Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind

by Mark Pagel

  Our biases extend to religions, where all or nearly all of them draw on a restricted range of typically human forms with magical powers, such as the ability to be everywhere at once; they can subvert causation, pass through physical barriers, or create something out of nothing. All or nearly all promise things that we can never attain on our own, such as salvation, redemption, or immortality, and for which demand is unquenchable. But why do religions so often take these particular forms, usually headed up by a God who has a purpose? Ironically, the answer might lie in the nature of our minds as organs designed by natural selection to understand our world.

  The psychologist Paul Bloom says that children are naturally prone to a dualist view of minds as something distinct from ordinary matter such as the matter our brains are made of. This is a philosophical view that finds its way back to the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes, who famously wondered how the “incorporeal” substance of our minds interacted with our decidedly corporeal brains, and it is a question to which we still do not have good answers. The significance of dualism according to Bloom is that it predisposes us to allow that other things, like rocks, trees, the sky, waterfalls, or even clouds, can have minds. After all, if minds can exist independently of physical objects, but can nevertheless somehow communicate through them, why not? But of course if a mind can exist independently of a body, then it can also wander alone as a disembodied spirit.

  We are also, Bloom suggests, psychologically predisposed to see purpose in things. We have a taste for teleology, or the expectation that things happen and exist for a reason. Thus, children might tell you that clouds are “for raining” or that lions are so that we will “go to the zoo.” Bloom goes further and suggests that this predisposes us to be creationists at heart, because if things have a purpose, our naturally dualistic minds consider that something—a creator perhaps—gave them that purpose. In an adult mind, these tendencies turn into an appetite for religious explanations of what can otherwise be an inscrutable world. In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, the English novelist and essayist Julian Barnes describes the novel as telling “beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard and exact truths,” saying, “We talk of the suspension of disbelief as the mental prerequisite for enjoying fiction, theatre, film, representational painting.” The scenes and stories they depict “never happened, could never have happened, but we believe that they did… .” Religions, says Barnes, “were the first great inventions of the fiction writers. A convincing representation and a plausible explanation of the world for understandably confused minds. A beautiful, shapely story containing hard exact lies.” Or, as Voltaire put it, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

  Voltaire might be right. In The Natural History of Religion, the philosopher David Hume said, “We find human faces in the moon, armies in clouds… and ascribe malice and goodwill to every thing that hurts or pleases us.” Daniel Dennett calls this tendency to attribute agency to things the “intentional stance.” Most things in our environment that move and behave—especially other humans—can be dangerous, or can at least make a difference to our lives. If we adopt the stance that they have intentions—and, in effect, minds—like our own, it allows us to make predictions about how they might behave. We can use the intentional stance to simulate what an agent might experience and to make guesses about what its goals might be or what it is thinking. Any particular stance we adopt need not be correct; it merely needs to provide a useful shorthand for engaging with the world. If it does so, the conclusions and predictions we derive from adopting the stance then become embedded into our understanding of a particular agent, and allow us to make quick decisions that could, in the extreme, save our lives.

  Like our dualism and teleology, the intentional stance might set us up to embrace religion as we seek to understand and even predict what our imagined creator might do next. Still, how can we so easily and uncritically accept this sort of religious stance when it asks us to believe things that are palpably false—that there are beings that can pass through walls, have no weight, live forever, and otherwise break the laws of physics? An unexpected answer is that religious beliefs might have flourished throughout our history precisely because they do not appear to be palpably false, at least to our minds. One of the more compelling demonstrations of experimental psychology of the mid-twentieth century was to show how easy it is for animals to acquire what we might call superstitions or magical thoughts that connect some action to some outcome. In the late 1940s, the provocative and influential learning theorist B. F. Skinner studied pigeons put on what students of learning call reinforcement schedules. A reinforcement schedule describes how often and in response to what behavior or behaviors an animal receives a reward or punishment. Not surprisingly, animals will generally do more of the things they come to associate with rewards, and less of the things they have been punished for in their past. Indeed, this is the implicit and, to some, sinister message of the Jesuit motto that goes: “Give me the child for his first seven years, and I’ll give you the man.”

  In a typical learning experiment, animals will be rewarded either on some fixed schedule, in which they receive a reward perhaps every time or every second or third time they perform a particular behavior, or a variable schedule, in which rewards come at variable intervals, perhaps sometimes after one bout of behavior, other times after three, or maybe other times two, the precise interval constantly being varied. Skinner’s insight was to ask what would happen if animals were put on reinforcement schedules that provided food rewards not in response to what the bird was doing, but at random intervals of time. Skinner’s random reinforcement schedule meant that a food pellet would drop into a food hopper independently of what the bird happened to be doing in the moments before, and the provision of food was not dependent upon any particular behavior.

