The Cognition of Belief: Cognitive Insights into Mechanisms of Belief

okay well perhaps we'll get started if everybody's found something to eat and a place to to sit down thanks for being here so early we have a full day and good morning and I'm Adam Greene and on behalf of all of us here at Georgetown it's really an honor and a pleasure to welcome you to today's meeting on the cognition of belief I want to start by thanking all of you who are attending and participating today and I want to acknowledge a few people in particular here at the top of the day first and foremost I'd like to direct grateful acknowledgement to the John Templeton Foundation with special thanks to Nick Gibson and chemo and Sergeant who are who are here with us yes absolutely the efforts of the Templeton Foundation have really awakened interest in the empirical study empirical exploration of the cognition of belief over the last few years and the growing momentum in this research space is really very clearly traceable to initiatives that Nick and kamon have led and Nick will be speaking with us later today about sort of where we stand as a field and what's on the horizon and he'll be giving particular attention to priorities and opportunities at Templeton that are going to support our next steps as a field grateful thanks are also due to our colleagues at the Berkeley Center for religion peace and world affairs here at Georgetown we thank Claudia Winkler melody Fox Ahmed Tom van Shaw Michael Kessler Tom far Timothy Shaw and especially Carly Henry who's in the back there for months quite literally months of preparation organization guidance and event planning thanks Carly and last but by no means least thanks to need in who's who's my lab manager and the many other members of my lab who are who are here today and who have been working for quite some time to make today happen so thanks guys and also thanks for waking up so early earlier than I usually do so today's convening is a component of a larger project on the cognition of belief funded by the Templeton Foundation and by Nick in particular and which our co-leader on the project Zac Warren will talk about later today and as Zac will discuss one of the things that's exciting about this area of research is the opportunity to consider how the relatively new science of mind and brain interacts with old questions and especially ancient divisions between believers of different faiths which are of course very timely today and in particular as a neuroscientist thinking about belief what's maybe most exciting to me is the idea that while beliefs vary across contexts and cultures and members of one faith or faction might think of members of another group is fundamentally different from themselves it's probably more true that the basic characteristics of a brain and therefore a mind for those of Nan dualists among us are likely to be very very much the same no matter where that brain grows up or in what cultural religious or political context it's placed and if that's true then it may be that the brains of ostensibly oponent believers are actually manifesting beliefs very similarly and that the development of belief across disparate faiths and factions may actually happen through shared neurocognitive pathways and so if all of that's true then it may be possible to think of mind and brain at kind of a safe space kind of a neutral territory where a conversation about deep-lying commonalities can begin and here at Georgetown which of course is an institution with a Jesuit heritage and which is an institution that's made a strong commitment to dialogue and bridge building between different faiths and different groups and different cultures it seems like an ideal place to convene that kind of discussion so with that in mind today's meeting convenes many of the world's leading dollars on religious cognition and today will feature scientific research exploring the relationship of beliefs to basic elements of human cognition which are common to human beings across cultures and across faiths and with that I'll say thanks to you all again and hand it off to my dear colleague and projects co-leader Alamo go down well welcome I'm a Cali mother damn of Georgetown and I'm not going to thank anybody I do want to mention two things about why is particularly timely to think about belief at this moment in our history around the beginning of the 20th century modernization theories developed and it was predicted that religion would become a thing of the past eventually and science would take over the leaf's would become scientific well that hasn't happened I was born in a part of the world where in Iran where radicalization and religious beliefs are very important and very influential that's why I left and of course the other factor why beliefs are particularly important to study now is because there seems to be not only a global wave of radicalization in different religions but also a global wave of fundamentalism against facts and science and scientific thinking and it's not just Trump in America this happens to be a global wave so I think it's a particularly apt time to explore beliefs my other task is to alert you to the program I know you are have it in your hands or close to you and to point out that there are two symposium 1 and 2 and Adam is this discussion for the first one I am the disc the second one there will be time for questions at the end of each and also very importantly there is a poster session next door and that's going to be going on from twelve fifty to three o'clock we decided we would stop at three and then Zach Warren would have a bit more time to speak from three to three twenty and then of course we have the keynote address at the end of the day from Jordan graffman thank you very much for your participation and we're going to start the first panel thank you so yeah there are a lot of really interesting reasons to study what belief is made of and we'll get to explore some of them the first panel I think it is it's it's useful as we get started to contextualise a little bit and I think Ali started to do that you know we're at this moment of fake news and alternative facts and so do people believe these things if so what does that belief made of and I think one of the exciting things about this moment again in sort of this burgeoning science of mind and brain is that we get to ask questions that are a little bit deeper so so there's the standard questions about belief are you know whom do you believe what do you believe but I think we're now at a place where we can start to ask questions about how do you believe mechanistic questions how and why type questions and it's these deeper sort of mechanisms of mind and brain that support belief that the speakers in the first panel will be addressing and so we have with us a distinguished panel we have Miguel Farias from Oxford and Coventry Neal Van Leeuwen from Georgia State University and we'll Gervais from the University of Kentucky and so these guys will begin to address some of these mechanistic questions and following each talk we'll hopefully have time for a question or two and then we're going to take some time at the end for a group QA so if you have questions maybe you can ask them at the end of one talk maybe you keep that in mind until until the group QA at the end of the session so let's get rolling now in our first speaker today is dr. Miguel farías thank you [Applause] thank you very much it's a great pleasure to be here very grateful to the John Templeton Foundation to do Adam green for for having me and my colleague Jonathan Jang so I'm originally from Portugal Lisbon I've been in England for 17 years looking at belief not just belief but also the other side of it and belief so as an experimental personality and social psychologist I conduct experiments on people and I try to get hold of everything I could so from field studies to lab experiments to brain imaging to pain brain stimulation and what I'd like to share with you today is just a snippet of some things which our lab has been developing for the last two three years and at the same time as I present some of these results I'd like to challenge them and challenge some of the ideas that we as researchers also have and I mean particularly when we talk to the media we might portray and once it is in the media they twist it again and again so for the last two or three years I have become more reflective and concerned about somewhat biased set of ideas of what religion consists of and where it comes from and this is happening not just about what belief or lack of it may be about but also with religious practices so let me just start by giving you an example so meditation is a religious practice which is used has been used for a long time across world religious traditions but in the last 20 to 40 years it has become a tool within psychologists resources a tool for therapy and well-being and this is how the meditating mind is usually portrayed so it is a quiet peaceful mind very much like that tranquil like so if you meditate your mind will become like this on the other hand if you do not meditate your mind will feel much like this a cubist maze now I'm not making this up if you turn any thought by psychologists on your scientists on meditation that you will I will show you these very two things slide and I borrowed this from a colleague at the Oxford mindfulness Center or they will convey something very similar and after that they will move on to present the evidence for the wonderful effects of meditation so it quiets your monkey mind lowers your stress your heart rate and of course most