The main struggle in society is always about whose picture of the world will be considered true. He who determines the history and goals of the distant future gradually strengthens his control levers in the present. The question of faith in God is one of the key questions with the help of which millions of people have been effectively controlled for a surprisingly long time. And if such a system has been effective for thousands of years, then from a scientific point of view, the roots of our faith must be sought in evolutionary psychology.
It looks like Satoshi Kanazawa managed to do it. Having systematized the experience of his colleagues, he very clearly explained why people believe in God and, most importantly, how the habitat of our ancestors determined such behavior. Below we present an adapted translation of two articles by Kanazawa from his blog on Psychologytoday.
The connection between God and Beavis and Butt-head
The key to understanding the connection between God and Beavis and Butt-head lies in two young rising stars in evolutionary psychology—Marty G. Haselton of the University of California and Daniel Nettle of Newcastle University—and their incredibly original error management theory. In my opinion, error management theory outlines the greatest theoretical advance in evolutionary psychology in recent years.
Imagine a typical scene in Beavis and Butt-Head - that rare occasion where the guys aren't sitting on the couch watching a video. So, Beavis and Butt-head are walking down the street and pass a couple of young, attractive women dressed in tank tops and attractive pants. As the women pass by, one of them turns to Beavis and Butt-head, smiles and says, "Hi!"
So what happens then? Beavis and Butt-head freeze, all their cognitive functions (such as they are) are suspended, and they mutter: "Whoa... She wants me... She wants to do it... I'm going to sleep with her..."
As funny as Beavis and Butt-head's spectacular misunderstanding may be, experimental evidence suggests that their reaction is quite common among men. In a standard experiment, a man and a woman engage in spontaneous conversation for several minutes. Unbeknownst to them, observers—a man and a woman—are watching their interaction from behind a one-way mirror. After the conversation, all four (participant, participant, observer and observer) talk about how interested the participant is in the participant in a romantic sense.
Data indicate that a male participant and a male observer often rated a female participant as more romantically interested in a male participant, in contrast to the ratings of both the participant and a female observer. Men think a woman is flirting with a man, while women don't think so.
Whether you are a man or a woman, if you think about your life for a minute, you will quickly realize that this is a very common occurrence. A man and a woman meet and start a friendly conversation. After the conversation, the man is convinced that the woman is attracted to him and perhaps wants to sleep with him, while the woman had no thought about it; she was just polite and friendly. This is a common theme in many romantic comedies. Why is this happening?
Haselton and Nettle's error management theory offers a very compelling explanation. Their theory begins with the observation that decision making under uncertainty often leads to erroneous conclusions, but some errors are more costly in their consequences than others. For this reason, evolution must support a system of inference that minimizes not the total number of errors, but their total costs.
For example, in this case, in the absence of comprehensive information, a man must decide whether a woman is interested in him romantically or not. If he concludes that she is interested when she is really interested, or if he finds out that she is not when she is not really interested, then he has made the right conclusion.
On two other occasions, however, he made an error in inference. If he concludes that she is interested when in fact she is not, then he has made a false positive error (what statisticians call a “Type I” error). On the contrary, if he concludes that she is not interested when she is, in fact, interested, then he has made a false negative error (what statisticians call a “Type II” error). What are the consequences of false positive and false negative errors?
If he makes the mistake of assuming she's interested when she's not, he'll make advances toward her but end up being rejected, laughed at, and possibly slapped. If he made the mistake of thinking she wasn't interested, then he missed out on the opportunity for sex and likely reproduction. As bad as it is to be rejected and ridiculed (and believe me, it is), it is nothing compared to not having a real chance to have sex.
So, Haselton and Nettle argue that evolution has equipped men to overestimate women's romantic and sexual interest in them; thus, although they may make a large number of false positive errors (and, as a result, get slapped all the time), they will never miss any opportunity to have sex.
This is known among engineers as the "smoke detector principle." Like evolution, engineers design smoke detectors to minimize not the total number of errors, but their total cost.
The consequence of a false positive smoke detector error is that you are woken up at three in the morning by a loud alarm when there was no fire.
The result of a false negative error is that you and your entire family are dead if the fire alarm does not go off. It's annoying to be woken up in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, but it's nothing compared to being dead.
Therefore, engineers deliberately make smoke detectors extremely sensitive, so that they will give many false positive alarms, but no false negative silence. Haselton and Nettle argue that evolution, as the engineer of life, designed the male inference system in the same way.
