Young kids can't help believing what they're told - including religion

I think you should pop over to Epiphenom and read the discussion on Tom Rees' post about how young kids can't help believing what they're told. It seems that small children have a very strong bias to believe verbal testimony over anything else and can't tell from experience that they're being lied to. The study Tom refers to, and the experiments included in it, are really interesting in and of themselves, but the most interesting thing is when he concludes:

Now, you may be wondering what all this has to do with this blog's regular fare of religion or non-religion. The answer is: not a lot! But it is interesting...

I'm not sure if he really means what I think he means. I disagree! I'm thinking more in the vein of John S. Wilkins' comment. It has everything to do with religion!

A little test on a Sunday evening: Are atheists better at religion?

This is pretty interesting stuff. According to a survey published this week by something called The Pew Forum, atheists seem to know religion better than religious people do... among other findings. What can I say? It's sort of unsurprising. It certainly confirms my experience as an atheist in discussions about religion. If you're going to actively denounce something, it makes sense to find out a lot about it. Also, atheism is an effect of knowledge. Not a necessary effect, but still. The fact that atheists in general are better educated than religious believers may also play in a bit. I'm sure there are many other factors involved, I won't go too deep into it. Most of all I'm a bit chocked that the people in the survey scored so badly! On average they only answered half the questions correctly.



I took the sample quiz on the Pew Forum website just for fun and scored 15/15. Although it should probably be 14/15 'cause one of them was a lucky guess. Take the test yourself, it's a fun way to review the data and the questions are pretty interesting.







Again, I'm a bit chocked that the scores are so bad. A few of the questions were tricky, but most of them could have come from my 9th grade religion exams back in school. There is probably something to be said about the differences between the Swedish and the American educational systems there. Anyway, I won't go too deep into the findings, although they are sure to generate a lot of debate and there is much to be said, I just can't resist an online quiz.

If you want to read more about it you can read the full report on the Pew Forum website. I also recommend these interesting commentaries on The New York Times, Epiphenom and Pharyngula.

"Why do we believe", and are atheists really more intelligent?

ResearchBlogging.org editor Dave Munger has written an article for SEED magazine entitled "Why do we believe". The article summarizes recent blog entries regarding studies on the origins of religiosity. It's really worth reading to get a good overview of the subject, and what do you know he links my entry on god's will and beliefs in it.

Among the studies that are mentioned is a controversial study entitled "Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent" (link at the end of this post).

Medical writer Tom Rees devotes his blog Epiphenom to the scientific study of religion. Last week he examined a study on the relationship between intelligence and religious belief. Published in Social Psychology Quarterly, this study by Satoshi Kanazawa replicated the results of several earlier studies in showing that strong religious belief was correlated with lower intelligence. In this case, adolescents who scored higher on intelligence tests were less likely to be religious as adults.

But Rees says Kanazawa’s study goes beyond those earlier studies to arrive at a potential explanation of why less-intelligent people are more religious: Intelligence evolved in order for people to adapt to novel situations.

You should go over to Epiphenom to read a summary of the study as well as my commentary on it, posted as a blog comment. In summary: I don't think it's very good. Kanazawa's evolutionary argument is completely based on some pretty wild conjectures and lacks any sort of empiric support. His argument is at most "sorta reasonable", but we must do better than that surely. For evolutionary researchers that have to spend considerable time and effort gathering a solid line of evidence, this sort of jumping to conclusions can be a tad annoying.

Also, let's remember what kind of forces we're dealing with here, how evolution through natural selection actually acts and what it acts on. Even if we assume first, that intelligence tests do measure some sort of good approximation of intelligence, and second, that results gathered today actually reflect a past situation; what difference do a "good few" average points make for survival? Any conclusions made from the correlation between higher intelligence, as measured by intelligence tests, and atheism are only significant within a larger evolutionary and functional neurobiological context. So take claims that atheists are more intelligent (on average) with a considerable pinch of salt.

Read more on the subject on Epiphenom, here and here.

Kanazawa, S. (2010). Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent Social Psychology Quarterly DOI: 10.1177/0190272510361602

Swedish blog tags: Vetenskap, Biologi, Neurovetenskap, Hjärnan, Religion
Technorati tags: Science, Biology, Neuroscience, Brain, Religion

God's will and beliefs are your own, not god's

I've written before about how religious beliefs probably are grounded in brain mechanisms that we use for other purposes, primarily social interactions. There is no "god spot" in the brain, rather we think of supernatural all-powerful agents much in the same way as we think of the people we interact with. It suggests that religious belief is a secondary effect of basic or general mechanisms that guide social cognition, although it is not definitely proven.