importantly as we will hear later today it changes your brain and it does this through a variety of ways and of course it also makes you happier right this is an image from transcendental meditative apparently levitating in the 70s they're actually hoping this will promote these hopping contests when you're in deep meditation now how does this translate into the cognition of belief now when it comes to the mind we are also faced by a variety of symbols and some odd stereotypical images usually divided dividing the mind into two major aspects so this can be referred to either as intuitive and analytical thinking had an heart knowledge hot-and-cold cognition and there is of course a history to this it didn't just develop in the last 20 30 or even 100 years there is a philosophical historical background to this and it's very similar to what we're talking to also today about religion and science so the perceived conflict between religion and science has been enunciated for the last 3 and 400 years as this conflict between what pasilla calls the emotional needs to believe and the rational impossibility of believing if you go further back 500 500 years ago or thousand years ago this was not a problem for philosophers and theologians back then but it is now and something which again is portrayed in much of our experimental psychological research these days that religious people are understood as less rational or in a and again this is coming from this historical enlightenment tradition now you're probably familiar with various duel models of information processing this one I'm showing here sorry if bye-bye abstain and but it's very very similar to the most of the other ones you have one system which is more analytical logical conscious and the other which is more automatic emotional and unconscious back in 2008 so before this last surge of experimental research on dual processing thinking and religion took off I heard them I had I heard AB Stein give a talk and and told you the end of his talk he talked about he mentioned religion as coming under the experiential or intuitive system so I read some of his stuff and back then I was finishing a study on pilgrimage where we were comparing different kinds of motivation and experiences that pilgrims have whether they are going on Christian pilgrimages to places such as lived or if they're going to places of pagan pilgrimage such as Stonehenge for the winter or summer solstice so we were doing one more place the way to Santiago what's particular about Santiago today that you have I mean about 50% of religious people and the other 50 would be either a face agnostic sort people just exploring what you're going to do with the rest of their life hitting a midlife crisis or just finishing their undergraduate degrees and what the hell am I going to do now so we packed up our questionnaires and a task which Epstein has been using to differentiate between intuitive and analytical thinking it's a probability task where you have two containers you're blind you look at them you're asked to make a choice where you want to try to get the color beat from you're blindfolded and then you try to take one what's interesting about this is that the odds are always better on the smaller container but it always it only has one color beat while the one where the odds are lower and lots of did so your intuition tells you oh there's so many more beads here and then your logical thing will tell yes but the right choice is the is a right way is the right hand blood so we were interested in seeing whether there was any difference in terms of intuitive analytical processing in relation to pilgrims level of supernatural beliefs as well as the levels of commitment since they were walking some of them for thirty days we didn't find either so I forgot about this for two or three years until this study came out by Linderman in which he showed that the rejection of the financial belief was associated with a stronger activation of the writing cereals frontal gyrus so the marking fuels frontal gyrus is associated with or anything by sorry is associated with cognitive inhibition and this this is usually known as a process in which you either stop or we hope withhold the mental processes or an impulse so this is particularly relevant for people who have addictive or aggressive behaviour but he or she is claiming yeah so she's claiming that people who are able to withhold their response to seeing supernatural signs in a task like this they're actually enhancing their core using more their cognitive inhibition so we thought of replicating this in in an experiment so we got hold of her task we got people to train using a stop signal task to increase their levels of cognitive inhibition and we use the different tasks which is now commonly used the cognitive reflection task at a standard measure of dual processing again we didn't get any interesting results so no correlation whatsoever between intuitive or analytical thinking and seeing science we only got what we'd expect in terms of individual differences that people who claim to be or endorse stronger spiritual beliefs we tend to see more science in this so nothing is particularly exciting until then but we were confronted with this interesting question about cognitive inhibition just believe if religion as concrete science of religion argues is natural and we are hard-wired to believe how do we explain something like non-belief and the demographics of not belief or unbelief are growing so I'm skeptical individuals do not have the propensity to believe in the supernatural in first place and of course if that is the case it casts doubts on the naturalness of religion idea or they inhibit this tendency as in the man was suggesting with this fMRI study so we decided to do a neural stimulation study where we would manipulate Cantus inhibition across a variety of participants with different religious backgrounds and instead of using TMS which is more I mean precise but painful and more difficult to create sort of double-blind procedure we went for transcranial direct current stimulation where we have either nodal stimulation or placebo and we had a set of implicit tests of supernatural attributions and beliefs for those who haven't seen this is a sort of apparatus you have visited tDCS stimulates and you have two electrodes which are attached to the person's hand so we were expecting but by using that device and applying a nodal stimulation would increase neural excitability in this area the writings of the frontal gyrus this would lead to enhanced cognitive inhibition and a decrease in supernatural belief and compared to sham stimulation just very quickly so to check whether the cognitive inhibition stimulation was working we just use the very standard tasks stop signal tasks where people are asked to inhibit their response in a number of trials we use again the standard continued flexion task as a measure of quantities into all intuitive analytical thinking and we had a couple of tasks also Lindemann tasks and Jonathan Jung's my colleagues implicit association task which has been also used often and just to give you an idea he's kissed us he starts asks people participants to associate religious and spiritual stimuli with real or imaginary category so you'd expect a religious person to much more quickly associate religious spiritual stimuli with real and imaginary and the opposite with the unbelievers terms of demographics we had about 50 people of different religious backgrounds about 40% were either atheist or agnostic now we we managed to get the cognitive inhibition stimulation as we expected and we have this small but significant effect both on the supernatural education task and on the implicit association supernatural belief stuff right so moving from real to imaginary so these are the sort of good news so the stimulation to this area of the brain was associated with an increase in cognition abyssion a decrease in supernatural attributions and the decrease in implicit belief in the supernatural on the other hand like for the previous studies we had no association between baseline measures of supernatural belief and intuitive thinking in the cognitive reflection task so what what is happening here this cognitive inhibition modulate belief by blocking an intuitive system I think this is unlikely this would mean that non-believers would need to inhibit supernatural attributions we currently saw throughout their daily lives this would be a very considerable use of cognitive resources that would weaken their ability to inhibit other thoughts feelings and actions now cognitive inhibition is a mechanism which might explain modulation of belief but clearly does not address the origins of belief right and it might work in this way imagine that you're confronted with situation in your life interesting all this is because God wanted this to happen or this is my karma so it may work very much like a conditioned response right it can decrease the strength of the Scioscia between a certain event and the supernatural agent now what am I going with all this so both psychologists cognitive psych psychologists and also some anthropologists have been portraying humans as boring believers the idea that we have a set of cognitive dispositions that are congenial to make us enter the morph eyes and describe causality to invisible powerful beings and religious beliefs also as we now seem to provide it with a sense of comfort and alleviation of our human fragility now while I do not dispute that some there is some truth to this I think we are only telling how for the story and this is not a