et al.
cues of humanlike agency (Guthrie, 1993). Because failing to notice potentially dangerous agents in our ancestral envi- ronment was costlier than making false alarms, our agency- detection system evolved to be tilted toward overperception. But the by-product of being adaptively tuned to overper- ceive agency is that humans are biased toward perceiving agents—such as gods—behind natural phenomena.
Alongside this hypersensitive agency-detection device, theorists have described biases for overperceiv- ing human-relevant purposes behind events and objects—adaptive because of the necessity of decipher- ing intentionality and the usefulness of understanding tools but leading in turn to a tendency to make attribu- tions of divine purpose (Kelemen, 2004). In addition, because of the importance of understanding mental states, humans evolved separate systems for thinking about social stimuli and physical, nonsocial objects (Bloom, 2007). Although this was adaptive for our social cognition, a by-product was that it made it easy for humans to imagine the existence of disembodied supernatural agents that nonetheless had an active mental existence (Forstmann & Burgmer, 2015).
These by-products of innately occurring cognitive features provided the psychological raw materials from which supernatural beliefs were culturally shaped into shared God beliefs (Gervais, Willard, Norenzayan, & Henrich, 2011). Unlike the gods of most modern reli- gions, the supernatural agents that early societies believed in tended to be nonmoralistic, with limited powers and knowledge (Roes & Raymond, 2003). To explain the transition, cultural evolutionary theorists have argued that, in a process roughly analogous to genetic evolution, selective pressures made certain cul- tural beliefs more likely to survive and spread than others. As human group sizes increased, it became dif- ficult to track which members were cooperative con- tributors and which were defecting free riders, straining the mechanisms maintaining group cohesion. Beliefs in omniscient supernatural watchers capable of doling out punishments and rewards helped solve this problem by deterring free riding, giving groups adopting these beliefs an advantage over other groups (Norenzayan et al., 2016; though see the commentaries to that article for criticisms and alternative perspectives). In a recent cross-cultural study demonstrating this religiously inspired prosociality, researchers found that the more individuals believed their gods were punitive and knowledgeable about humans, the more money these individuals shared with anonymous coreligionists in an economic game (Purzycki et al., 2016). In another study, subtle reminders of God made people more charitable, but only when these reminders were of God’s punitive aspects (Yilmaz & Bahçekapili, 2016).
Thus, increased cooperation made groups who believed in watchful, moralizing gods more likely to
survive and spread their beliefs, making these beliefs more common. Analysis of historical societies has found that these beliefs were especially likely to spread where the need for cooperation was high, such as in societies with rights to movable property, high political complex- ity, or resource scarcity (Botero et al., 2014).
Proximate Reasons for Who Believes and When
While ultimate explanations tell us why specific cogni- tive biases evolved, proximate explanations show how and when these biases contribute to belief in God. Understanding these cognitive, motivational, and social factors that influence belief helps explain the great variation in religiosity among our species—not just across countries (84% of people in the Philippines report being certain about God’s existence, compared with 4% in Japan; Smith, 2012) but across time—which can in turn inform long-standing debates about secularization.
Cognitive factors
One method of examining the proximate cognitive fac- tors influencing belief in God is to compare individuals who differ on cognitive factors, such as the tendency to rely on evolved cognitive intuitions. People with an analytical thinking style—that is, people more likely to override their intuitions in decision making—are less likely to be believers (Pennycook, Ross, Koehler, & Fugelsang, 2016). In addition to overriding intuitions, the extent to which people experience these intu- itions in the first place also plays a role. Because attributing mental states to unseen agents facilitates belief in God, people who less easily perceive and understand the mental states of others (such as indi- viduals on the autism spectrum and men relative to women) show lower levels of belief (Norenzayan, Gervais, & Trzesniewski, 2012).