This is why men always hit on women and make unwanted advances all the time. But what in God's name does any of this have to do with our faith in God? I'll explain this in the next post. Believe me, there is a connection.
Some cases
As mentioned above, a person can suddenly believe in God. This often happens after completely extraordinary life events. After the loss of a loved one or illness, for example.
There are cases when people suddenly think about God when they come face to face with danger, after which they were lucky: with a wild animal, with a criminal, with an injury. Faith as a guarantee that everything will be fine.
We are religious because we are paranoid
Religion is a cultural universal. People in every known society practice some type of religion. It is therefore tempting to believe that religiosity is part of evolved human nature, that humans are designed to be religious. Well, the answer is both yes and no.
In my last post, I looked at how Haselton and Nettle's error management theory explains interspecies telepathy, why men always overestimate women's sexual interest in them. One of the great things about error management theory is that it can explain a wide range of phenomena. This is actually a general theory.
Imagine that you are our ancestor who lived on the African savannah 100,000 years ago, and you are faced with some ambiguous situation. For example, you heard a rustling noise at night. Or you are walking in the forest, and a large fruit falling from a tree branch hits you on the head. What's happening?
In such an uncertain situation, you can either attribute the phenomenon to impersonal, inanimate and random forces (for example, a gently blowing wind creating a rustle in the bushes and leaves, or ripe fruit falling under the force of gravity and hitting you on the head by pure chance) or subjective, animate and intentional forces (for example, a predator hiding in the dark and preparing to attack you, or an enemy hiding in the branches of trees and throwing fruit at your head). The question is, which version of the situation is true?
Again, error control theory suggests that you can make a false positive “Type I” error or a false negative “Type II” error in your inference, and these two types of errors lead to very different consequences and costs.
The cost of a false positive error is that you become paranoid. You are always looking around and behind you, looking for predators and enemies that don't exist.
The consequence of a false negative error is that you are dead, killed by a predator or enemy when you least expect them.
Obviously, it's better to be paranoid than dead, so evolution must have developed a mind that invents personal, animate forces that act deliberately even when they don't exist.
Various theorists call this innate human tendency to make false-positive rather than false-negative errors (and, as a result, be a little paranoid) the "animistic bias" or the "agent detection mechanism."
These theorists argue that the evolutionary origins of religious beliefs in supernatural forces may have come from this innate cognitive tendency to make false positive errors rather than false negatives and, as a result, to invent subjective, willful and animate forces that would otherwise be completely natural phenomena.
You see a bush on fire. It could be caused by an objective, inanimate and unintentional force (lightning striking a bush and setting it on fire), or it could be caused by a subjective, living force acting with intent (God trying to communicate with you). The "animistic bias" or "agent detection mechanism" predisposes you to accept the latter explanation rather than the former. This inclines you to discern the hand of God in the workings of natural, physical phenomena whose exact causes are unknown.
From this point of view, religiosity (a person's ability to believe in supernatural beings) is not a developed tendency in its pure form; after all, religion itself is not customizable.
Instead, it is a byproduct of an animistic bias or agent detection mechanism, a tendency to be paranoid that tunes in because it might save your life. Humans did not evolve to be religious; they have become paranoid. And people are religious because they are paranoid.
Some readers may recognize this argument as a variation of Pascal's Wager. The 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) argued that, given the impossibility of knowing for sure whether God exists, it is still reasonable to believe in God. If one does not believe in God and He really exists (false negative error), one will spend eternity in hell and eternal torment, while if a person believes in God and He does not really exist (false positive error), one will have to go to religious services minimum amount of time and effort is spent. The cost of making a false negative error far exceeds the cost of making a false positive error. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe in God.
However, Pascal cannot explain why men always hit on women, while Haselton and Nettle can. The intriguing suggestion here is that we may believe in God and supernatural forces for the same reasons that men are more likely to perceive women's sexual interest in them and make unwanted advances all the time.
Both religious beliefs and sexual misunderstandings between the sexes may be the product of the human brain, designed to effectively manage errors so as to minimize the total cost (rather than the total number) of errors. We can believe in God for the same reason that women have to slap Beavis and Butt-head to keep them in line.
Environment, geography
As a rule, a person born into a religious family also becomes a believer. And the geographical place of birth influences what faith he will adhere to. For example, Islam is widespread in the Middle East (Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, etc.) and in northern Africa (Egypt, Morocco, Libya). But Christianity with all its branches is widespread in almost all of Europe, North America (Catholicism and Protestantism) and in Russia (Orthodoxy). That is why in a purely Muslim country, for example, almost all of the believers are Muslims.
