Research Into Your Brain on God
New Scientist posts this snippet:
"Intuiting God's beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one's own beliefs," writes a team led by Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
To many, this seems a quite evident and non-controversial comment. After all, what are the chances that someone with, say, a hatred of any given act be drawn to any religion that fails to condemn or even embraces the act? Ah, but the article gets more interesting when we discover why the researchers were led to this conclusion:
The researchers started by asking volunteers who said they believe in God to give their own views on controversial topics, such as abortion and the death penalty. They also asked what the volunteers thought were the views of God, average Americans and public figures such as Bill Gates. Volunteers' own beliefs corresponded most strongly with those they attributed to God.
Next, the team asked another group of volunteers to undertake tasks designed to soften their existing views, such as preparing speeches on the death penalty in which they had to take the opposite view to their own. They found that this led to shifts in the beliefs attributed to God, but not in those attributed to other people. . . .
"The experiments in which we manipulate people's own beliefs are the most compelling evidence we have to show that people's own beliefs influence what they think God believes more substantially than it influences what they think other people believe," says Epley. (Emphasis mine.)
This smacks of perhaps something related to the Overton Window. By simply being exposed to opinions that vary from their own, this second group shifted not just their own opinion, but the opinion God is likely to take. Perhaps this is a variant on the old canard "Vox Deus, vox populi," or "The voice of the people is the voice of God." I say variant simply because the second group didn't sway from what they felt other people would say on the issue, a point illustrated by further brain scans:
Finally, the team used fMRI to scan the brains of volunteers while they contemplated the beliefs of themselves, God or "average Americans". In all the experiments the volunteers professed beliefs in an Abrahamic God. The majority were Christian.
In the first two cases, similar parts of the brain were active. When asked to contemplate other Americans' beliefs, however, an area of the brain used for inferring other people's mental states was active. This implies that people map God's beliefs onto their own.
So, we store and consider the opinion of others in different place in the brain than the place used to mull our and God's existences. Interesting.
Oh, and before you smug left-leaning folks out there take this as ammo for future dealings with the Faux News crowd, other researchers have been doing great work showing how one's political persuasion influences how credibly one accepts or rejects unsubstantiated claims. Here's one such graph. There are more. Each shows that all of us are susceptible to misinformation, to accepting the unproven. What bad knowledge that happens to be simply depends on the mis-info spreader tying the particular lie to the proper spin, one that resonates well with other preconceptions.
I realize that politics and religion are to many minds separate issues, but I feel both topics have share a "grounding" in the brain, are held by the adherents of those beliefs because they resonate well with preconceptions held by the adherents. Both political and religious beliefs are, after all, the mental models we humans use to frame the world around us. (For a really powerful if somewhat hackneyed take on this, has anyone read Philip K. Dick's The Eye In the Sky?) The old saying "Never discuss politics or religion" in polite company recognizes that both topics prove for most people difficult to discuss dispassionately since the topics carry deeply-held and therefore non-negotiable elements.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this research mentioned in New Scientist replicated in a political context with similar results.
"Intuiting God's beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one's own beliefs," writes a team led by Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
To many, this seems a quite evident and non-controversial comment. After all, what are the chances that someone with, say, a hatred of any given act be drawn to any religion that fails to condemn or even embraces the act? Ah, but the article gets more interesting when we discover why the researchers were led to this conclusion:
The researchers started by asking volunteers who said they believe in God to give their own views on controversial topics, such as abortion and the death penalty. They also asked what the volunteers thought were the views of God, average Americans and public figures such as Bill Gates. Volunteers' own beliefs corresponded most strongly with those they attributed to God.
Next, the team asked another group of volunteers to undertake tasks designed to soften their existing views, such as preparing speeches on the death penalty in which they had to take the opposite view to their own. They found that this led to shifts in the beliefs attributed to God, but not in those attributed to other people. . . .
"The experiments in which we manipulate people's own beliefs are the most compelling evidence we have to show that people's own beliefs influence what they think God believes more substantially than it influences what they think other people believe," says Epley. (Emphasis mine.)
This smacks of perhaps something related to the Overton Window. By simply being exposed to opinions that vary from their own, this second group shifted not just their own opinion, but the opinion God is likely to take. Perhaps this is a variant on the old canard "Vox Deus, vox populi," or "The voice of the people is the voice of God." I say variant simply because the second group didn't sway from what they felt other people would say on the issue, a point illustrated by further brain scans:
Finally, the team used fMRI to scan the brains of volunteers while they contemplated the beliefs of themselves, God or "average Americans". In all the experiments the volunteers professed beliefs in an Abrahamic God. The majority were Christian.
In the first two cases, similar parts of the brain were active. When asked to contemplate other Americans' beliefs, however, an area of the brain used for inferring other people's mental states was active. This implies that people map God's beliefs onto their own.
So, we store and consider the opinion of others in different place in the brain than the place used to mull our and God's existences. Interesting.
Oh, and before you smug left-leaning folks out there take this as ammo for future dealings with the Faux News crowd, other researchers have been doing great work showing how one's political persuasion influences how credibly one accepts or rejects unsubstantiated claims. Here's one such graph. There are more. Each shows that all of us are susceptible to misinformation, to accepting the unproven. What bad knowledge that happens to be simply depends on the mis-info spreader tying the particular lie to the proper spin, one that resonates well with other preconceptions.
I realize that politics and religion are to many minds separate issues, but I feel both topics have share a "grounding" in the brain, are held by the adherents of those beliefs because they resonate well with preconceptions held by the adherents. Both political and religious beliefs are, after all, the mental models we humans use to frame the world around us. (For a really powerful if somewhat hackneyed take on this, has anyone read Philip K. Dick's The Eye In the Sky?) The old saying "Never discuss politics or religion" in polite company recognizes that both topics prove for most people difficult to discuss dispassionately since the topics carry deeply-held and therefore non-negotiable elements.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this research mentioned in New Scientist replicated in a political context with similar results.