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How does theory of mind equip us for the ubiquitous human capacity for religiosity? What biases might it introduce in our concepts of spiritual entities?

 

 

Word count: 2393

 

March 2013

 

Religious belief and behaviour has been found in every known human culture throughout history (Brown, 1991). This overwhelming ubiquity has inspired scholars to study religion from an evolutionary standpoint; could it be that religion is somehow innately human? That we are born religious? If so, one should be able to find certain universal aspects of human cognition that cause, or bias us towards, religious belief. One major aspects of religion is belief in supernatural agents and events. It has been hypothesized that our tendency to believe in the supernatural is a product of our theory of mind (ToM) – our ability to infer the mental states of other agents (Tremlin, 2006). This essay will examine three aspects of religious belief that would not be possible without ToM; (1) belief in the afterlife, (2) the way we perceive supernatural agents, and (3) the way we attribute supernatural causation and communication to unexpected events. It will be argued that our natural tendency to view the mind and the body as separate allow for the belief that certain aspects of the mind survives the body. Further, it will be suggested that supernatural agents can take a wide variety of forms, but are most likely to be attributed with those states we are most familiar with; those of our fellow human beings. Lastly, it will be reasoned that ToM drives our tendency to infer communicative meaning from unexpected events. In essence, this essay demonstrates that the universal aspect of human cognition known as ToM makes the acquisition of religious belief almost, but not quite, inevitable.

Bering and Bjorklund (2004) performed a study which examined how children think about death. By asking a number of questions about the state of a dead animal, they wanted to examine which universal judgments were made about dead agents as children develop. They found that children aged 7 and older were more likely to say that emotional, epistemic and desire states would continue after death, compared to biological, psychobiological and perception states (ibid). The same was true for adults. No such pattern was observed for younger children. The authors argue that the reason for this distinct pattern in continuity beliefs in older children and adults can be attributed to simulation constraints. Emotional, epistemic and desire states may be difficult to imagine being without, as one can never experience being completely without e.g. thought. In contrast, it is fairly simple to imagine not being hungry or not moving because such states are experienced relatively often. Such biological aspects of death are thus easy to imagine as discontinuous. Bering and Bjorklund therefore argue that it is the innate simulation constraints in our ToM that explains the reason for this universal disparity between cognitive states, driving afterlife belief.

A similar study to that of Bering and Bjorklund (2004) was performed by Astuti and Harris (2007) on children and adults in rural Madagascar. The precise results of the study are not of importance here, but it must be noted that their results differed from those of Bering and Bjorklund; children and adults applied different states to dead agents depending on the context in which the questions were asked. Whilst there are methodological problems in this study, the results do indicate that beliefs about dead agents can vary according to the situation an individual is primed with (ibid). Thus, it may be that dead agent beliefs do not rely upon innate knowledge, but rather on knowledge acquired in a cultural context. Teasing apart which knowledge is innate, and which is not, is not an easy task, however.

Hodge (2011) suggests that it is the way that we think about others in a social context that drives our afterlife beliefs. In contrast to Bering’s view, Hodge views belief in life after death as other-oriented. Since humans have a deeply social mind, due to ToM, we are able to socially reason about individuals who are not present with us at a given moment. This is known as offline processing (ibid). Hodge suggests that we are slow at updating our social cognitions after a loved one dies, and thus continues to reason about them as if they were still alive, yet absent at the present moment. This suggestion makes intuitive sense as one might find oneself temporarily “forgetting” that an individual has recently passed away. However, it is unclear how this tendency for offline processing alone can account for why only certain states are believed to continue after death and not others.

A concept which may be better applied to Bering and Bjorklund’s results is that of intuitive dualism. Bloom (2005) argues that our experiences of mind-body separation, for example through dreaming, results in an intuitive idea that certain processes are separate from the body. The main difference between Bering and Bloom comes down to the concepts of simulation-theory and theory-theory. According to simulation-theory, ToM works by simulating other agents’ situations (Apperly, 2008). According to theory-theory, ToM works by gathering information about agents and applying that knowledge when reasoning about them (ibid). In order to infer whether simulation-theory or theory-theory best accounts for afterlife beliefs we can examine how they account for mental state attributions to other types of agents.

