So the question is, why are these delusions so common? Do we humans have an inbuilt predisposition (a cognitive bias) that leads us to anthropomorphize events? That’s one explanation that’s been suggested. The idea is that the brain machinery devoted to figuring out what’s going on inside another person’s head (the so-called ‘theory of mind’) also acts to interpret major life events as purposeful and meaningful.
Alternatively, fatalism might simply be one other aspect of basic errors in thinking that lead to all sorts of mistakes about how the world operates. Perhaps fatalism is just a kind of paranormal delusion, and they are all caused by an inability to understand how the world works.New research from Annika Svedholm and colleagues from the University of Helsinki suggest that’s exactly what happens.
They surveyed over two thousand Finns (mostly women, but with a good age range – not just students) on whether they believed that seemingly random events were in fact caused by an invisible agency. Then they asked about their paranormal beliefs.
They also asked a series of questions to test their subjects’ basic understanding of how the world works (their ‘core knowledge confusion”). Here’s some examples – many people would recognise them as poetic metaphors, but those with core knowledge confusion tend to think that they are literally true:
- “Stars live in the sky” (Lifeless natural objects are living)
- “Planets know things” (Lifeless objects are animate)
- “Flowers want light” (Living inanimate objects are animate)
- “A home knows its inhabitants” (Artificial objects are animate)
- “Force can sense a human being” (Force is living and animate)
- “The mind falls apart when ill” (Mental states are material)
Paranormal beliefs and beliefs in the purpose of events were strongly correlated (leading to a factor they call “General Paranormal Pelief”. What’s more, all the elements of ‘core knowledge confusion’ were inter-correlated.
What does that mean in practice? Well, what they were left with was a strong link between basic errors in thinking and belief in the paranormal – including fatalistic beliefs.
What this suggests is that there is nothing particularly special about the belief that things are ‘caused’ in some mysterious way – or indeed about paranormal beliefs in general.
If Svedholm and colleagues are right, there is no special brain pathway that makes people believe things happen for a reason. It’s simply that some people just have problems understanding how the world really works.
In the words of the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, “Either you believe in it all, or you do not”!
Svedholm, A., Lindeman, M., & Lipsanen, J. (2010). Believing in the purpose of events-why does it occur, and is it supernatural? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24 (2), 252-265 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1560
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
Couldn't the oversensitive agency detection be a result of a more basic pattern recognition? Even birds are superstitious. It would make sense to recognize patterns excessively; for example to recognize dangerous animals in bushes even when there are none, excessive safety is better than minimal safety...
ReplyDeleteAren't some of those 'false statements' arguable?
ReplyDeleteFor instance, "Plants want light" (a slight modification of "flowers want light") is arguable. Many plants, when placed in a situation where the light comes from one direction will grow so that their leaves point in that direction. I'm not arguing there is any cognition here, but rather that the definition of 'want' in english is fuzzy enough to not require cognition. One could argue that any reactive system that moves the state of the world towards a goal could be said to 'want' that goal. (As a roboticist who builds reactive systems, I certainly use the word that way without any misunderstanding about what is going on. English doesn't have good words for the goals of reactive systems.)
"The mind falls apart when ill" has a similar issue. It wouldn't be unreasonable in a review to say something like, "The third step of your proof is wrong, and so your argument falls apart." Here the phrase 'falls apart' is used to refer to an abstract 'argument', again something non-physical. If 'falls apart' is a synonym for 'breaks' and 'ill' is a synonym for 'is broken' (that second synonym is a bit of a stretch (ooh - did I just confuse physical and abstract again) but not a large one) then the sentence is almost a tautology.
I agree with Will about the problem of expressing reactivity and I would add, interactivity, in English. There are similar linguistic/cognitive problems when it comes to dealing with concepts like 'striving' and 'design' when it comes to a dynamic but mindless process like evolution; I think Richard Dawkins specifically addressed this confusion, but when we make statements about something being perfectly adapted to its environment or designed to function in a certain environment we've got implications (in English, at least) about purpose built into the very words we use.