Though still controversial, convergent research sug- gests that more intelligent individuals are less likely to believe in God (Kanazawa, 2010; Lynn, Harvey, & Nyborg, 2009). Although partially explained by its overlap with analytic thinking, the relationship between belief in God and intelligence also has compelling motivation-based explanations. For example, M. Zuckerman, Silberman, and Hall (2013) argue that more intelligent individuals may have less need for the psychological benefits that religion provides (such as a sense that the world is controllable; see below) because they can more ably generate these benefits themselves. Intelligent people are also more likely to be nonconformists and thus feel more comfortable deviating from the (typically) reli- gious majority.
Belief in God 265
Motivational reasons
In addition to studying the factors that make people more or less cognitively receptive to belief in God, research has also examined the factors that motivate (or demotivate) people to believe. For instance, Sedikides and Gebauer (2010) present a meta-analysis showing that high self-enhancers—people with a strong desire to see themselves positively—have higher levels of intrinsic religiosity, especially in societies that place greater value on religion. They argue that elements of religion—such as a believed association with God— create feelings of positive self-regard, motivating high self-enhancers to adopt stronger religious beliefs. How- ever, more research is needed to confirm this causal direction.
Other research has used experiments to provide a causal test of motivational factors influencing belief. Epley and colleagues show not only that chronically lonely people are less likely to believe in God but also that randomly assigning people to situations that increase loneliness (such as informing people that they will probably be alone later in life) increases reports of belief (Epley, Akalis, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2008).
Compensatory-control theory posits that people strive to believe their world is predictable and control- lable (Kay, Gaucher, Napier, Callan, & Laurin, 2008). On the basis of this theory, Kay and colleagues (2008) argue that belief in God is motivated by a need for perceived control, which they demonstrated by showing that experimentally threatening people’s sense of con- trol can increase belief in God. Experimentally increas- ing mortality salience has also been shown to increase belief (Vail, Arndt, & Abdollahi, 2012), which may explain why religiosity tends to increase when people get older, become terminally ill, or experience a natural disaster (Bentzen, 2013; Jong, 2013). The ability of the belief in God—and religion more generally—to palliate the effect of negative life events has been offered as one explanation for religiosity’s association with greater well-being (Whitehead & Bergeman, 2011).
Together, these cognitive and motivational factors help explain where and when belief in God has declined around the world. For example, some research- ers have argued that the declines in belief over the 20th century can be explained by the corresponding increases in IQ over this same period (Lynn et al., 2009). Likewise, religiosity has tended to decline when strong and predictable political systems dampen the uncertainty and adversity in a society. The religiosity of the United States, which is aberrantly high among rich countries, has been attributed to the sense of eco- nomic insecurity caused by its (relatively) laissez faire economic policies (Norris & Inglehart, 2004).
Social factors
Finally—but critically—declines in belief are acceler- ated by feedback loops with changing cultural norms. In religious societies, people are socialized to believe in God through communities that value and encourage belief (Sherkat, 2003). This socialization, particularly the religious behaviors of one’s community, appears to be one of the strongest determinants of belief. Accord- ing to Henrich (2009), humans evolved to be acutely sensitive to credibility-enhancing displays in their ten- dency to adopt beliefs. For example, claims that blue mushrooms are not poisonous are more credible when the claimant eats the mushrooms (Henrich, 2009). Con- sistent with this theory, research has shown that the more frequently children observe others not just pro- fessing belief in God but engaging in religious credibility- enhancing displays (such as volunteering for religious organizations), the more likely these children are to believe in God as adults (Lanman & Buhrmester, 2017). Thus, once triggered, generational declines in belief in God might gain momentum through a positive feedback effect. Children of each generation are raised witness- ing fewer displays of religious commitment than the last, making them less likely to believe in God and less likely to expose their own children to displays of com- mitment (Willard & Cingl, 2017; see Fig. 1).
Limitations With the Literature
Though the past 5 years have seen remarkable progress in the psychology underlying belief in God, a more complete understanding of the phenomenon has been hampered by significant limitations in interpreting what is by far the primary source of data about beliefs in God: self-reports.