  To his surprise, some of the pigeons on this regime began to twirl in circles, or raise and lower their heads, others would swing their bodies from side to side, or prance around the cage. Skinner realized that pigeons produce some of these behaviors spontaneously anyway, so if they produced one just by accident shortly before a piece of food arrived, they would somehow associate the behavior with getting food and be more likely to perform it again. It was as if the pigeon had come to believe its behavior would make more food appear (although Skinner, who treated the mind as an unknown “black box,” would never have used such language). Because rewarded behaviors are more likely to be performed, they were also more likely, just by chance, to get rewarded again. It wasn’t even necessary for the reward to be presented every time the pigeon produced the behavior (remember it was a random reinforcement schedule). The occasional twirl or prance might be missed, but just so long as some proportion of the behaviors was rewarded, they would continue. In fact, one of the most robust findings of learning experiments is that behaviors rewarded every now and then rather than consistently are far more resistant to fading away when rewards are eventually withdrawn. It goes by the term partial reinforcement and explains why children nag so much.

  We posed the question of how people can come to believe things that are false, and Skinner’s work provides an answer. In fact, the irony of Skinner’s work is that it shows how our hard-wired tendency to look for causes and to attribute agency to things means it is precisely where no real cause exists, or the true causes are beyond our grasp, that we are vulnerable to finding a false one. Thus, to a hungry pigeon unable to predict when the next food will come, twirling in a circle, or prancing around the cage, or raising or lowering its head or wings would have been as good a bet as any for obtaining a reward, because, after all, the food appeared at random. To a thirsty person, unable to predict when the next rain will fall on their parched savannah landscape, whatever they happen to be doing just before it does finally come might come to be associated with making it happen, and in the blink of an eye a religious or superstitious belief would be born.

  But this raises the question of why Skinner’s p
igeons pranced around or raised and lowered their heads rather than doing precisely nothing. It is an important question because a pigeon that did nothing would have received just as much food as those that had behaved, or done something. In fact, we could even speculate that Skinner’s work provides us with a framework for understanding the origin of quiet and reclusive monk- or nunlike contemplation. Imagine that one of his pigeons had happened to be doing precisely nothing just before the food was presented! The answer to why Skinner’s pigeons behaved is that animals probably have a bias hard-wired into their brains to do so—to try things out, and to poke and prod at their environment. For most of the things that matter in our lives we have to behave to get them, or to make them happen. We might suspect then that genes for behaving—that is, genes that encourage us to act on our environments—will have spread as those who carried them would have been more successful, on average, than their more retiring counterparts. And, if it is generally true that doing something is better than doing nothing, this bias is probably stronger in humans than in any other animal. We have a great ability to use our behaviors to change our world, and in ways that suit us, and so natural selection will have strongly favored dispositions to have hunches and to try things out. Indeed, this might be one reason why we are so prone to finding causes of things in the first place.

  If you are feeling smug and superior to the pigeons, remember we throw salt over our shoulders, touch wood, avoid black cats, and become anxious on Friday the 13th. Next time you are in a tall building, check to see if it has a thirteenth floor. Many don’t, even though of course one of the floors is the thirteenth. Each time we perform one of our superstitious acts and nothing bad happens, the superstitious behavior is rewarded and we breathe a sigh of relief. It is a logic our abstract minds can engage in, and they do. If allowed to get out of hand, people can enter the beckoning corridors of obsessive-compulsive behaviors, including hand-wringing, repeatedly checking that doors are locked, and obsessive cleaning—these are just the human versions of Skinner’s prancing pigeons. Some religions get people to hug trees or to worship animals, to hit themselves with sticks, recite mantras, starve themselves, prance around, and move their bodies from side to side. They also get us to perform strange rituals of bowing, genuflecting, burning incense, chanting and singing in special buildings we call churches, all in the hope of bringing about things we want to happen, but which are utterly out of our control—Skinner’s pigeons again? Our capacity for language puts us at even greater risk for developing false beliefs because, unlike Skinner’s pigeons, we don’t even have to witness an event to know about it. Churches take advantage of this by widely publicizing miracles, and then beatifying or even granting sainthood to people, all as ways of advertising a connection between beliefs and outcomes.

  On top of our predilection to find causes even where they don’t exist, a simple and yet true law of nature means that in just those extreme circumstances when all other natural explanations have been exhausted, the supernatural, magical, or superstitious explanation is likely to appear to work. The phenomenon of regression to the mean tells us extreme circumstances are likely to return spontaneously to less extreme circumstances over time. Thus, when you roll two dice and get two sixes, your next roll will normally be less fruitful. This is because many improbable chance factors come into play to produce two sixes, and it is unlikely they will happen twice in a row. For two dice, it is easy to calculate the probabilities exactly. There are 36 possible outcomes to the roll of two dice, ranging from (1,1) to (6,6). For each of the possible 36 outcomes of the first roll of two dice, there are 36 possible outcomes of the second roll, or 1,296 possible outcomes. Only one of these corresponds to (6,6),(6,6). By comparison, if you get two sixes on the first roll, 35 of the 36 outcomes of the second roll are not (6,6), and so (6,6) followed by something else is far more probable.