That study dealt with god's perceived involvement in the world and god's perceived emotion among other things - in a newer article published around christmas in PNAS a team of researchers have investigated how believers think when they think about god's will and god's own beliefs. The importance of such an investigation is highlighted already in the opening paragraph of the article.

Religion appears to serve as a moral compass for the vast majority of people around the world. It informs whether same-sex marriage is love or sin, whether war is an act of security or of terror, and whether abortion rights represent personal liberty or permission to murder. Many religions are centered on a god (or gods) that has beliefs and intentions, with adherents encouraged to follow "God’s will" on everything from martyr-dom to career planning to voting. Within these religious systems, how do people know what their god wills?

Since we already readily infer other people's beliefs egocentrically, that is as similar to our own - conservative people tend to gauge positively evaluated people as more conservative than progressive people do - it's justified to ask: How do your own beliefs guide your predictions about god's beliefs? Especially since we seem to think about god as we think about the people we interact with. According to these results believers project their own values and beliefs on their god (or gods) to a great extent, which could certainly help explain not only the great diversity and variability of religious belief and expression, but also the ambiguous nature of religious interpretation.

The paper includes several studies, among them several correlational studies using surveys where people were asked to estimate god's, the "average American's", Bill Gates', George Bush's (among other known figures) beliefs on several controversial subjects such as abortion and same-sex marriage, and an experimental study where the subjects' beliefs were manipulated through exposure to persuasive arguments in order to see if they "changed god's mind" as readily as they changed their own.

Most interestingly for me though, they also conducted a neuroimaging study, and since it's what I'm most familiar with I will focus on that. It consisted of 17 test subjects reporting their own attitudes on controversial subjects as exemplified above, as well as estimating the attitudes of the "average American" and god on the same subjects while in an MRI machine.

Below you see three images that highlight the differences in brain region activation (yellow/orange spots) when comparing the measurements done while stating your own attitudes vs. estimation of the "average American" attitude, estimation of God's attitude vs. the "average American" attitude, and most interestingly your own attitude vs. estimation of god's attitude.


Ref: N. Epley et. al. (see reference below)

As you can see, there is no difference between thinking of your own beliefs and thinking about god's beliefs, which stands in contrast with how it looks when you're thinking of another person's beliefs. Of course the image only shows one representative slice of the data, but the results were consistent across the panel. Thinking about god's beliefs seems statistically indistinguishable from thinking about your own beliefs, whatever your beliefs are.

The brain regions that were found to show differences in the self vs. American and god vs. American comparisons, and no differences is the self vs. god comparisons, include regions that are known to be involved in thinking about your own mental state and in the projection of your own mental states onto others. In a follow-up analysis the authors closed in on one of these regions, the medial prefrontal cortex, and observed that it had a significantly lower activity when thinking about the beliefs of the "average American" than when thinking of your own beliefs or those of god, which again were indistinguishable. Compare the three columns in figure B. BOLD is the measurement of blood oxygen level in the brain regions, which is a correlate of brain activity.

There is a growing body of literature showing that religious beliefs seem to emerge from the same neural substrates that produce a more general social cognition. The interesting point in these studies is that while we relate to the entity of god and experience god's involvement in the world much like we would that of another person, our estimations of god's will and beliefs are self-referential and egocentrically biased, more so than our estimation of other people's beliefs. Religiously motivated political, moral or social stances may originate just as much from your self as from others in your surroundings, like your parents or congregation. Indeed it only seems natural to assume that god has the same belief as oneself. God, as the supreme authority, must hold true beliefs and most people naturally presume that their own beliefs are true.

As an atheist one is often confronted with the view that without religion there would be no morality; that without religion humanity would degenerate. As a professed nonbeliever you're either an immoral degenerate or unconsciously religious. These data provide some evidence that morality and personal beliefs are native to human cognition and are largely independent from religious inputs.

People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want. The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing.

PS: Just as a side note I want to mention that in one of the correlational studies they included nonbelievers. However the results were difficult to interpret. Nonbelievers seem to go less according to their own beliefs when estimating god's beliefs... which somehow makes sense but kind of doesn't prove anything. At least, the authors note, it demonstrates that you have to believe in god to make an egocentric estimation of god's beliefs in the first place.