recent story the idea is these ideas I mean which the sort of father of cognitive science of religions toward God we thought about these these ideas have been suggested by other people for a while including Darwin so when I began looking for historical predecessors to these years our ideas the historian genre pointed me to various sources including this quote by Darwin where he's talking about his dog so one summer day the dog suddenly barked at the parasol swaying in the breeze Darwin surmised that he must have reason to himself that's movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent and that no stranger had a right to be on his territory now it seems to me that it is Darwin and not a dog we see an invisible agent and and total more fighting the behavior of his dog it's interesting that Darwin even considers that his dog reasoned that is the dog made a causal inference now Darwin like his contemporaries who had had some contacts with pre-industrial or so-called tribal societies he was struck by their animistic beliefs but Darwin's bewilderment with animistic beliefs is probably saying more about his own Anglican religious background mostly divided up symbolic thinking then of the people who endorsed the rich symbolism in nature and act and in the world in a very different way right um so I'm not completely convinced either conceptually or empirically that we have a hyperactive agency detection device just a few months ago I was at the American Academy of religion conference and after the first panel on the convict science of religion someone asked if CSR and the heart was just a neo-colonial concept meaning that we get all these affluent Western white males trying to come up with explanations for why people who live in funny exotic places of the world and were not educated at Oxford Princeton or Georgetown University believing all these weird things I think there is a point in this criticism and in what concerns the heart I have for the last year or so been collecting ethnographic accounts of how Westerners could be the tribal societies actually perceived when they are in the jungle and I'll just give you one of these accounts by Daniel Everett who's a linguist to spend some time some years actually living with the piraha tribes in the Amazon so they were he was walking back with a dinner and adolescence from this tribe and it was dark and he couldn't see anything but this adolescent stopped him and said look there's a caiman up ahead a caiman is a small crocodile crocodile not as aggressive as the alligators or crocodiles you get so he directs his beam of flashlights up the path and does not see a thing and the the tribal a teenager tells him turn off that lighting thing in your hand and look in the dark so he looked in the dark and he saw absolutely nothing what are you talking about there is nothing up ahead the teenager giggled and she says that my inability to see beyond my nose is a source of constant merriment among the Tierra has I never see anything while they see everything so this boy rushes up ahead yet to stitch hit something in the head and brings back to this Chi Minh by the tail so ever conclude that urban folks like me look for cars bicycles and pedestrians in the past not prehistoric reptiles now while these anecdotes are interesting they always tell the same story the natives don't have any HUD or perceive any ambiguity they clearly see the stimuli in the jungle it's the Westerners who either don't see a thing or start imagining things when they are in such an unfamiliar environment and I see that my time is out but I just wanted to very briefly mention the other aspect of this in relation to CSR which is so the idea that we are born believers but there's quite a lot of historical evidence that we are all equally borne and believers I mean going back to of course the famous incredulity of st. Thomas this wasn't just a one-off symptom there's a rich history of doubt within an inch of Christianity so the history of unbelief is probably as old as the history of belief and of course things keep changing there's now almost about 50% of people in the UK who claim to have no religion and these leads us to think that we don't just have to look at belief we need to look at what's happening with and believe so-called unbelievers what is it that they believe in do they implicitly believe in something supernatural or not really I mean I have a sweet colleague who's always telling me that even in Scandinavia Icelanders believe in fairies I think that could be the exception rather than the norm anyway I just want to finish by plugging in a recent large project we have also funded by the John Templeton Foundation which we're looking at and believed so I hope that in three years time we'll have in a few more answers and plenty more questions thank you very much so so I think let's take time for just one question now and again we'll have a Q&A at the end there's a microphone that will move around the room if you have a burning question and that now is a good chance and if it's realizing is it yeah and if not then I think in the interest of time we'll we'll keep going and we'll ask question soon enough so our next speaker today is Neil Van Leeuwen from Georgia State ok great there's my clicker and one thing I know there's not a lot of time a lot of interesting things going on today so in the interest of being most useful to all of you I put my most important ideas on the first slide and you can think of everything as kind of an elaboration of that what I want to rehash for you today is a debate that I recently had with another philosopher so I'm in the philosophy department at Georgia State University and the other philosophers name is also Neil it's Neil Levy and what we were debating about is what explains why religious believers often don't act on their internal beliefs they have these beliefs that are so important to them to who they are yet we all know that in a broad range of cases religious believers so think of the phrase once a week Christian might not act on these internal beliefs and I'll give you some examples of empirically validated what I call representation discrepant behavior but I I want to say first and foremost the interesting question here is what's the best paradigm what's the best kind of exemplar for explaining representation discrepant behavior so we'll start with the other Neil's suggestion and he suggests the physicist and I'll explain what I mean by that so if you think about this the gentleman here is a physicist doesn't always use his theoretical beliefs about physics when say estimating when a ball will hit the ground or how long it will take for a wheel to roll down in fact very often there's plenty of evidence that even people who are well trained in physics they don't use their theoretical beliefs but rather they use their more intuitive physics in estimating what happens and why is that well this fluency is a good explanation it's too hard in real time to calculate D equals one-half GT squared for the sake of estimating when a ball is going to hit the ground it's just to disfluent the processing of those internal representations is too slow so sometimes you don't act in accord with your internal fear radical beliefs and what Neil suggests the other Neil Neil Levy suggests is that maybe religious representations or something like that maybe the idea that God is watching doesn't get processed fluently enough to affect our behavior all the time so that's paradigm one the physicist I have a very different explanation for why it is that many religious people don't always act on their internal religious beliefs my paradigm is what you might call the playground what do I mean by that well let's take this let's take this young girl right here and let's say she's playing a game of baked believed and you might see that there's uh was Jesus in a laser no there we go this little green piece of paper right here say she's pretending that that's a frog well she wants to make-believe play ends she's not going to keep acting like that's a frog rather she's going to continue to act like it's a green piece of paper but one of the representations her make-believe representation is going to cease guiding action outside what we might call the practical setting of Bank belief play and so a suggestion that I've been putting forward for a few years now is that not all religious but a broad range of what I call religious credence 'as have that feature of practical setting dependence they're different from ordinary matter of fact beliefs in that they guide behavior primarily on a certain sort of stage or a certain sort of sacred context and so contrary to what Bibi thinks we're its disfluency that gives rise to failure to act on internal representations it's the fact that those internal representations are what I call practical setting dependent and another way of thinking about this is that like and make-believe play there's a to map cognitive structure when it comes to much religious cognition you have your mundane ordinary factual beliefs about the world namely this is the bringing piece of paper but then you also have a secondary map that is more imaginative and character so how are we going to decide now you might all of course have your own explanations for for this phenomenon of representation discrepant behavior and of course I you know if you have paradigms of your own I'd encourage you to float them but I'm going to discuss why I think Levy's explanation is not going to work but before we do that let's so let's just let me just outline what else I'm going to be doing in the in the ten minutes