According to Tremlin (2006), agents are “…beings capable of independently and intentionally initiating action on the basis of internal mental states like beliefs and desires” (p. 78). Most agents that we encounter are humans and animals. However, spiritual entities such as gods and ghosts are also agents. Furthermore, we can attribute agency to more abstract concepts such as groups of agents perceived as one, e.g. “the government” (Boyer, 2003). At the most basic level, agency is detected by an ancient automatic cognitive mechanism known as the “Agency Detection Device” (ADD) (Tremlin, 2006). Mental states are attributed to detected agents using ToM (ibid). According to simulation-theory these states are attributed through simulation. However, theory-theory may better account for the ease with which we can attribute a wide variety of states to a wide variety of agents. Considering the range of different types of agents in the world, including animals and even organizations and groups, it seems the most parsimonious explanation that states are attributed to these through knowledge, not simulation (Pyysaïnen, 2003).

 

Although it may be most likely that our agent inferences are based on theory-theory, humans, and especially children, do show a tendency to anthropomorphize animals and other non-human agents (Barrett & Richert, 2003). An emerging alternative theory to both theory-theory and simulation-theory is known as hybrid-theory, proposing that some sort of hybrid between the two strategies is employed when attributing mental states to agents. To investigate whether children always anthropomorphize agents, Barrett and colleagues performed an experiment looking at the way in which children attribute mental states to a wide range of agents (Barrett, Richert & Driesenga, 2001).Using an experimental set-up known as “the cracker box experiment” they presented children with a box marked “crackers”. Upon inspection it was revealed that the box, which one would assume to contain crackers, in fact contained rocks. Subsequently, the children were shown a brown paper bag which did contain crackers. They were then asked where a range of agents including their mother, a bear, a tree and God, would look if they wanted a cracker. This task is a test of ToM, as one must be able to infer that other agents have beliefs different to one’s own knowledge about the world; an agent who did not know that the crackers were in the bag would first search in the box marked “crackers”.

 

The youngest children in the sample, aged 3 and 4, attributed omniscient knowledge to all agents; they assumed that everyone would know that the crackers were in the paper bag (ibid). This mental state is inaccurate for agents such as the child’s mother, but is indeed accurate for an agent commonly viewed as omniscient such as God. The authors therefore argue that young children have “a more accurate understanding of God’s agency than that of humans” (ibid). However, this argument does not seem completely precise; it appears more prudent to assume that children at a young age do not possess a fully developed ToM, and are therefore unable to imagine any agent as having mental states different from their own. To say that this implies an “accurate understanding of God’s agency” (ibid) appears misguided. Young children do not have an understanding of the beliefs of neither humans nor God. In order to investigate how children reason about God in particular, the data on older children can therefore provide a more plausible model.

 

Children aged six and over in Barrett’s experiment (ibid) correctly inferred both that a human would search for crackers in the cracker box, and that God as an omniscient being would search in the paper bag (ibid). Furthermore, a follow-up experiment introduced an agent known as Kitty, who could see in the dark. The experimenters placed a block inside a darkened box, and asked whether various agents would be able to see the block (ibid). Children age six and up consistently said that a human or a bear would not be able to see the block, but both Kitty and God would. They were thus able to apply their newfound knowledge about Kitty’s special vision and attribute it to their mental representation of Kitty’s mental state. These results indicate that children who have a fully developed ToM do not have natural drive to anthropomorphize agents, and can indeed gather knowledge about an agent’s abilities, and attribute mental states from this.

 

To put these results in the context of afterlife beliefs and belief in supernatural agents; humans do not necessarily anthropomorphize supernatural agents. However, humans are the type of agent with which we have the most experience. When a person dies, our intuitive dualistic ideas (Bloom, 2005) make us prone to believing that their minds are still alive. Activation of the ADD, and subsequent search for an agent makes the recently deceased person available for agency attribution. This line of possible events may explain why supernatural agents are often attributed with human-like mental capacities. Further, it may explain the prevalence of supernatural beliefs surrounding ancestor worship in hunter-gatherer societies (Astuti & Harris, 2007). Humans are not necessarily used as models for supernatural agents, but they are likely to be, due to their pervasiveness in our everyday life.

 

Another important aspect of religious belief relates to seeing meaning in the world around us, and explaining why things are the way they are. Gopnik (2000) suggests that we have an innate “drive to explain” which enables acquisition of religious belief. Furthermore, humans appear to have an innate tendency to favour teleo-functional explanations of object presence; they tend to believe that objects exist for a purpose. Early theorists (e.g. Piaget, 1929) believed that this tendency was exclusive to children, and that adults have a profoundly different view of the world. However, Casler and Kelemen (2008) show that the tendency to prefer teleo-functional explanations is constant throughout life, and merely suppressed by scientific knowledge of the origins of objects. These cognitive inclinations to seek explanations and assume that objects have a specific function may in part explain why humans often explain events and object origins in terms of religion; when no obvious creator is available, a supernatural creator is settled upon. Furthermore, humans tend to infer meaning from natural events (Bering & Barker, 2006), seemingly believing that a supernatural agent is trying to communicate something to them. This tendency may require additional cognitive capacities separate from a drive to explain and teleological reasoning.