The first issue derives from a Western and Abrahamic bias in the psychology of religion. Efforts to conduct research outside the monotheistic, Judeo-Christian reli- gious traditions in North America and Europe are limited not just by inconvenience and political restrictions (e.g., in China and several Muslim-majority countries) but also by conceptual differences in the meaning of belief. That is, methods of measuring belief in God that assume a traditional Western conception of God may not be appropriate for understanding the beliefs of people with different conceptions of God (Höllinger & Eder, 2016). These cultural variations in the meaning of belief are rarely assessed (for a notable exception, see Bluemke, Jong, Grevenstein, Mikloušić, & Halberstadt, 2016). How similar is an American Christian’s belief in a personal God to the Vedic theistic beliefs in India or to ancestor worship in China? Although someone from each country may answer affirmatively to straightforward questions
266
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Belief in God 267
about belief in “God” (if only to conform to Western surveyors’ expectations), it remains unclear whether these homogenous responses disguise psychologically important differences.
Even in Western contexts, the continued evolution of religion has led to widening conceptions of God, which may not cleanly correspond to traditional beliefs. For example, 30% of Europeans, including many self- described “atheists,” report believing in a “spirit God or vital life force” (Bréchon, 2007, p. 469). Should this quasideism be defined as belief in God? Clearly, tradi- tional methods are not fully capturing the scope and meaning of belief in these contexts.
The other major challenge to the integrity of self- report-based research on belief in God is that reports may reflect self-presentation concerns as much as genu- ine belief. Around the world, people show considerable prejudice against nonbelievers (Gervais et al., 2017), and majorities consider belief necessary for morality (Pew Research Center, 2014). Thus, people may be inclined to present themselves as more religious than they truly are. Evidence of exaggeration in church attendance supports this concern—as evidenced by discrepancies between direct self-reports and head counts (Hadaway, Marler, & Chaves, 1993) or time-use diaries (Brenner, 2011). And though it is harder to con- firm the veracity of people’s internal beliefs than their behavior, research supports the idea that people are indeed overreporting their belief in God. Survey tech- niques that decrease socially desirable responding, such as responding anonymously online rather than directly to a live surveyor (Cox, Jones, & Navarro-Rivera, 2014) or using the unmatched-count technique (Gervais & Najle, 2018), suggest that rates of belief may be sub- stantially lower than traditional methods have assumed.
The potential invalidity of self-reported belief calls into question the interpretation of many findings within the social scientific literature on religion. Consider research that finds relationships between God beliefs and any construct that might be misreported because of social pressure (e.g., happiness, health, prosociality). Any correlation between belief in God and (for exam- ple) happiness may be the result not of a genuine relationship between the two but of a third variable: individual differences in people’s tendency to overre- port levels of both. Furthermore, experimental studies— including those discussed above—that show changes in self-reported belief in God could very well be reveal- ing changes in people’s willingness to admit their belief rather than changes in belief itself.
These methodological questions should weigh heav- ily on the field. The past 5 years have seen an expanding body of research on belief in God; researchers should devote some of the next 5 to tackling these critical chal- lenges. Until we do, we will not fully understand the
extent, nature, or future of how belief in God factors into our psychology and society.
Recommended Reading
Norenzayan, A., Shariff, A. F., Gervais, W. M., Willard, A. K., McNamara, R. A., Slingerland, E., & Henrich, J. (2016). (See References). An in-depth review of the cultural evo- lution of religion plus an assortment of commentaries that discuss additional and alternative perspectives.
Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2004). (See References). A review of the causes and consequences of secularization around the world.
Sedikides, C. (2010). Why does religiosity persist? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14, 3–6. The introduction to the 2010 Personality and Social Psychology Review spe- cial issue on religion, which provides a summary and overview of the approaches contained within the issue.
Zuckerman, M., Silberman, J., & Hall, J. A. (2013). (See References). A meta-analysis, comprehensive review, and theoretical discussion of the research examining the relationship between intelligence and religiosity.
Action Editor
Randall W. Engle served as action editor for this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.
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