Epley N, Converse BA, Delbosc A, Monteleone GA, & Cacioppo JT (2009). Believers' estimates of God's beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people's beliefs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106 (51), 21533-8 PMID: 19955414

Swedish blog tags: Vetenskap, Biologi, Neurovetenskap, Hjärnan, Religion
Technorati tags: Science, Biology, Neuroscience, Brain, Religion

'Why we believe in gods' lecture

From the Richard Dawkins YouTube channel: Psychologist Andy Thomson talks about why we believe in gods at the American Atheists 2009 convention. He talks briefly about the brain imaging study I wrote about in a previous post.



Of course he's an atheist speaking to a (I would assume) largely atheist audience and it comes through, but I think the main point, at least to me, is general enough to be appreciated and understood by everyone. At the very least he provides a hypothesis for how belief is generated in our brains, although he does focus too much on adaptations, and at the very most he demonstrates how unlikely gods are. There's plenty there to discuss.

Swedish blog tags: Neurovetenskap, Hjärnan, Religion, Ateism
Technorati tags: Neuroscience, Brain, Religion, Atheism

Religious belief in the brain

I've often wondered what's going on in the religious brain that is so different from what's going on in mine. How can religious people so determinedly "get it" while I just as determinedly don't. Turns out that, in a sense, not that much is different. Religious belief works through brain networks that have regular non-religious functions, suggesting that religion is nothing but a secondary effect of regular cognitive processes.

A study published in PNAS last week (ahead of print) set out to examine which psychological "dimensions" make up religious belief and how the brain processes them, largely through the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI - a technique that allows researchers to get images of brain activity in awake test subjects performing different tasks. In this case the task was agreeing or disagreeing with statements such as "God is removed from the world", God is punishing", "God is forgiving", "A source of creation exists", "Religion provides moral guiding" and so on.

Some interesting conclusions:

The practice of religious belief involves the assessment of god's perceived involvement in the world and god's perceived emotion. So when we ponder god, we use the same brain networks that are used for understanding the intent of people around us, understanding their emotional state, predicting their actions and generating an appropriate emotional response to give back. This is a central mechanism behind our social interactions. This study demonstrates that we think of gods just as we think of anyone around us. There are no particular parts of the brain that are dedicated explicitly to understanding god, instead our brains try to "read" god just as we read the people we interact with.

It also seems like the reason some people adopt religious beliefs while other don't is largely emotional, with the effect being larger for those who are believers. When religious test subjects were asked to actively deny a series of religious statements they showed much larger involvement of brain networks involved in the communication between emotions and cognitive processes than non-religious test subjects. You can see these brain regions in the lower row of the figure below. This finding will be familiar to any non-believers who have discussed religion with believers. Their final arguments are often emotional instead of logical, they often claim to "just know" and their position is motivated by the negative emotional response of considering a world without god.


Ref: D. Kapogiannis et. al. (see reference below)

I'll take the opportunity to recommend the blog where I first found this study: Epiphenom. It's updated frequently with a lot of very nice information from studies on the neuroscience and psychology behind religious belief. You can read more there. But while the author of that blog states that this study doesn't do anything to prove that religious belief is a by-product of evolution, I see that it absolutely does. The authors even conclude with:

The evolution of these networks was likely driven by their primary roles in social cognition, language, and logical reasoning. Religious cognition likely emerged as a unique combination of these several evolutionarily important cognitive processes.

To me it's pretty clear that any supernatural belief is an "overshoot" of mental capacities that we use for other purposes, that we relate to supernatural entities just as we relate to those entities we interact with. Whether this is adaptive or not, whether it's been to our advantage or not, is another question altogether. I'm inclined to believe that given the complexity of the brain and the complexity of phenomena it can generate, it's unlikely that all of them, at any point in evolution, are the result of adaptation. The brain simply does too much. I'm open to the thought that cultural phenomena could have "abducted" some of our cognitive abilities more or less "by accident" to generate some of the more colorful phenomena of our cognition and behavior.

Kapogiannis, D., Barbey, A., Su, M., Zamboni, G., Krueger, F., & Grafman, J. (2009). Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0811717106

Swedish blog tags: Vetenskap, Biologi, Neurovetenskap, Hjärnan, Religion
Technorati tags: Science, Biology, Neuroscience, Brain, Religion

I'll tell you why

I got this (anonymous) comment to one of my recent posts countering creationist claims.

But why so terribly arrogant? If you believe you are right, some humility would make it better. The way it is now, it appears to be along the line of "when the arguments are weak, speak louder".

