The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (5 page)

In fact, another team of researchers, this one led by psychologists Michael Tomasello and Josep Call at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, reported that their chimps demonstrated some degree of theory of mind, especially when competing for food against other chimps. In a widely publicized 2000 study conducted in Leipzig and spearheaded by one of their colleagues, Duke University psychologist Brian Hare, a group of chimps was divided into pairs of two, in which (on the basis of previous competitive games) one animal was known to be clearly dominant in the group and the other one clearly subordinate. The two animals faced each other in opposite cages separated by a middle, empty cage, while an experimenter baited this center area with a desirable food reward. For example, the experimenter might put the food reward behind a large tire swing on the side of the subordinate so that the dominant animal couldn’t see it. In some cases, this baiting was done while the dominant wasn’t present in its cage; in others, both animals saw where the experimenter placed the coveted food.

After the baiting, the middle area was opened and the two chimps were observed. One of the main hypotheses in this study was that, if the subordinate understood that the dominant didn’t
see
where the food reward was hidden, then it didn’t
know
where the food was, and therefore the subordinate shouldn’t give the hiding location away by directing the dominant’s attention to this spot. (If it did, the dominant would surely rush in and strong-arm this delicious cache away from the subordinate.) And, sure enough, Hare and his coauthors found precisely this effect. Under such conditions, the subordinate acted as though it knew nothing of the food’s whereabouts, instead waiting until the dominant left the scene before gathering up its loot.
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On the basis of such findings, Call and Tomasello recently wagged a finger of disapproval at Povinelli and other “killjoy skeptics” of nonhuman theory of mind: “It is time for humans to quit thinking that their nearest primate relatives only read and react to overt behavior.”
³⁰
Yet Povinelli attempted to replicate Hare’s findings and failed to do so. He therefore remains unrepentant and unconvinced, arguing instead that all social behaviors in chimpanzees can still be understood without invoking a theory-of-mind interpretation and claiming that it’s the smoke and mirrors from our own theory of mind that’s occluding our view of other animals’ psychology.

It seems a debate unlikely to be settled anytime soon. In one of his latest comments regarding the subject, a 2007 position piece published in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
, Povinelli and coauthor Derek Penn provocatively titled their article: “On the Lack of Evidence that Non-human Animals Possess Anything Remotely Resembling a ‘Theory of Mind.’” (Some comparative psychologists believe that the best evidence lies not in chimps, but rather dogs, dolphins, or even scrub jays.)

Despite the stalemate, even the most unwavering continuity theorist demurs that with the possible, qualified exception of a few other species of great apes, there’s indeed no clear evidence that any primate species but our own possesses “anything remotely resembling a theory of mind.”
³¹
And although the jury is still out on whether we’re
entirely
unique in being able to conceptualize unobservable mental states—chimps may well have some
degree
of theory of mind that eludes all but the most sensitive experiments—there’s absolutely no question that we’re uniquely good at it in the whole of the animal kingdom. We are exquisitely attuned to the unseen psychological world. Theory of mind is as much a peculiar trademark of our species as is walking upright on two legs, learning a language, and raising our offspring into their teens.

In fact, once we assume the intentional stance, we can’t shut it off. If I were to extend my arm at a ninety-degree angle, pointing at the sky by uncoiling just my index finger, with the rest of my digits drawn into my palm and my eyes fixed upon some apex at the end of an invisible trajectory, you would almost certainly perceive this action as a communicative act. Perhaps I’m attempting to direct your
attention
to, say, the large seagull that’s threatening to release its bowels on your recently shampooed head, or the hot-air balloon that’s spiraling out of control into the open sea. Even if I were to admonish you not to perceive this set of my concrete behaviors in such a manner, but instead to look upon these actions as only my arm and hand and eyes moving about in some stereotyped way, your brain would resist following the rules—you would want to turn around and look, to see what I’m seeing. As any good magician knows, pointing is an extraordinarily effective means of inconspicuously diverting the audience’s attention.

As a human being, you’re even prone to overextending your theory of mind to categories for which it doesn’t properly belong. Many people remember fondly the classic film
Le Ballon Rouge
(
The Red Balloon
, 1956) by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse, in which a sensitive schoolboy—in reality Lamorisse’s own five-year-old son, Pascal—is befriended by a good-natured, cherry-red helium balloon. Absent dialogue, the camera follows the joyful two, boy and balloon, through the somber, working-class streets of the Ménilmontant neighborhood of Paris, the glossy red balloon contrasting sharply with the bleak old-Europe atmosphere while adults, oblivious to the presence of an inanimate object that has apparently been ensouled by an intelligent gas, are largely indifferent, even hostile, to the pair. Eventually, a mob of cruel children corners the boy and begins pelting the “kindhearted” balloon with stones, ultimately popping it. There’s something of a happy ending, though, with the smiling boy being hoisted off to an unknown destiny by the other resident helium souls of Ménilmontant, sympathetic balloons that, we can only assume, have been inspired by the “death” of their persecuted red brother to untangle themselves from their heartless captors and rescue Pascal.