I have remaining so a few examples just to get a clear idea of the behavioral phenomenon that I'm talking about and trying to explain go a little bit more in detail on what Li D is saying about disfluency say why I think media is wrong I think many religious representations are highly intuitive and then here's a critical move say what I think he's missing right he's missing the mundane character of ordinary factual beliefs and then if there's time suggest a couple of future research directions so let's get going representation discrepant behavior many of you probably know some of this literature already but let's just consider pornography use in the Bible Belt so there's there's been some studies of this it turns out that in the Bible Belt pornography use and buying porn online dips on Sunday people take a break on Sunday from from using porn why might you well God is watching right you have the religious credence that God is watching and so you're less likely to use porn the the finding however is also that Bible Belt use of pornography is higher during the rest of the week and you might find that a little bit puzzling if you think that God is watching it should lower it so that we lower the porn use every day of the week charitable giving shows the opposite pattern more charitable giving on Sunday less during during the rest of the week so it seems as if for six days a week people are just not acting in accord with their internal representations of God's awareness of their actions up the wrong way another example this is one of my favorites so Paul Harris and Rita ass to deed it'd a study and this has been replicated in various places but they basically showed that when you prime people with a naturalistic context so like a bird dying or something like that and then you ask them about their ancestors this is among the Vito tribe in Madagascar it turns out that they're much less likely to say that their ancestors can see or think or have various other psychological properties but if you ask them in a in after a ritual Prime and in ritual settings they're much more likely to say that their ancestors can still see and think so you get a kind of contextual toggling of the representation of the life of the ancestors and again representation description behavior they're not talking in accordance with their supernatural beliefs at least much of the time when they're outside the ritual setting I won't go into this example but for interest of time there's a person I've taken an interest in Marcus Ross PhD in Geoscience from the University of Rhode Island is also a young earth creationist and he compartmentalizes his beliefs to a great extent so when he goes into the lab or into scientific conferences he no longer talks in ways that are suggestive of his young Earth Creationism namely the idea that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and finally a very cool study that came out in 2015 Eric um did a study among the Moroccan shopkeepers in the medina in Fez I happen to have been there it's a it's a remarkable place historically interesting and what he found using a one-shot economic game is that within about 20 minutes after the call to prayer a hundred percent of the shopkeepers who were all all Muslim would give the most charitable option but then after that it dropped to around 50 percent so people were much less charitable outside that window around the call to prayer so for me it's the very brevity of that phenomenon is so striking and just to have a broad category it does seem to be that in each of these cases we're getting representation discrepant behavior they have internal representations of the supernatural world that say watching them or encouraging them to give and then outside certain contexts those representations cease the guy behavior even though again those representations are very very important so why might that be well again I think I kind of gave you the overview of what Nia levy thinks here's a little bit more detail there's a very interesting literature in cognitive psychology on disfluency so what happens when you have a hard time processing certain representation say a font is hard to read or a sentence has a complicated syntax and the finding is that disfluency makes you less likely to accept a certain representation it causes you to engage in analytic processing and it you know maybe makes you just a little bit more skeptical overall soli these Levy's suggestion is that those internal religious representations are disfluent they're hard to process and that makes them unintuitive so Li D says religious beliefs do not differ from many scientific beliefs in being counter intuitive and then his gloss on counter intuitive is just that if something is counterintuitive people are less likely to accept it as true well if that's what he thinks about religious representations and religious beliefs then you might ask why do people accept them at all and his explanation is that processing fluency is sensitive to context so in certain context your internal representation of say God is watching is going to be processed more fluently so say in the church or after the call to prayer that's going to have more fluent processing and that's why you're more likely to act on it so you can see you can see that the logical structure of mule Levy's explanation for representation discrepant behavior is is quite ingenious he's building up an explanation out of components that are pretty well evidenced in the literature in cognitive psychology and what he's aiming at in contrast to my overall view is what you would call a one map as opposed to a to map cognitive structure so he's basically saying that the religious beliefs fit in together with the factual beliefs contrary to what I say it's all just one map but certain portions of it are harder to process well again I want to give Neil his credit ingenious explanation unfortunately I think it's dead wrong why well there's a great deal of reason to think you know details aside that popular religious representations as opposed to what you might think of as abstruse theological doctrines are highly highly intuitive in nature what that means is that they're amenable to processing by our intuitive system so our intuitive represent a of agency are intuitive representations of psychology and then also our intuitive representations of the physical world and I have just a couple of or three of the many references that point in this direction which suggest that given the intuitive systems that humans have religious representations are more memorable for being minimally counterintuitive so that means that when you have say a representation of a divinity the divinity is mostly like an agent with maybe one or two or three counterintuitive properties well the flip side of being minimally counterintuitive is being that's right mostly intuitive okay and I'm aware Miguel just raised some questions about this but there's also a very interesting literature which suggests that people who are less analytic and cognitive style and more intuitive in cognitive style are more likely to be religious believer so so the sum total of this is to say that nearly these suggestion that it's lack of fluency and hence lack of intuitiveness that explains why people don't act on their internal religious representations gets the intuitiveness piece of the puzzle exactly wrong and let me just present a quote from Bob McCauley down at Emory University from his his athlete idol book why religion is natural and science is not and this is something I quote in my response to Leedy religion in its popular that is widespread forms incorporates assumptions that are more common materials that are more familiar and judgments that are more intuitive than is the case with either science or theology so I I'm pretty confident that Neal has gotten things wrong and the question is just well why and my view of the situation is that he's missing just how ordinary and common it is to have matter of fact nein matter of fact beliefs so when I talk about factual beliefs and when I differentiate them from religious credence a--'s I'm talking about the stable base in our multi map cognitive structures and without giving you my theory of factual beliefs there's obviously not enough time for that let's just think of some examples my neighbor has a dog dogs have teeth my house has two exterior doors I have n dollars in the bank US currency is the dollar so when Neal levy conflates religious beliefs with factual beliefs I think he does so without a proper awareness of just how mundane and ordinary and easy to miss regular factual beliefs are but the truth is we all have a great a great reservoir of factual information about the world that mostly guides behavior in the background and when I say religious credence is not factual belief what I'm saying is religious credence is not like that is not like these mundane representations or attitudes that have the content my house is two exterior doors all right so let's let's wrap this up I've got two minutes what are some what are some predictions remember these are kind of big paradigms that I'm suggesting so they're ways of thinking that can be illuminating but really need to be developed so what are some ways to develop the playground paradigm that I'm suggesting so first of all if it's true that many religious beliefs in particular those ones that I'm calling religious credence 'iz are practical setting dependent you would expect people to construct practical settings specifically with the aim of activating that set of internal religious beliefs so just like when we go back to the