Geography and family usually influence whether a person becomes religious at all, but there are a number of other reasons why people believe in God later in life.
IQ and values of the country's population
The hypothesis about the influence of general intelligence on individual preferences and values can also be applied to differences in mentality, institutions of government and laws of states. A population with a higher level of intelligence may hold different collective preferences and values than a population with a lower level of intelligence.
If smarter people are more likely to be liberals and atheists, and if smarter people are more likely to value sexual exclusivity, then it follows that, at the societal level, those populations with higher intelligence levels are more likely to be liberal, to be atheists, and to practice monogamy. than those groups of the population whose level of intelligence is lower. The data fully support these macro-level conclusions of the Hypothesis.
Even after statistical predictions regarding such important factors as economic development, education and the history of communism, societies with higher intelligence levels are more liberal, less religious and more monogamous.
For example, the average level of intelligence in a society increases the maximum marginal tax rate (as an expression of people's willingness to invest their personal resources in the welfare of genetically unrelated people) and as a result partly reduces income inequality. The smarter the population, the more they pay in income taxes and the more egalitarian the distribution of their income.
The average IQ of the population is the most significant determinant of the maximum marginal tax rate and income inequality in a society. Each IQ point of average intelligence increases the top marginal income tax rate by more than half a percentage point; In societies where the average intelligence level is 10 IQ points higher, individuals pay over 5% of their personal income in taxes.
Likewise, the average level of intelligence in a society reduces the percentage of the population that believes in God and how important God is to people, as well as the percentage of the population that considers itself religious. The smarter the population, the less religious it is on average.
The average level of intelligence of the population is the most important factor determining the level of religiosity. For example, each IQ point of average intelligence reduces the share of the population who believes in God by 1.2% and the share of the population who consider themselves religious by 1.8%. Average intelligence alone explains 70% of the variance in how important God is across countries.
After all, the average level of intelligence in a society reduces the level of polygyny. The smarter a population is, the less polygynous (and more monogamous) it is. The average intelligence of a population is the most significant determinant of the level of polygyny within it. The average intelligence level of a population has a more significant impact on polygyny than income inequality or even Muslimness.
In an earlier post I suggest that there may be something in human nature that craves a hereditary monarchy, since we seem to want our political leaders to be succeeded by their wives, children and other family members.
If this is indeed the case, it means that some form of hereditary monarchy - the transfer of political power within families - may be evolutionarily familiar, while representative democracy (and all other forms of government) may be evolutionarily new.
Thus, the Hypothesis would predict that smarter people are more likely to prefer representative democracy and less likely to prefer hereditary monarchy. At the societal level, the Hypothesis would imply that the average level of intelligence in a society will increase the level of democracy.
From this point of view, it is interesting to note that the work of the Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen supports this assumption. His detailed study of 172 countries shows that the average level of intelligence in a society increases its level of democracy.
The smarter the population, the more democratic its government. This suggests that representative democracy may indeed be evolutionarily new and unnatural for people. Again, don't make the naturalistic fallacy. Unnatural does not mean bad or undesirable. It simply means that humans have not evolved to practice representative democracy.
Does believing in God make people happy?
One of the questions that ardent minds are raising concerns the relationship between faith and well-being. A number of studies report that among a control group of more than 160,000 Europeans, 85% of those who regularly go to church confidently said they were “very satisfied with their lives.” At that time, the percentage was slightly lower among atheists - 77%. Psychologists insist on three factors why this happens:
- social support. Faith is not individual and implies integration into groups of practitioners who provide each other with psychological and material assistance;
- finding the purpose of existence. The level of happiness and well-being increases when a person understands why he lives and what he strives for;
- feeling of emotional unity. Communication with God brings a person a sense of satisfaction and increases his personal significance.
What changes if you realize yourself as an eternal soul, as part of the spirit of the Creator himself.
Firstly , you understand that nothing is yours in this world . Everything belongs to God. You only use everything temporarily.
Secondly , in your actions you are guided not by personal gain, but primarily by the benefit for your soul . And such actions will bring joy and satisfaction not only to you, but also to all those for whom you will do all this. Such actions make you truly better, when your soul grows and strengthens, and not your body, which exists today and is unknown tomorrow.
Thirdly , you calm down. You stop striving to change this world for yourself, to change people. What is good is good, what is bad, so be it. You learn to let go and not get attached to things, people, or events .