This is a fairly common response to vocal scientists countering any kind of pseudoscientific claims. I see it over and over and on occasion, like now, I have it aimed at myself. First of all it's really rather tiring and, just for the record, I don't think my retort was very arrogant at all. But putting that aside, it's the sort of critique from the peanut gallery that has little validity to the question at hand.

If there are two mutually incompatible views, they cannot possibly both be right. When one of them is nothing but misleading illiterate nonsense, ignorant distortion of facts or outright dismissal of them, it just doesn't merit the kind of "humble" and respectful response advocated by those who feel scientists are too arrogant. In this case, the kind of creationism I countered in my posts deserves nothing but the ridicule and severe rebuke it got. To approach it "humbly" would be to play right into the creationists' hands. It would be to concede that both views are equal and deserve equal attention and respect and that they play on an even field, which is 100% not the case. True humility is to approach questions of science unprejudiced and objectively, which creationists most certainly don't. Who are the arrogant ones?

As I wrote in my retort's concluding remarks;

This [creationism] is not about challenging science. This is not about wanting to bring science forward. This is not about one scientific view arguing with another. It's so very easy to forget that. This is about religious proselytes wanting to destroy a product of rational thought because it challenges their deeply held world-views. For all the science that is involved, for all that I have written in these entries, in the end this is about fanatics wanting to tell us all how we should lead our lives because they patronizingly feel that they have the moral authority to do so. No scientific theory pretends to do the same. The mere thought is utterly ridiculous. But by arguing like this, creationists want to take down evolutionary theory to their playing field. It's important that we don't lose sight of that.

So really, who are the arrogant ones?

Creationists thrive on the "when the arguments are weak, speak louder"-argument and they love nothing more than playing the underdog card whenever they can. Unfortunately a large portion of the general public plays along with their dishonest outcries for humility. When I said that the critique presented in the above quoted comment was not valid to the question at hand, I meant it, but that doesn't mean to say that I don't take it seriously. It is of course unfortunate if the scientific rebukes are seen as arrogant by the general public and if they only reinforce the view of creationists as underdogs. This is often coupled with the fact that scientists speak out from a position of authority, which in any situation is readily mistaken for arrogance. But the solution is definitely not to concede to their tactics and give the impression that science and creationism offer equally valid explanations. The solution is to bridge the disconnect between science and scientific thinking and the general public. It's maybe in that department that those of us who vehemently rebuke pseudoscientific claims have failed. But ultimately dreck is dreck and it needs to be called out on it, forcefully and vocally.

Swedish blog tags: Pseudovetenskap, Kreationism
Technorati tags: Pseudoscience, Creationism

It's bad luck to be superstitious

>> Re-post from January 24, 2007.

I saw an article through scienceblogs.com this morning that I thought was interesting and thoughtworthy and really cool. It's called Magical Thinking: Why Do People Cling to Odd Rituals. Even Diesel Sweeties, mentions it. Apparently the belief that your own thoughts can affect the physical world is very common and easy to elicit experimentally.

Read the article with a pinch of salt though.

The appetite for such beliefs appears to be rooted in the circuitry of the brain, and for good reason. The sense of having special powers buoys people in threatening situations, and helps soothe everyday fears and ward off mental distress. In excess, it can lead to compulsive or delusional behavior. This emerging portrait of magical thinking helps explain why people who fashion themselves skeptics cling to odd rituals that seem to make no sense, and how apparently harmless superstition may become disabling.

It's interesting to think that our brains accept a magical interpretation to a series of events or situations in the absence of a rational explanation, but where the author of the article is very quick to see purpose I see a side-effect of our imaginative and creative brain. The ability to make quick judgments about causation and form hypotheses quickly, even before logical thinking, is something I judge to have been very helpful in our evolution as well as our development into adults. So in my opinion, any propensity towards magical thinking, or religion, doesn't really have a "purpose" of its own, but is rather an interesting property of our mental abilities, a by-product of the abilities that have been advantageous in our evolution. Which makes the following statement even more bewildering...

If the tendency to think magically were no more than self-defeating superstition, then over the pitiless history of human evolution it should have all but disappeared in intellectually mature adults.

Frankly, I can't figure out what that's even supposed to mean.

Even though I'm sure we all know that feeling of security from "positive omens" and so on, most sound people don't walk around actually believing that our thoughts can affect the outcome of events independent from us. At least that's what I hope.

Swedish blog tags: Vetenskap, Neurovetenskap, Vidskeplighet
Technorati tags: Neuroscience, Science, Superstition