The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (23 page)

We see the same basic dynamic operating in police witness protection programs today. In fact, many unexplained homicides, whose real motives may never be known, might well be the result of the victim’s knowing a little too much about the murderer. I once even read a sad news story about a thief who burglarized a pet store and killed the owner’s talking parrot for fear it would be able to identify him. It may have indeed done so if his partner had inadvertently said his name aloud during the heist.

In general, though, it was best for our ancestors not to find themselves in a position where such costly damage control tactics were necessary, or to become vulnerable in any way to carriers. The most adaptive strategy was usually simply to be well behaved—or restrained—in the first place. “Conscience,” said the American satirist H. L. Mencken, “is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”
²⁷
So when you dig deep enough into what are apparently selfless, pure-hearted motives, cynics can still rejoice in knowing that being good is ultimately, as evolutionary biologists point out, a selfish genetic enterprise. There really is no being good for goodness’ sake—at least, not at the unconscious level of genetic replication.
²⁸

Lest we forget about that selfish monstrosity still rummaging about in our heads, moaning for release from the prison of such evolved inconveniences, there are occasions still when being selfish can reap its own rewards. This is especially the case when carriers don’t seem to pose a genuine threat, such as when there are no witnesses to our actions, or when we’re acting in collusion with others who are gambling with their own genetic stakes. There are also occasions when, owing to any number of relational vicissitudes with others, releasing the devil inside can earn us considerable profit by causing us to be impulsive and self-centered.

But acting in such a manner is pretty much always a high-risk strategy, no matter how certain we are that we can get away with it. This is because human beings operate with an “optimism bias,” a way of looking at the future that causes us to downplay the likelihood of negative personal outcomes. Among other things, this bias leads us to assume that we’ll be successful at tasks in which we feel we’re even remotely competent, including, sometimes, antisocial acts. As a result, we have a tendency to underestimate the presence of genuine threats—in the ancestral past, perhaps someone was in fact spying on us when we thought we were alone or perhaps our partner in crime would be discovered and subsequently rat us out. These threat miscalculations are especially dangerous to our genetic welfare today. Contemporary forensic science methods have filled our prisons with people who had very different plans for themselves. And of course the world has its generous share of regretful divorced men and women who traded in their loving spouses for a single, seemingly discreet pleasure that came to be exposed.

As we learned earlier in this chapter, however, we also possess an especially effective, adaptive safeguard to protect our genes against our evolved impulses and our vulnerably overconfident judgment: the inhibiting sense of being observed. Again, ancestrally speaking, eyes meant carriers, and carriers meant gossip. What further derails our selfish streak is the conscious awareness that an observer can identify us as an individual: a specific person with a name and a face. The more obvious—or traceable—our individual identity, the less likely we are to engage in intemperate, high-risk behaviors that, though they may well reap immediate payoffs, can also hobble our overall reproductive success, owing to the adaptive problem of gossip. Only a rather dim-witted bank robber, for example, would enter his targeted establishment without a disguise. If one is convinced of being absolutely unidentifiable, the fear of punishment—or retribution—vanishes. The famous social psychologist Leon Festinger referred to this general phenomenon as the process of “deindividuation,” which occurs whenever “individuals are not seen or paid attention to as individuals.”
²⁹
Deindividuation is quite clearly a potentially dangerous scenario for the social group as a whole; if the individual actor cannot be identified, then the threat of gossip loses that personal punch, one that otherwise helps keep the actor’s egoistic needs in check.

Deindividuation is, of course, at the core of a mob mentality. It can also lead to acts of brutal violence against out-group members, because a “deindividuated” person is absorbed into an anonymous group identity and no longer fears the consequences of toting around an insolvably tarnished reputation. When faced with a frenzied mass of angry, anonymous people, relatives and friends of the out-group victim wouldn’t know where to begin looking for revenge against a specific perpetrator. In anthropological circles, it is well known that warriors who hide their identities before going into battle are more likely to kill, mutilate, or torture than are those who do not bother to disguise themselves. And here in Northern Ireland, where I currently live, one analysis found that of all incidents of sectarian violence reported in the region over a two-year period (1994–96), paramilitary members who wore masks during their offenses attacked more people, inflicted more serious injuries, committed more acts of vandalism, and were more likely to threaten their victims after attacking them than were paramilitary members who left their faces exposed.
³⁰

The coevolution of language and theory of mind came with its good side, its bad, and its downright ugly in giving our species its unique signature in the animal kingdom. So where does God—and other supernatural agents like Him—come into the evolutionary picture? As we’ve seen, God was born of theory of mind. But it seems Mother Nature gave birth for selfish reasons.