The plot of
Le Ballon Rouge
exemplifies how our evolved brains have become hypersocial filters, such that our theory of mind is applied not only to the mental innards of other people and animals, but also, in error, to categories that haven’t any mental innards at all, such as ebullient skins of elastic stretched by an inert gas. If it weren’t for our theory of mind, we couldn’t follow the premise of the movie, let alone enjoy Lamorisse’s particular oeuvre of magical realism. When the balloon hovers outside Pascal’s flat after his grandmother tries to rid herself of this nuisance, we perceive a charismatic personality in the balloon that “wants” to be with the boy and is “trying” to leverage itself against the windowpanes; it “sees” Pascal and “knows” he’s inside. Our theory of mind is so effortlessly applied under such conditions that it’s impossible to see the scene any other way. In fact, part of the reason the movie may have been so effective was that the lead role, the young boy, genuinely believed that the balloon was alive. “The Red Balloon was my friend,” recalled a much-older Pascal Lamorisse in a 2007 interview. “When you were filming it, did you really feel that way?” asked the reporter. “Yes, yes, he was a real character with a spirit of his own.”
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As a direct consequence of the evolution of the human social brain, and owing to the weight of selective importance placed on our theory-of-mind skills, we sometimes can’t help but see intentions, desires, and beliefs in things that haven’t even a smidgeon of a neural system there to generate the psychological states we perceive—just as we do for the Red Balloon. In particular, when inanimate objects do unexpected things, we sometimes reason about them just as we do for oddly behaving—or misbehaving—people. More than a few of us have kicked our broken-down, “untrustworthy” vehicles in the sides and have verbally abused our “incompetent” computers. Most of us stop short of actually believing these objects possess mental states—indeed, we would likely be hauled away to an asylum if we genuinely believed that they held malicious intentions toward us—but our emotions and behaviors toward such objects seem to betray our primitive, unconscious thinking: we act as though they’re morally culpable for their actions.

Some developmental psychologists even believe that this cognitive bias to see intentions in inanimate objects—and thus a very basic theory of mind—can be found in babies just a few months out of the womb. For example, Hungarian psychologists György Gergely and Gergely Csibra from the Central European University in Budapest have shown in their work that babies, on the basis of their staring response, act surprised when a dot on a computer screen continues to butt up against an empty space on the screen after a computerized barrier blocking its path has been deleted. It’s as if the baby is staring at the dot trying to figure out why the dot is acting as though it “thinks” the barrier is still there. By contrast, the infants are not especially interested—that is, they don’t stare in surprise—when the dot stops in front of the block, or when the dot continues along its path in the absence of the barrier.
³³

The most famous example of this cognitive phenomenon of seeing minds in nonliving objects, however, is a 1944
American Journal of Psychology
study by Austrian researchers Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel. In this very early study, the scientists put together a simplistic animated film depicting three moving, black-and-white figures: a large triangle, a small triangle, and a small circle. Participants watched the figures moving about on the screen for a while and then were asked to describe what they had just seen. Most reported using a human social behavioral narrative—for example, seeing the large triangle as “bullying” the “timid” smaller triangle, both of “whom” were “seeking” the “affections” of the “female” circle.
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So it would appear that having a theory of mind was so useful for our ancestors in explaining and predicting other people’s behaviors that it has completely flooded our evolved social brains. As a result, today we overshoot our mental-state attributions to things that are, in reality, completely mindless. And all of this leads us, rather inevitably, to a very important question—one that’s about to launch us into an official inquiry spanning the remainder of this book. What if I were to tell you that God’s mental states, too, were all in your mind? That God, like a tiny speck floating at the edge of your cornea producing the image of a hazy, out-of-reach orb accompanying your every turn, was in fact a psychological illusion, a sort of evolved blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? It may feel as if there is something grander out there…watching, knowing, caring. Perhaps even judging. But, in fact, that’s just your overactive theory of mind. In reality, there is only the air you breathe.

After all, once we scrub away all the theological bric-a-brac and pluck out the exotic cross-cultural plumage of strange religious beliefs all over the world, once we get under God’s skin, isn’t He really just another mind—one with emotions, beliefs, knowledge, understanding, and, perhaps above all else, intentions? Aren’t theologians really just playing the role of God’s translators, and every holy book ever written is merely a detailed psychoanalysis of God? That strangely sticky sense that God “willfully” created us as individuals, “wants” us to behave in particular ways, “observes” and “knows” about our otherwise private actions, “communicates” messages to us in code through natural events, and “intends” to meet us after we die would have also been felt, in some form, by our Pleistocene ancestors.

Consider, briefly, the implications of seeing God this way, as a sort of scratch on our psychological lenses rather than the enigmatic figure out there in the heavenly world that most people believe Him to be. Subjectively, God would still be present in our lives. (For some people, rather annoyingly so.) In this way of perceiving, He would continue to suffuse our experiences with an elusive meaning and give the sense that the universe is communicating with us in various ways. But this notion of God as an illusion is a radical and, some would say, even dangerous idea because it raises important questions about whether God is an autonomous, independent agent that lives outside human brain cells, or instead a phantom cast out upon the world by our species’ own peculiarly evolved theory of mind.

Since the human brain, like any physical organ, is a product of evolution, and since natural selection works without recourse to intelligent forethought, this mental apparatus of ours evolved to think about God quite without need of the latter’s consultation, let alone His being real. Then again, one can never rule out the possibility that God microengineered the evolution of the human brain so that we’ve come to see Him more clearly, a sort of divine LASIK procedure, or scraping off the bestial glare that clouds the minds of other animals.

Either way, we’re about to discover just how deeply this one particular cognitive capacity, this theory of mind, has baked itself into our heads when it comes to our pondering of life’s big questions. Unlike any science-literate generation that has come before, we now possess the intellectual tools to observe our own minds at work and to understand how God has come to be there. And we alone are poised to ask, “Has our species’ unique cognitive evolution duped us into believing in this, the grandest mind of all?”