the young girl on the playground the playground is a certain kind of space that's meant to activate her imaginative representations while you might expect sacred times and places if my paradigm is the correct one to exist and of course that's not so much of a prediction as a gloss on things that we've already noticed but it does cohere with the paradigm I'm suggesting second we should think that there won't be confusion if there's a to map cognitive structure and if religious credence is a second map level then say someone who is is taking the communion wafer won't actually get confused and expected to taste like human flesh or something like that so as much as you sincerely avow that this this wafer is is the body of Christ you're not going to be confused as you would if you ordinary ordinarily factually believe that so non confusion is an idea that I take from the literature and the developmental psychology of pretend play as something that's been well-documented and I think non confusion is a mark to look at when we when we think about how people interact with religious props and then finally this is a something that is definitely hopeful for the future so there's been a little bit of work that suggests that minimally counterintuitive ideas of the supernatural are processed in the brain in ways similar to metaphorical cognition a very interesting paper by Fonda via and colleagues on that but there needs to be more investigating that so but if my paradigm is the correct one then we can express expect the neural signatures of religious credence to be similar or at least more similar to fictional imaginings than two ordinary factual beliefs so let me just wrap up I'm presenting religious credence --is as a kind of secondary cognitive attitude so a layer of our representations of the world that are not confused with factual beliefs rather they're in fundamental ways similar to fictional imaginings but they're like fictional imaginings that are partially identity constituting so they're still incredibly serious there's still something that determined - you commune with and so on but a lot of the structure of religious actions is going to be similar in nature to make the leaf play again this is the paradigm I'm suggesting factual beliefs by way of contrast are so mundane that you hardly notice them and in conclusion it's the practice of sending dependence or the playground that explains religious representation discrepant behavior explains why we don't always act on our internal religious beliefs thank you okay I see two questions and perhaps we have time for both so I'll be quick great yeah yeah Thanks you talk about religious beliefs and you're making a metaphor with pretend play I assumed you did that as a deliberate choice rather than just talking about regular contextual beliefs so if you're outside at a picnic and you ask someone if it rains will everything get wet they'll say yes if you're in living room they might say no well these are most beliefs are contextual we know that from you know cognitive science but what you're saying is that it's more like hypothet it's in the realm of hypothetical thinking and make-believe rather than just a merely contextualized belief yes that's that's exactly right so that's that's a good distinction and that's that's one that I developed in my work but any representation is is going to be sensitive to relevance so that's if if a certain representation isn't relevant to a given question or given action even factual bleeps you're not going to deploy them in the crafting of the action but what you might notice about the representation discrepant behaviors that I went through is that the internal beliefs are relevant so the the question of whether God is watching is just as relevant to the question of whether you give charity during the call to prayer or not during the call to prayer and same thing same thing for the other examples so the kind of this phenomenon of practice of sending dependence it really is a different a different kind of contextual sensitivity from the one you were talking about seems to be more to me to be more matter of relevance so so briefly to sum up relevance makes everything sensitive to context in a certain way as you just illustrated with your example of the picnic but there's a further kind of sensitivity to practical settings which I think obtains both for make the lead play and for not all but a very broad range of religious beliefs John so you draw the distinction you rather you use Bob McCall this distinction between religion and theology earlier as a way of criticizing Neal's ideas about whether or not religious beliefs are intuitive for fluent or whatever um so okay let's try to channel Bob I think you would say that the belief that God has once God has desires is intuitive right as religion in his in his terms that sounds like bad right but I think the the belief that you can represent as God does not want you to pay for pornography I like that I think Bob might think that's theology right so enter Punk like enter bars in general is religion and then but then particular propositions about God's particular desires that seems like theology in which case I'm not sure the context ampuls you give which are you know God wants you to give money to the poor or go wants you not to pay for pornography like I'm not sure you can easily just say all right like science tells us that these are intuitive beliefs because even I think under Bob's scheme they might count as form or religion rather than then for religion as it were all right I think I just disagree with that so you don't need any absolute theology to know that God doesn't want you to look at porn right I mean that's that's very intuitive and and but that's no white blob means my intuitive right so for Bob intuitive is very kind of like strict definitions it's things that are the as it were the natural outputs of evolved cognitive processes and unless you think that we evolved the belief that God doesn't want us to pay for porn then you must think that it's the belief that requires cultural like scaffolding which then Bob would Christ as theology any any any any proposition that requires cultural scaffolding is as theology no I think I think I think you're doing injustice to Bob there so so so he's not he's not so this is Bob Bob McCauley that I referred to earlier so he's not saying that all the intuitive religious beliefs are encoded in our evolutionary system rather he's saying that they're apt for being processed by both are evolved intuitive systems and then are highly practiced what he would call practiced natural intuitive system and I think although of course we didn't you know back in the course of evolutionary history of all the belief that that God doesn't want us looking at porn I think it is fair to say that that kind of normative belief about what a supernatural agent wants is one that is is perfectly intuitively processable and and just to highlight the contrast between me and Neil levy it's it's not it doesn't take difficult conscious logical reasoning to grasp what's going to grasp of what's going on on there sounds like there's more here we're going for burgers and beers later so let's look maybe continue at then that is 9e interest of time yeah so our next speaker is will Gervais University of Kentucky cool well thank you for organizing and for hosting us it should be a fascinating day so the the theme of this is on understanding the cognition of beliefs so naturally I'm going to dive right in and talk about people who don't believe so basically the whole talk is about atheists but I really think that understanding atheists and religious disbelief it kind of represents a crucial test case in any theories we develop about how religious belief actually works so any good theory has to explain both belief and disbelief and what what is associated with either one so most of my research starts from a simple observation that most people in the world do seem to hold various religious beliefs but at the same time we have a large and potentially growing number of non-believers out there so I'm really interested in what's going on at the cognitive cultural or motivational levels that explains why some people are believers some people aren't and then I also consider what are the consequences of either religious belief or religious disbelief and the main thing I'll be talking about today is looking at some of the consequences of religious disbelief here I can laser that one maybe there we go especially one of the main consequences of religious disbelief at least from a social psychological perspective is it's carrying a whole bunch of stigma so in most religious majority countries people really have negative perceptions of non-believers and I think this stigma actually can feed back and it has the potential to actually mess with our series of religious cognition so hopefully that will become clearer as we dive into it and I think I have this little pop-up back at the end so a lot of the work I'll be talking about just recently it was published and you can download a free preprint of it if you want for for all the juicy details so really most of this work is going to be asking one simple question so how many atheists are there any guesses out there let's go globally yeah buzzkill that that's I'm gonna get to that yeah fair enough so for global estimates film Zukerman has estimated 500 to 700 million atheists worldwide and to reach this estimate he kind of comb through census data various large scale polls but he admits that there's a whole lot of uncertainty in this estimate because the conducted