In an influential cross-cultural analysis on “the attributes of God” performed by the Italian scholar Raffaele Pettazzoni in the 1950s, one especially prominent and recurring feature began to emerge in the samples of all the religious groups studied. Pettazzoni discovered that, regardless of the particular religion one subscribed to, the central gods were envisioned as possessing a deep
knowing
of people as unique individuals—of their “hearts and souls.”
³¹
Indeed, one of the inevitable consequences of thinking about God is a heightened, almost invasive sense of individuation. In one recent study, participants who were asked to think about God exhibited a huge increase in self-awareness compared to those asked to think about other people. Many people believe that while you may be anonymous to your fellow man, rest assured that some “Other” is always surveying your actions. In the early 1980s, for example, a team of anthropologists in Borneo studying a group of people known as the Iban jotted down a prominent belief there: “Anyone who successfully cheats another, or escapes punishment for his crimes, even though he may appear to profit temporarily, ultimately suffers supernatural retribution.”
³²

For many, God represents that ineradicable sense of being watched that so often flares up in moments of temptation—He who knows what’s in our hearts, that private audience that wants us to act in certain ways at critical decision-making points and that will be disappointed in us otherwise. The “right decisions” are favorably inclined toward those logistical details we’ve just discussed, what we’d call morals and social norms, and are seen to be as right as the grass is green. Even if this sense of God’s watching didn’t always persuade our ancestors to act morally under such conditions, if it did so just once, it could have been the one time they’d have been caught by other people—which is, of course, the only penalty for misbehavior they’d have really ever faced. In other words, the illusion of a punitive God assisted their genetic well-being whenever they underestimated the risk of
actual
social detection by other people. This fact alone, this emotional short-circuiting of ancient drives in which immediate interests were traded for long-term genetic gains, would have rendered God and His ilk a strong target of natural selection in human evolution.

The intoxicating pull of destiny beliefs, seeing “signs” in a limitless array of unexpected natural events, the unshakable illusion of psychological immortality, and the implicit assumption that misfortunes are related to some divine plan or long-forgotten moral breach—all of these things have meaningfully coalesced in the human brain to form a set of functional psychological processes. They are functional because they breed explicit beliefs and behaviors (usually but not always of a religious nature) that were adaptive in the ancestral past. That is to say, together they fostered a cognitive imperative—a deeply ineradicable system of thought—leading our ancestors to feel and behave as though their actions were being observed, tallied, judged by a supernatural audience, and responded to in the form of natural events by a powerful Other that held an attitude toward them. By helping to thwart genetically costly but still-powerful ancestral drives, these cognitive illusions pried open new and vital arteries for reproductive success, promoting inhibitory decisions that would have been highly adaptive under the biologically novel, language-based rules of natural selection. The illusion of God, engendered by our theory of mind, was one very important solution to the adaptive problem of human gossip.

Such thinking may not lead people to reason logically about the nature of existence. But that’s irrelevant. As evolutionarily minded scholars, all we really need to determine is whether or not these cognitive predispositions somehow increased our ancestors’ odds of passing on their genes. And indeed, evidence that supernatural reasoning curbs our selfish and impulsive behavior is limited, but consistent, and comes from a variety of studies.

For example, one logical conclusion that follows from the theoretical model we’ve just sketched out is that the larger the society, the more opportunities there are for cheating others, but also the more likely it is that one would underestimate the threat of potential carriers, given the sheer number of eyes present. The inhibiting effect of feeling watched and known about by a punitive, supernatural Other would be especially vital to saving one’s “genetic hide,” so to speak, under such large-group conditions. And indeed, in an important cross-cultural analysis reported in a 2003 issue of
Evolution and Human Behavior,
evolutionary biologists Frans Roes and Michel Raymond found that, across cultures, large societies are associated with moralizing high gods: the larger the population, the greater the chance that the culture includes the concept of supernatural watchers concerned with human morality.
³³
Note also that as long as group members genuinely believe that another’s misfortune is caused by that person’s sins, this erroneous causal attribution is sufficiently scary to keep the rest of the group members in line.

In another study, University of British Columbia psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff primed some of their research participants with “God concepts” by exposing them to words such as “spirit,” “divine,” and “prophet.” The effect of this exposure was that, compared with those who saw only neutral words, these people donated more money to a stranger on a seemingly unrelated task. Although the authors acknowledge that these findings aren’t without alternative interpretations, their particular argument favors the one being made here:

In addition, in a 2005 issue of
Human Nature
, Todd Shackelford, Katrina McLeod, and I reported the results of a study in which, as part of a slick cover story, we told a group of participants that the ghost of a dead graduate student had recently been seen in the lab. Compared to those who didn’t hear any mention of the alleged ghost, students who received this information beforehand were much less likely to cheat on a separate game in which they were competing for fifty dollars when left alone in the room and given the opportunity to do so.
³⁵

More recently, University of Kent psychologist Jared Piazza and I resurrected the spirit of Princess Alice (discussed in Chapter 3) to determine whether young children left alone in the room with this friendly invisible being would also be inhibited from cheating. Five- and six-year-olds were just as likely to refrain from cheating on a game when they thought Princess Alice was sitting in a chair watching them as they were when a real human being—an unengaged stranger with a neutral facial expression—actually was in that very same chair observing them. As expected, cheating rates were highest among a control group of children who were left alone in the room with neither the stranger nor Princess Alice. In general, this pattern of findings was the case for slightly older kids as well, yet a few of the seven- to nine-year-olds in the study did in fact cheat in front of Princess Alice, shrugging her off as a fabrication devised by the experimenters. Curiously, though, even these young skeptics did so only after reaching out and waving their hands over the empty chair to make sure she wasn’t there. Furthermore, those who said they believed in Princess Alice were much less likely to cheat than those who said they didn’t.
³⁶

In sum, both logic and current evidence point to the following unavoidable conclusion: By curtailing bad behaviors, the sense of being observed by a morally invested, reactive Other (whether God, Princess Alice, the ghost of a dead graduate student, or some other supernatural agent of your choosing), especially one that created us and for whom we’re eternally indebted in return, meant fewer self-destructive scraps for those ravenous wolves of gossip to feed on.