 

An experiment by Bering and Parker (ibid) investigated how children attribute intention to a supernatural agent by priming children ages 3-9 years with a story about the invisible Princess Alice. The children were asked to guess in which of two boxes a ball was hidden, and were informed that Alice would tell them if they made the wrong choice. During the experiment, unexpected events occurred, and children’s reactions were recorded. Results showed that children ages 5 and 6 attributed supernatural agency to the unexpected events, but failed to interpret any form of communication behind them. In contrast, 7-9 year olds did infer communicative intent behind the events, supposing that Princess Alice was telling them their choice was incorrect. These age differences are in line with current knowledge about the development of ToM (ibid); only after having acquired a second-order ToM can one infer communication from agent actions. These results therefore suggest that ToM is crucial in inferring supernatural communicative agency behind events, and provide a plausible explanation for the easy acquisition of religion that penetrates human cognition. However, it must be noted that the children in the control group, who had not been primed with the story about Princess Alice, did not infer any meaning or supernatural agency behind the unexpected events. Therefore, it seems the idea of a supernatural agent presence is necessary for communicative meaning inference. This point is important because it emphasizes the importance that culture and indoctrination play in religious belief acquisition; whilst our cognitive mechanisms make religious explanations easy to grasp, it is not a given that all individuals will acquire religious belief regardless of their environment and culture.

 

In summary, ToM may play a profoundly important role in the acquisition of religious belief. ToM equips all humans with the ability to gather information about the agents around them. Through personal experience they learn about mind-body dualism, creating a proneness to believe in life after death. ADD and ToM work together to allow for the detection of agents, and the attribution of mental states to them, even when no physical agent is present. The drive to explain and tendency to favour teleo-functional explanation, along with a fully developed ToM are necessary to infer communicative meaning behind unexpected events. Put together, these processes, which all involve ToM to some extent, make it very easy for humans to acquire a concept of a spiritual world of supernatural agents. ToM knowledge about other familiar agents is used to attribute mental agency to spiritual entities, but the tendency to anthropomorphize is not innate. Spiritual entities can take a wide variety of forms, depending on each individual’s experiential input. As such, religious belief is not innate per se, but the deeply social nature of the human mind is so profound that acquisition of belief is very easy, yet not inevitable.

 

 

References

Apperly, I. A. (2008). Beyond simulation-theory and theory-theory: why social cognitive neuroscience should use its own concepts to study “theory of mind”. Cognition, 107, 266-283.

 

Astuti, R. & Harris, P. L. (2007). Understanding morality and the life of the ancestors in rural Madagascar. Cognitive Science, 32, 713-740.

 

Barrett, J. L. & Richert, R. A. (2003). Anthropomorphism or preparedness? Exploring children’s god concepts. Review of Religious Research, 44, 300-312.

 

Barrett, J. L., Richert, R. A., & Driesenga, A. (2001). God’s beliefs versos mother’s: The development of nonhuman agent concepts. Child Development, 72, 50-65.

 

Bering, J. M & Bjorklund, D. F. (2004). The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity. Developmental Psychology, 40, 217-233.

 

Bloom, P. (2005). Descartes’ baby: how the science of child development explains what makes us human. NY: Basic Books.

 

Boyer, P. (2003). Are ghost concepts “intuitive”, “endemic” and “innate”?. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 3, 233-243.

 

Brown, D. (1991). Human Universals. NY: McGraw-Hill.

 

Casler, K. & Kelemen, D. (2008). Developmental continuity in teleo-functional explanation: Reasoning about nature among Romanian Romani adults. Journal of Cognition and Development, 9, 340-362.

 

Gopnik, A. (2000). Explanation as orgasm and the drive for causal understanding: The evolution, function and phenomenology of the theory-formation system. In F. Keil &

 

R. Wilson (Eds.) Cognition and explanation (pp. 299-323). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

 

Hodge, K. M. (2011). On imagining the afterlife. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 11, 367-389.

 

Piaget, J. (1929). The child’s conception of the world. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

 

Pyysaïnen, I. (2003). On the ‘innateness’ of religion: a comment on Bering. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 3, 218-225.

 

Tremlin, T. (2006). Minds, other minds, and the minds of gods. In T. Tremlin (Ed.) Minds and gods: the cognitive foundations of religion (pp. 73-106). Oxford: Oxford

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