ReplyDeleteI think the statements as presented above are too ambiguous (at least in English; maybe in Finnish they are less so) to be able to say people are making errors in thinking.
I don't think the primary value of this kind of research is determining whether "purpose" (or perhaps "purposiveness") is a valid concept in biology. That's a nuanced philosophical question and I think the initial reaction that attributing purpose in general is "superstitious" is a little overboard.
ReplyDeleteIt seems bizarre to me to think that purposiveness is limited to human beings (or perhaps not even found in human beings).
To me the more important point of this sort of cognitive research is more regarding how beliefs cluster according to patterns of attribution. For example, all living things "strive" in some sense, but in different ways according to their nature and ecology.
I think the boundary we draw in biology with the theological perspective is in seeing nature itself as a whole as striving, or being guided by something that strives and also has special significance to humans.
Along the lines of what john said, my favorite explanation (it's a Just-So story, but IMO it's a damn good one) for why humans tend to over-ascribe agency is because the cost of a false negative is much higher than a false positive. john cites the example of a rustle in the bushes: if you assume it's a tiger and you're wrong, you wasted a little time and energy running away; but if you assume it's the wind and you're wrong, you get eaten by a tiger.
ReplyDeleteExtending it to the "things happen for a reason", you get a Pascal-esque wager: If you assume God is punishing you and you're wrong, you waste some time trying to appease him; but if you assume it was just a random bad event and you're wrong, God smites you. Not that people are consciously reasoning this, but it seems at least plausible that it could be a misfiring of an evolutionary trend to over-ascribe agency.
Or it could be what the authors of this paper said :) I don't think their data really proves anything though... it seems just as likely to me that the commonality in these false beliefs is in the cure, not in the cause, i.e. they could have all different causes, some cultural, some evolutionary, whatever, but the same sort of rational/skeptical thinking fixes all of them.
Also, most of those phrases could be viewed as over-ascribing agency, anyway...
John, many (perhaps all) people have hyperactive agency detection (HAD) - I certainly do. When I hear an unexpected noise my instinct is to wonder who is making it. But not all people are superstitious. HAD and other illusions probably underlie the faulty world view that leads to supertition. But they do not inevitably lead to it. Even in prescientific times some people were more superstitious than others. What this study is really looking at is the links between that faulty world view and 'sense of purpose'. They seem to be linked, and not independent.
ReplyDeleteWill, all the statements are metaphorically true, but they're not clearly literally true. There is some ambiguity though, I agree. But remember that these are just selections from a battery of questions. Even the most scientifically minded would not not answer 'no' to all of them. But they would say no more often than people with faulty world views, and that's the critical metric.
ReplyDeleteI heard about philosophical investigation of the concepts "natural" and "supernatural" in the Department of Philosophy in the University of Turku. These concepts are very arguable and thats why this kind of investigation presented above seems to be allmoust futile.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting really to see this as part of psychology. There are many investigations which show that decision making is almost always psychologically self-protective(for example: i didnt make wrong decision I keep on trying - even though its definitely useful or this changes my life so much that it cannot be just normal - there is some bigger meanings like..). This means that that decisions are not rational and they depend on many logically (but maybe not unconsciously) wrong hints. These are not rational in logical sense but human being is not rational at all.
This feature of human thought doesnt depend on supernatural worldview, its common to all people in just normal situations. Without this many more would became desperate - everything good that happens to me is just meaningless - nothing was FOR me, I just happened to be there so in the end nobody loves ME, nobody wanted ME, even my parents didnt know who is going to be born, I just happened to be there...
(for example: i didnt make wrong decision I keep on trying - even though its definitely NOT useful or this changes my life so much that it cannot be just normal - there is some bigger meanings like..)
ReplyDelete@alias Edmund, yes, totally agree on the defensive nature of decision making (post-hoc rationalisation especially). There's evidence that putting people in stressful situations increases their superstitious beliefs, but there isn't necessarily a connection between cognitive biases (i.e. faulty thinking) and superstition.
ReplyDelete