The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (18 page)
Read The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life Online
Authors: Jesse Bering
Tags: #General, #Psychology, #Religion, #Spirituality, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Cognitive Psychology, #Personality, #Psychology of Religion
After running several psychological studies probing children’s and adults’ reasoning about the spread and nature of the virus that causes AIDS, Legare and Gelman reported their findings in a 2008 issue of
Cognitive Science
: “Although biological explanations for illness were endorsed at high levels, witchcraft was also often endorsed. More important, bewitchment explanations were neither the result of ignorance nor replaced by biological explanations.”
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In fact, adults were more likely to give witchcraft explanations than were children, even though the adults also had a better understanding of the disease’s biology.
Borrowing from an account by author Tracy Kidder in his
Mountain Beyond Mountains
(2003), a book about the legendary humanitarian doctor and Harvard anthropologist Paul Farmer, Legare and Gelman also provide a humorous example of this natural coexistence of supernatural and biological explanations in the individual’s mind. In the example, Farmer, credited with developing a free, modern health care system among the poorest of nations, is described as having a tongue-in-cheek conversation with an elderly Haitian woman suffering from tuberculosis:
When he had first interviewed her, about a year before, she’d taken mild offense at his questions about sorcery. She’d been one of the few to deny she believed in it. She stated, “I’m not stupid. I know tuberculosis comes from people coughing germs.” She’d taken all her medicines. She’d been cured. But now, a year later, when he asked her again about sorcery, she said that of course she believed in it. “I know who sent me my sickness, and I’m going to get her back,” she told him. “But if you believe that,” he cried, “why did you take your medicines?”
“Cheri,”
she said.
“eske-w pa ka kon-prann bagay ki pa senp?”
The Creole phrase
pa senp
means “not simple,” and implies that a thing is freighted with complexity, usually of a magical sort. So, in free translation, she said to Farmer, “Honey, are you incapable of complexity?”
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Many individuals expect to be punished by God even when their secret misdoings have gone unpunished by other people. And when this doesn’t happen, something seems to them fundamentally off-kilter with the moralistic universe. As social psychologists have known for a very long time, most people are guided by expectations of a just world. But God lurks in these shadows. If the world is perceived as being just (even, as studies show, among many nonbelievers), then wouldn’t some watchful, knowing agent be required to keep tabs on people’s social behaviors, adjusting the scales of nonhuman justice? Or, for “godless” Buddhists, who exactly is it that’s making sure the bad guys are being reborn as dung beetles and lab rats?
In
The Moral Judgment of the Child
(1932), Piaget provides an illustrative, though somewhat strange choice of an example of just world beliefs. These days, masturbation isn’t exactly a felony, but there were different sexual mores back in Piaget’s conservative Switzerland. “It cannot be denied,” he writes, “that we observe in masturbators a systematic fear of the retribution residing in things—not only the fear of the result their habits may have upon their health, the fear of making themselves stupid, etc., but also a tendency to interpret all the chance misfortunes of life as punishments intended by fate.”
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Before you go patting yourself on the back for your more rational mind, see if you can stomach your own psychological instincts when mulling over the real-life fate of Justo Antonio Padron. On November 12, 2007, Padron, a career criminal, wiped the sweat from his brow as he jimmied open yet another lock while burglarizing vehicles at a popular Miccosukee Indian resort in South Florida. When police caught him red-handed and blared their sirens, Padron tried to make a getaway by diving into the casino’s retention pond, where a fussy nine-foot alligator named Poncho made an impromptu meal out of him. And it works the other way around too. Take lucky Michigan resident Fred Toupas Jr., who back in 2008, not long after being released from prison for raping a thirteen-year-old girl, hit the jackpot in his state’s fifty-seven-million-dollar lotto.
If you’re logically minded, chances are you would say that these things just happen; you’d shrug them off as ironic but coincidental. But I bet you’d nevertheless feel that Padron got what he deserved and that something’s not quite right about Toupas’s situation. In fact, Toupas’s windfall prompted a cavalcade of angry Internet users to chime in after reading the story, many of whom were atheists asking believers what more evidence they could possibly need that God didn’t exist than a level 3 sex offender winning the megalottery. But our evolved theory of mind provides God with a lot of loopholes. One woman, for example, used her very creative theory of mind to discern a certain cleverness in this tale. She reminded these cynical atheists that God will always outfox humans when it comes to unraveling His unknowable motives:
There is a God and He certainly does know the things we all have done. Let’s wait and see where this man ends up after a year of extravagant spending and whatever else he may be up to. We will all see just what money can do to the wrong kind of people.
In certain rare cases, though, even the wildest stretch of the imagination wouldn’t seem to grow a loophole large enough to accommodate God’s elusive logic. According to Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, in Nazi Germany some people reportedly thought that God had gone insane. But an even darker prospect emerged. A few Jews began to revise their theological views and surmised that God had become morally corrupt. In his semiautobiographical chronicle,
Gates of the Forest
(1966), Wiesel describes a particularly telling scene:
In a concentration camp, one evening after work, a rabbi called together three of his colleagues and convoked a special court. Standing with his head held high before them, he spoke as follows: “I intend to convict God of murder, for He is destroying His people and the law He gave to them…I have irrefutable proof in my hands. Judge without fear or sorrow or prejudice. Whatever you have to lose has long since been taken away.” The trial proceeded in due legal form, with witnesses for both sides with pleas and deliberations. The unanimous verdict: “Guilty”…[But] after all, [God] had the last word. On the day of the trial, He turned the sentence against His judges and accusers. They, too, were taken off to the slaughter. And I tell you this: if their death has no meaning, then it’s an insult, and if it does have a meaning, it’s even more so.