  The same principles are true of other extreme phenomena, even if it is difficult to calculate their probabiities exactly. Regression is why you shouldn’t count on a long run of good weather to plan a picnic for tomorrow, why the tallest parents tend to have children shorter than them and vice versa, why exceptional school reports one term often disappoint the next, and it is why luck does run out. In each case, a set of improbable events has to combine to produce an outcome, and it is less likely that all of them will come together again than that they won’t. So, regression is also why praying for a hurricane to end, a flood to recede or for rains to end a drought is more likely to work the longer your desired outcome hasn’t occurred. If you happen to think up a supernatural explanation just before some extreme event spontaneously returns to “baseline,” you might just attribute it to your belief rather than to regression.

  In other walks of life, the stock analyst’s advice to buy stocks when they are low and sell when they are high capitalizes (in this case, literally) on regression effects, but we pay stock analysts to give us this advice. All doctors know most common illnesses spontaneously get better within about two weeks. If a shaman-doctor proposes some sort of ritual or ceremonial treatment in that time, even if ineffective, it can come in our minds to be connected to the improvement, just as Skinner’s pigeons associated their twirls with getting food. We often consult homeopaths as a last resort only after other medical treatments have failed. Homeopaths might owe to regression a greater proportion of what success they do have than they care to entertain, but if you have been “cured” by one you will not believe this. Finally, regression is also why, as the psychologist Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, praising your children seldom works nearly as well as a rebuke.

  THREE REASONS TO BET AGAINST EXPLOITATION

  THE FOREGOING gives us plenty of reasons to expect that cultural evolution can sculpt the arts, music, and religion to fit into the particular crevices of our brains. But I want to suggest that there are at least three good reasons to doubt that they are exploitative or hedonistic brain candy. One is they ask and receive far too much of us. Religions can command our loyalty even sometimes to the point of death; music can take control of our emotions; and art can consume our time and money. The “life-dinner” test of the Prologue tells us it is precisely those things that are costly in time and effort, or capable of causing us harm, that we would be expected to evolve defenses to—unless of course they somehow pay their way. A second reason is that—far from being frivolous or purely hedonistic pursuits—it should at least intrigue us that the arts and religions everywhere concern themselves with ideas, shapes, and emotions directly relevant to our lives. In all societies most art is about other people, romance, landscapes, animals, and social relations, except where this has been prohibited by religious beliefs. Music in all cultures expresses or elicits the range of our emotions, and our emotions exist to motivate our actions. Religions are about understanding an inscrutable and even terrifying world. They respond, as Hume in The Natural History of Religion says, to “the incessant hopes and fears that actuate the human mind.”

  The third reason is that it would be surprising indeed had humans missed an opportunity to hitch our survival and well-being to cultural traits that can get our minds so hungrily to pursue aesthetic and psychological rewards. Precisely because the arts and religion can get us to spend the night in rapturous song, believe things that are false, and even put our money, well-being, or lives on the line, they become forces we could put to our own use, somehow to enhance our performance. Any human group that failed to acquire these cultural forms could find themselves in competition with others that had. Religion, art, and music become part of the environment of being human that others have to compete against. If they can somehow promote our survival and reproduction, it will behoove us to adopt them, whether or not they are true, frivolous, or hedonistic!

  CONSOLATION, HOPE, AND OPTIMISM IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF

  EVEN IF we are prepared to accept one or all of these reasons for believing there is more to the arts and religion than mere exploitation and fun, we are left in the case of religio
n with the nagging worry that it is all a delusion or spell. Religions don’t really work as they say they do because nothing really is exchanged between you and the gods: miracles don’t happen, your prayers don’t bring immortality, the winds don’t change direction and blow the enemy’s ships away, and you are not granted protection against arrows or bullets. Even so, it might be important to take a step back from the perspective many of us have in our modern societies of religion as an irrational and non-scientific way of seeing the world. Today, we separate science from religion, but our ancestors would not have had sophisticated scientific knowledge, and what we think of today as a supernatural explanation might not have appeared to them all that different to a natural one.

  It is difficult to overstate the importance of trying to imagine the perspective of someone alive early in our history as a species. Religion at that time, in its earliest forms, might have been something closer to the received causal understanding of the world rather than “religion” in the carefully articulated and restricted modern sense. It would not have been the rather awkward poor relation to “real” scientific understanding that it is today. It would not have been this poor relation because there wasn’t any richer relation. Instead, to prehistoric people, religion provided an explanatory framework for why things happened, and would have acted like a sophisticated model of the cosmos, giving a rationale for people to behave one way as opposed to another in an arbitrary, dangerous, capricious, and unpredictable world.