Stephen Jeffrey / Economist
Explaining Religion
Edited by Andy Ross
Explaining Religion is a European scientific collaboration that
will spend €2m on the search for the biological reasons why so many people
believe in God, gods and religion in general. The study began last September,
will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities.
Religion is arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens. It has none of
the obvious benefits of that other marker of humanity, language. It consumes
huge amounts of resources and it is the subject of violent disagreements. But
science has made significant progress in understanding the biology of language.
So it is time to put religion under the microscope as well.
Explaining Religion will sponsor experiments designed to look at the mental
mechanisms needed to represent an omniscient deity, whether (and how) belief in
such a “surveillance-camera” God might improve reproductive success, and whether
religion enhances a person's reputation. The researchers will also seek to
establish whether different religions foster different levels of co-operation
and whether such co-operation brings collective benefits.
Nina Azari, a neuroscientist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, has looked at
the brains of religious people. She used positron emission tomography (PET) to
measure brain activity in six fundamentalist Christians and six non-religious
controls. Both groups were scanned in six settings: while reading the first
verse of the 23rd psalm, while reciting it out loud, while reading a happy
story, while reciting that story out loud, while reading a neutral text and
while at rest.
Previous research had suggested that the limbic system (which regulates emotion)
is an important centre of religious activity. In fact, when the Christians
recited the psalm there was increased activity in three areas of the frontal and
parietal cortex, which are involved in rational thought. The control group did
not show activity in these parts of their brains when listening to the psalm.
The only thing that triggered limbic activity in either group was reading the
happy story.
Dr Azari's PET study and other similar studies all suggest that religious
activity is spread across many parts of the brain. That conflicts not only with
the limbic-system theory but also with earlier reports of a God spot that
derived partly from work conducted on epileptics, which had suggested that
religious visions are the result of seizures affecting the temporal lobes of the
brain.
Richard Sosis, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, suggests that
the long-term co-operative benefits of religion outweigh the short-term costs it
imposes in the form of praying many times a day, avoiding certain foods, fasting
and so on.
Some scholars draw an analogy with sexual selection. Signs of religious
commitment that are hard to fake provide a costly and reliable signal to others
in a group that anyone engaging in them is committed to that group. Free-riders
would not be able to gain the advantages of group membership.
Dr Sosis drew on a catalogue of 19th-century American communes. Dr Sosis looked
at 88 religious and 112 secular communes and found that communes whose ideology
was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any
given year.
A follow-up study focused on 83 of these communes to see if the amount of time
they survived correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed on
the behaviour of their members. The more constraints a religious commune placed
on its members, the longer it lasted. But the oldest secular communes did not
last so long. Dr Sosis concludes that ritual constraints are not enough — what
is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified.
Dr Sosis has also studied modern secular and religious kibbutzim in Israel.
Because a kibbutz depends on group co-operation, the principal difference
between the two is the use of religious ritual. Within religious communities,
men are expected to pray three times daily in groups of at least ten, while
women are not. So it should be possible to observe whether group rituals do
improve co-operation.
Dr Sosis teamed up with Bradley Ruffle, an economist at Ben-Gurion University,
in Israel. They devised a common-pool-resource dilemma game, in which two people
try to divide a pot of money without knowing how much the other is asking for.
Both players were told that there was an envelope with 100 shekels in it and
that they could each request money from it. If the sum of their requests
exceeded its contents, neither got any cash. Otherwise, the amount left was
increased and split between them.
Dr Sosis and Dr Ruffle picked the game because kibbutz members often face
similar dilemmas over shared resources. The researchers' hypothesis was that in
religious kibbutzim men would be better collaborators than women, while in
secular kibbutzim men and women would take about the same. And that was what
happened.
Ara Norenzayan, an experimental psychologist at the University of British
Columbia, in Vancouver, has conducted experiments using a test to gauge
altruistic behaviour. Participants receive $10 and are asked if they would like
to share it with another player.
Dr Norenzayan and his graduate student Azim Shariff tweaked the game by
introducing the idea of God. They primed half of their volunteers to think about
religion by getting them to unscramble sentences containing religious words.
Those thus primed left an average of $4.22, while the unprimed left $1.84.
Exactly what Dr Norenzayan has discovered here is not clear. A follow-up
experiment which primed people with secular words that might have prompted
altruistic behaviour had similar effects, so the study may have touched on a
general question of morality.
Jesse Bering, of Queen's University in Belfast, showed that the perceived
presence of a supernatural being can affect a person's behaviour. Religion might
promote group collaboration, relying not just on other individuals to detect
cheats by noticing things like slacking on the prayers or eating during fasts,
but on cheats detecting and policing themselves as well, using the sense of
being watched by a supernatural being.
Dr Bering tested this idea by subjecting a bunch of undergraduates to a quiz,
where the best performer would receive a $50 prize. They were also told that the
computer program that presented the questions had a bug in it, which sometimes
caused the answer to appear on the screen before the question. The volunteers
were therefore instructed to hit the space bar immediately if the word "Answer"
appeared on the screen. That would remove the answer and ensure the test results
were fair.
The volunteers were then divided into three groups. Two began by reading a note
dedicating the test to a recently deceased graduate student. One did not see the
note. Of the two groups shown the note, one was told by the experimenter that
the student's ghost had sometimes been seen in the room. The other group was not
given this suggestion.
Dr Bering found that those who had been told the ghost story were much quicker
to press the space bar than those who had not. Awareness of a ghost made people
less likely to cheat.
David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University, in New York, has recently revived
the idea that evolution can work by the differential survival of entire groups
of organisms. This may explain the evolution of human morality in the context of
inter-tribal warfare. Such warfare can be so murderous that groups whose members
fail to collaborate in an individually self-sacrificial way may be wiped out
entirely, negating the benefits of selfish behaviour within a group.
Dr Wilson has discovered that it is the least secure societies that tend to be
most fundamentalist. That would make sense if adherence to the rules is a
condition for the security which comes from membership of a group. He is also
interested in belief in life after death. That can promote any amount of
self-sacrifice in a believer.
Jason Slone, a professor of religious studies at Webster University in St Louis,
argues that people who are religious will be seen as more likely to be faithful
and to help in parenting than those who are not. He plans to find out whether
this is so.
Evolutionary biologists tend to be atheists. If a propensity to religious
behaviour is an evolved trait, then by explaining religion they have put
themselves beyond its benefits.
University of Oxford Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology
Explaining Religion: Where do religious thoughts
come from?
AR Perhaps if I'd known about this in time I could have been employed to write it up.