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Cosmic punishment is often in the eye of the beholder. For Janet Landman, a psychologist at Babson College, the dramatic story of Katherine Anne Power is a case in point. In an edited volume called
Turns in the Road: Narrative Studies of Lives in Transition
(2001), Landman describes some of her discussions with Power while the latter was incarcerated in federal prison for a crime that had shattered the lives of many people, including Power’s own. “Narrative psychologists,” such as Landman, believe that dramatic life stories allow us to glimpse universal aspects of human psychology not easily captured by laboratory methods.
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Power’s tale is the prototype of karmic anticipations. One late summer day in 1970 in Brighton, Massachusetts, the articulate, starry-eyed sociology major from nearby Brandeis University, and also a fervent Vietnam War protester, sat behind the wheel of an idling getaway car as her heavily armed partners in crime liberated a bank of its “warmongering” funds. (To properly overthrow the government, the group believed, one must first pilfer and then cleanse its dirty loot by reinvesting in antiwar causes.) Unbeknownst to Power, one of her peace-loving compatriots shot a police officer in the back as he fled, which was the making of a widow and nine fatherless children. Reportedly shocked by this robbery gone bad, Power assumed the identity of an infant who had died a year before she was born and reinvented herself as “Alice Louise Metzinger.” The others were eventually caught. But Power went underground in the small northwest Oregon town of Lebanon, where, reminiscent of Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
(1862), she dedicated herself to a life of contrition. Power became a doting mother to a young son and a loving wife to the local meat cutter; she bought into a popular restaurant, became an active volunteer, taught a class at the community college, and even gave her car to a neighbor in need.
Yet this former high school valedictorian, Catholic Girl Scout, and onetime winner of the Betty Crocker Cooking award was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for fourteen of her twenty-three years on the run. Haunted by feelings of shame, guilt, and paranoia, Power often tried tempting a vengeful fate. In her earlier years on the run, she even returned to her natural hair color so that she’d more closely resemble her own image in the “Wanted” posters hanging in her favorite bar. But nobody ever recognized her; the few people she confided in with her dark secret (her husband and a few close friends) were understanding and loyal, and there was only continued good kismet in her new life. By 1984, the few leads that had once trickled in had all dried up, and the FBI removed her from their Most Wanted list. For Power, it began to feel as though her punishment was the excruciating sense of undeserved normalcy and “happiness” she had achieved. It was so insufferable, in fact, that in 1993, honoring, as she called it, her “contract with God,” she turned herself in to puzzled Boston authorities and served six years of an eight-year sentence.
Like Power, many of us also can’t help but mentally replay past events that continually nip at our emotional heels, and we have experienced life-changing episodes that—at least in our heads—represent a sort of sharp dividing line between everything that was before and everything that came after. According to some social psychologists, the sort of subjective spin that we put on these nightmarish events, and particularly how we see them as having shaped our current and future selves, says much about our personalities.
As director of the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University, Dan McAdams has spearheaded a new brand of social science research in the study of personality called the “narrative study of lives.” In an article published in a 2001 issue of the
Review of General Psychology
, McAdams points out that autobiographical memory is intriguingly creative:
Life stories are based on biographical facts, but they go considerably beyond the facts as people selectively appropriate aspects of their experience and imaginatively construe both past and future to construct stories that make sense to them and to their audiences, that vivify and integrate life and make it more or less meaningful.
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Using quasi-structured interview methods in which older individuals are asked about the major turning points in their lives and how these events affected them, McAdams sorts through the responses using an elaborately detailed coding system, one designed to detect subtle, underlying themes in the way people frame these important events in their own minds.
McAdams has found that there are two types of people in this world. First, there are those who view life-altering experiences during young adulthood (such as death, crime, addiction, abuse, relationship woes, loss, failure, and other abysmal yet often unavoidable plights of the human saga) as “contaminative episodes” in their life stories. Retrospectively, everything before the event is seen through rose-tinted glasses, with the event viewed as a type of toxic incident that corrodes into the present and ruins the rest of the life course. In a contamination sequence, a good life suddenly goes bad. The key personal misfortune is treated as a sort of foreign body rather than integrated into the narrative. For those prone to such reasoning, it’s as though a happy fairy tale had been rudely interrupted: something—or someone—vandalized God’s plans for them.
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And then there are those who view such dramatic events as “redemptive episodes” in their self-narratives. Like Katherine Ann Power, these people eventually transform or redeem bad scenes into good outcomes by becoming better people and benefiting society. As one might expect, those older folks who look back on their lives and see their various crises as redemptive episodes that taught them valuable life lessons and changed them for the better (rather than ruining everything) are also the ones who tend to score high on scales of “generativity,” which is a measure of their positive, or prosocial, contributions to others, particularly to younger generations. Yes, these events were painful, but “everything happens for a reason.” This is the case for Power, anyway; she’s now working at an AIDS nonprofit organization in Boston.
So McAdams believes that investigating how people cobble together their life stories is revealing in more ways than one. “Some people construct life stories that are modeled on classical tragedy,” says McAdams, “whereas others convey their identities as television sitcoms.”
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The irony is that real life is seldom portrayed in our heads as the dramaturgical genre that it actually is: the existential narrative where things just happen. In this genre, there is no tidy narrative arc, but just a rather messy, conductorless train of interconnected events hitched together in an impersonal and deterministic fashion, the links between them invisible to the naked eye and beyond the ken of everyday human intelligence. Rather, in most people’s minds, their own lives appear to be moving in a linear progression, one mostly of their own making, and toward a satisfying climax. Dartmouth College psychologist Todd Heatherton, for example, has found that most people tend to unreasonably denigrate their own past, casting their distant, flawed selves as naive, hapless third-person characters.
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So in comparison, our current selves appear more advanced, or developed, in the full autobiographical plot.