across different countries they don't know has asked the same questions in the same ways so he's kind of got a weird apples and oranges problem in terms of compiling all these various polls potentially a more tractable way to look at this is let's say if we could look within one country where we have had standardized polls for a long time so both Gallup and Q for example have been running polls in the US for decades where they'll ask people about their religious beliefs in various ways so let's forget that what would you guess is the percentage of atheists in the u.s. there we go pretty close what's interesting is you'll come up with different atheist prevalence estimates in the u.s. depending on how the question is asked and the different polling firms tend to ask the question in different ways so for example Pew so give people like a menu of religious identities and they'll ask people to check one so are you Catholic are you Protestant Baptist are you Hindu or you seek are you atheist or agnostic they have typically just a nun box where you can say I'm going to be above so their atheism prevalence estimate is around 3% so 3% of Americans will actually check the atheist box what's interesting though so Gallup instead of kind of giving people this menu they take a more definitional approach where they ask people do you believe in God yes or no the people who say no or by definition atheists so now instead of people kind of actively identifying with the tag atheist they can just say no I don't believe in God and that question generates an estimate of around 10 or 11% so you just change the wording a little bit all of a sudden your estimate changes a whole bunch and I suspect and I'll show you data that these estimates are far too low in part because of how they're conducted so typically these polls are nationally representative telephone polls so imagine you're you're sitting at home one day and the phone rings and then somebody says oh do you believe in God this is kind of strange and it might not give us good unbiased honest answers to that question because those of us with a social psych background we know that self reports are not always trustworthy especially if you have kind of a socially loaded topic that you're asking people about there's all sorts of things that keep people might believe or behaviors they engage in and if you ask them whether or not they do that they're not just going to fess up and tell you and I suspect that atheism is exactly one of these things again because there is profound social stigma against religious disbelief in the u.s. so to illustrate some of the stigma against atheists we've been doing studies for years now where I won't dive too much into the mess the methods but essentially how it works is you give people a description of somebody doing something immoral so for instance kicking a puppy or engaging in some light cannibalism or consensual incest you give people a description of somebody breaking some sort of a moral norm and then you can gauge who they intuitively assume the perpetrator is and across all these studies basically any moral violation we can come up with people readily and intuitively assume that the perpetrator is an atheist and it turns out even atheists themselves showed the same effect I'll be it to a lesser extent all these studies were conducted in the US but recently mom it it was recently accepted for publication we started collecting data in 2013 but instead of just looking in the US we were interested in kind of the cross cultural variability in this attack so is it just a weird American thing that people assume that immoral folks are atheists or is it more cross culturally generalizable so we gave people a description of somebody who tortures animals as a child and then when they grow up they no longer get as much of a kick out of torturing animals so they move on to hurting people and the person now has the dismembered bodies of five homeless people buried into the basement so this is an unambiguously amoral character and we're interested in whether people would assume that the perpetrator was an atheist collected some data in the US and just a few other places all in we collected data in 13 different countries I think I have a list yeah and what's interesting is we really tried to get a broad spread where we'll have highly religious countries as well as highly secular ones just to see how well the effect turns up and it turns out of our 13 countries people everywhere assume that this serial killer was an atheist except for Finland and to a lesser extent New Zealand so it looked really robust across all these countries which i think is really interesting it's interesting picturing you know students at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands where most of them identify as atheists and nonetheless they're morally wary of atheists skip that one so just another illustration of this stigma against atheism we have a recent project and again another preprint if you want it where we're asking the question of what are people's mental representations of what atheists look like so in some sense atheism is kind of like a hollow stereotype if you know somebody doesn't believe in God you haven't learned anything about what they are into you can't picture them you know eating atheist cuisine and listening to atheist music it's it's not like a lot of other religious identities where you can form these inferences about what somebody's like just because you can guess what some of their shared norms are within their community so to do this we use a reverse correlation procedure and essentially you start with kind of a base image and then you generate hundreds of odd degraded images where it just kind of tweaks them and adds noise you guys had a poster on this over there right awesome check that one out yeah and then essentially participants you'll show um two of these kind of just randomly degraded images then you say all right pick which one looks more like somebody who doesn't believe in God and they do this time after time after time after time and what you can do then is you can take all the images that they chose as you know this is what an atheist looks like and then you morph those together so you can come up with this kind of composite image of what people's kind of implicit mental representation is of this group so we did this where people would either choose which image looks like somebody who doesn't believe in God or which image looks like somebody who does believe in God so we can come up with a composite believer face and a composite atheist face I'll pop the two composites off see if you can guess which is the believer in which one's the atheist here yes so the believer face actually ended up looking like lighter skin this is the most feminine feminine composite looking face we've actually gotten this for whatever reason when people do this test like the the resulting image almost always looks male except evidently for the composite believer phase whereas the composite atheist face looks like a monster yeah he's creepy and then what you can do is you take these faces show them to a different group of participants and have them rate various attributes of the face in question they see the composite atheist face is less religious less trustworthy less moral less competent more cold more hostile less human more lazy more unlikable less happy less attractive fairly gigantic effect where they thought the Atheist face looked way more masculine than the believer face and we're not sure quite what to make of the the fact to that for whatever is in people's mental representation of an atheist looked more african-american than their composite image of a believer phase we also then showed these faces to yet another group of participants and they'd see each face and we'd describe somebody doing something either moral or immoral and we have them pick you know which of these two people do you think did it and yeah for every immoral action they took the Atheist face for every moral action they picked the believers face so again now the stranger call you up and says pardon me do you believe in God well against the backdrop of this potent stigma against atheism we might suspect that people aren't going to you that's up and out themselves as an atheist so what happens is instead of doing it with the telephone pole if you still have the same stratified nationally representative sampling but instead of doing with the phone call you just have people fill out an online surveys now they don't have to actually use their voice to say no I don't believe in God they can just click a button we had one of these and that ups the estimate to about 17% which is interesting so now it's yes literally is people don't have to say they don't believe in God they indicated some other way yeah our estimate keeps getting higher and higher but again that might not even be the full story so we wanted to find a fully indirect measure where people could essentially indicate to us that they don't believe in God without having to directly say it or even click the button so we found a nice indirect measurement task after combing through some it was in sociology and criminology work where for instance you're trying to estimate the prevalence and criminal behaviors you can't just ask people you know how often do you smoke crack yeah that's that's not really going to work your problem drinking date rape ivory poaching perpetration of anti-gay hate crime so we found a task that's been used to estimate the prevalence of all of these behaviors and it's called the unmatched count technique and it works essentially like this you get a whole bunch of people randomly split them into two groups and they get a count task so you say all right I'm going to give you some statements tell me how many of them are true for you but you don't have to tell me which ones are true so our baseline group gets just some kind of mundane statements so I own a unicycle my favorite color is red I like hot dogs I have pets I brush my teeth daily each participant just gives you a number some people will say - some people will say for whatever then we have kind of our more critical condition where they do the exact same tasks and you give them the exact same list of five and then you add one item that you actually care about so a unicycle I own a unicycle my favorite color is red I like hot dogs I have pets I brush my teeth daily I occasionally date rape people again some people will say oh two of those are true for me so I'm going to say four of those are true for me and what you can do is if you just subtract out the average score from the baseline group from that sensitive group presumably any difference between these two groups you can chalk up to whatever the sensitive item was that you added in so we did essentially that we're yeah we'd ask people indicate how many are not true of you and then our baseline group gets these five boring statements our other group gets the five boring statements plus the statement I believe in God so any difference between these two you should be the people who would say that I believe in God is not a true statement about them and we actually had two separate nationally representative samples of 2,000 people at peace and yeah across the two samples we did slight tweaks to the wording of our question for your belief in God and we also were able to collect some kind of basic demographic information just to see how atheism prevalence would vary across different demographic groups and our overall estimate now is 26 percent yeah that was our most credible estimate we Bayesian estimation board so essentially we have a distribution of possible prevalence estimates and how this works the higher up you go that's your more credible estimates lower down is estimates that aren't very credible at all so 26 percent is our best guess but it really could be you know 20 percent could be 35 percent but it's it looks almost certainly higher than say gallops estimate of 11 percent and really this is saying that you know 40 percent is just as credible as 11 percent now I think this can be somewhat problematic because most of the theory in the cognitive science of religion assumes that the vast majority of people are believers that's why we have these kind of religion as natural ideas coming about and I think a lot of that is because the theory was developed trying to explain something that may or may not be effect so if our theory is trying to explain why you know 90 to 95 percent of people believe in God but it turns out only 75 percent do in the u.s. I think this this could really throw a wrench in all the works for a lot of our feeling we'd have to rethink kind of some of the corresponding on and really I always you know I usually used to think this is a nice tidy picture of my research program but the more we work on it the more I'm realizing it's kind of like this where whatever we learn about consequences and screws with our basic theory up here yeah so with that I wanted to thank my lab members for helping out and I'm done okay so maybe a question for will and then we can transition into a broader discussion for for everybody okay I see a question here the mics right there is easy is atheism something that tends to show up in multi religion societies only oh interesting like is it I've heard things like if you grew up in a pre-industrial tribe no one ever questions anything it's as true as everything else is it is there something about either a culture of atheism or at least a comparison a perception of choice among religions that makes it possible Jenny you know any good data on that we have historical days of relation to India ancient Greece though you'll have to look at how multi-religious they were I wouldn't be surprised though because a lot of what I think explains the spread of religious belief or disbelief it does come down to a ton of cultural learning where you're picking up credible cues from people in your community that this is what you ought to believe so I could see if you're living somewhere where there's a lot of different you're basically getting mixed signals of what you're supposed to be whereas if you know you live somewhere where there's one major dominant religion all the cues are telling you to believe in that it might be interesting to see if there's a correlation between the number how multi religion a society is and the number of atheists I mean I think there's some data out there that children growing up in a home where the parents don't share the same religion you see a higher atheism rate among those kids and again I think it's just because you're getting mixed signals of you know how have what the universe is all about American state correlation yeah the more religions the more you give them okay yeah so let's open it up and these are questions for everyone I see a question over there and then I had I had two questions basically you talked about modification to the UCT the wording of the questions and I was wondering what kind of how you know what modifications were made and the other one I have to make is it my son-in-law happens to be of the atheist variety but science is his God so he does worship at a temple so yeah yeah in terms of the specific tweaks we did in that task we varied the number of those kind of bland filler statements between the two just to see if that made a difference in one of them they were saying how many of these statements are not true of you and we have the positive statement I believe in God in the other one it was how many of these statements are true of you and then we had the statement I don't believe in God yeah just little details because we had a pain-in-the-ass editor he made us do that okay there's Kelly and then I think we have someone just a quick oh okay just a quick question about when the people did the two columns of questions the not questions did did he - the two thousand people take that and they took that they did the thing in one column at one time and then the thing in the other column and another time how did that everybody did one or the other yeah so to be you know a thousand people did just the boring statements and it allows them did the boring plus one yeah okay I'll just begun I'm a question four wheel so when you had though like two prototypes the atheists and believer and you were surprised that it was actually an african-american that's what people thought did you randomize the questions or are they always in the same order because except the first question which is about religion all of them were kind of leading to have these negative stereotypes which probably associated with yeah so we did randomize the order but I suspect you I suspect you're onto something that if people would just have a negative stereotype of a group you know unfortunately with race relations in the u.s. you add any negative stereotype when people are going to throw in African American as well thanks people right on that point are people having a stereotype of ICS or ice ice in particular right so it's not that you're asking them think of some one reason either you stand right this person right anymore you're not I suppose you're not getting the same kind of prejudice that you get against ethnic minorities or African Americans right yeah it affected people are not exerting violence against people because they're Isis well they are against people who belong kinetic minority right yeah I mean it's going to be a different flavor and prejudice where I think it's much of this kind of in-group out-group fighting and more just yeah people find out somebody's an atheist and they'd think they're kind of a moral wild card and don't trust them yes can we ask you a couple questions over here perhaps I know fern has had her hand up and Jordan also great this might be a slightly European question but in your work you're categorizing atheists by those who answer I don't believe in God or I do believe in God what about people who don't subscribe to Abrahamic perspectives so spiritual but not religious scriptural classifying those who's atheists that I clearly on yeah absolutely um and we've had some other work where especially back as I when I was in grad school in a Vancouver spiritual but not religious with the modal response so this one we ended up adopting this really crude binary classification not necessarily because we think that's how psychology works but we were trying to do kind of an apples to apples comparison with the Gallup numbers it is interesting how so what's your thought if somebody's spiritual but not religious would they still count as the definitional atheist if they're not really we can fight about that and Joe Jordan didn't yeah so I was wondering if you any of you found that atheists themselves have similar prejudice against atheists for example that you might find in people who have religious belief and then the second question was how much of the impact of religious belief on agency or actions involve a sense of either aggressive or other kinds of enforcement that is you know you you simply don't have the freedom of choice in some sense you better behave like that or you so people would feel and potentially oppressed by that so those are two different questions how the atheist feel about atheists and what's the sense in essence of threat sorry believe who's threatening whom in in your question or just wrong who's threat who's threatening whom well it's interesting I mean for example is there would you ever make a distinction that if you were in a culture even a local culture where atheism for example predominated would atheists threaten other other people to become atheists for example versus in a religious culture do you find P it for example if there's a subgroup identified as atheists do they feel some threat physical or otherwise I mean I could tackle the first question in terms of how atheists feel about other atheists at least on our weird little sneaky indirect measure even the atheists aren't too fond of other atheists we have some other research using more direct measures or self-report stuff and it looks like you get a weird asymmetry where religious people strongly distrust atheists but atheists are really ambivalent they don't care if somebody's an atheist or religious at least in kind of a moral trust domain so for them it seems like religion just isn't a salient cue as to who you can trust ya see we have a question here from the visitor okay a couple of them over here thank you my question is not regarding to atheist but agnostic where did you locate the agnostic which is the fashion in Europe and from Europe everybody's agnostic and it's very well approval very well accepted as Morris not agnostic you are the best you have for politics for example okay so that's one question the other one is um I have to I don't know I I don't understand well the the polls regarding to the question of do you believe in God I am legally scholar as you have to define what God is if I am God I don't believe in me you know what I think is depend of the definition so how Q are those polls when people and you know probably if they ask me do you believe in God my answer my answer will be define me God and then I can say if I do it or I don't do it it's somehow related to the previous question which is their Gnostic question thank you if you could pass across the table but yeah yeah so how do we deal with the atheist agnostic problem kind of interesting because you could argue that there are two porous ah g''l questions so whether or not you're agnostic that's a epistemological stance of how knowable is the answer to is there a god which isn't necessarily a belief one but then all the polls yeah they'll give you that menu and there's an atheist box and an agnostic box but you could easily be both or neither yeah and then for the issue of defining God for people it's interesting segalis been doing these polls for decades and they'll tweak the wording a little bit from time to time but they never do a great job although some years they'll ask do you believe in God yes no and then a subsample other people will get do you believe in God or some form of higher power yes no and the rates are identical no matter which when they ask which is odd and sometimes the rates are lower so you'll get fewer people saying they don't believe in God or a higher power then say they don't believe in God which yeah people are great I have comment on fun on the vagueness of the term god I think it to a large extent that's part of the point so it's easier to sign on to something in the sense of having a religious credence toward it if if it's not sharp so and I think that's that's you know following the work of dance Berber that's one of the things that's characteristic of what he calls representational beliefs so it's like you're clinging to a certain idea or a certain representation God exists without being sure what that means and so I think a lot of commitment to God has that character which is being committed despite lack of clarity right so most people don't think like lawyers I think my question was closely aligned with others so if I believe in a universal force that permeates all things is that God as with that how would I fit in your study it's not necessarily out of me outside of me or higher than me it's just a fourth yeah I don't know where exactly it is that was it you know in that case yeah I mean again we really don't necessarily like that strict binary classification but at least for this study we were just trying to play the same game as Gallup yeah blame Gallup that does the force does the force you believe in have a mind neither you so so feelings desires beliefs intentions knowledge no because you personally students yeah so it's not if if it doesn't have a mind it's not even one thing we can say is it's not like the God that most people believe in ah what do you mean most people what I mean by most people there's not you know are you asked us is the kind of normalization which are the word people let me be phrase when you rephrase that but then it's not like the god that's that's portrayed say in the Abrahamic religions which in this case in those cases God clearly does have a mind right so it to me it would seem in apt to apply the term God to that force that you happen to believe in what I do you think we're sort of converging on perhaps a gap between what it means not to believe in God and what it means not to believe in anything either supernatural or super explanatory and I think that's an interesting area where there's not enough research and I think one of the one of our goals today is to sort of identify those spaces and think about kind of what comes next so John and how are we doing on time okay yet yeah I don't have a question for will and my question for Neil is not the same question as the one else before so I was wondering whether or not you thought that Levy's physicist is in fact in a playground so why is it that your your argumentative strategy which is that look Neil is right what new movie is right that you know religious people are like physicists but physicists are also with respect to there there scientific theories are also in play groans well I think I think there's something there's something very good about that suggestion and and what I what I like about it is uh this a lot of our representations are like factual beliefs so take take the factual belief that concrete is hard that's going to guide your behavior wherever there's concrete if it's on the stage if it's in the church if it's in the lab even if you're pretending that concrete isn't hard in the background will be your factual belief that concrete is hard because it'll guide your pretense in such a way that you don't injure yourself so but unlike factual beliefs these what I call secondary cognitive attitudes they are very much sensitive to context and and certain kinds of context or practical setting activates them and so the the fact that our physical theories become activated in like the classroom setting or in the lab setting and and so on to some extent that does make them you know kind of like playground playground beliefs right there's a certain context where you use them but I don't think but but to to points really striking is relevant one is that that doesn't really validate what levy is saying right so so what levy is saying is is that it's really so why don't we use Newtonian physics all the time right so why didn't I do some some some calculations when I was stepping onto this stage and so on and it's it's not basically because it's too hard the processing those representations is disfluent and so I think there may be at least for some scientific theoretical beliefs there may be some practical setting dependence right I think that's that's entirely possible how ever that doesn't validate Vivi's explanation of why we don't use religious credence --is all the time and because that was making them analogous to a different feature of physical theoretical beliefs namely the disfluency of processing them right so just to sum up even if even if some physical theoretical beliefs are practical setting dependent that's not what what maybe was focusing on yes and then it to follow up more on this you know I guess I'm having trouble with the the physics example the physicist example yeah in that isn't there a distinction between thinking about something versus doing the thinking itself so describing the motion of the ball and and according to to Newtonian physics is one thing but but people are really good at catching balls most of the time and they're - they're doing the computation but just not at not at a sort of propositional level which then makes me think about about religious belief and how if if religious belief for many people is it this more than a hypothetical level how do you deal with the the filk reality of these beliefs for certainly some believers under some circumstances that they're not like the child in the playground who is making all the right inferences about their green piece of paper but doesn't feel that the green piece of paper really is a frog at that moment but but a believer in prayer might really feel like God is is speaking to him or her so how do you how do you engage with that affective felt relational piece let me deal with the second one the second one first I so I think a great deal of makes make-believe play is incredibly in roasting and emotionally powerful and I think a great book to look at on this topic maybe maybe you looked at it already but just think about it in this connection with the idea of felt reality take a look at at Marjorie Taylor's book imaginary companion so so wonderful psychologist at University of Oregon writes about imaginary friends in childhood and two things for me that are relevant really emerge from that one is just how emotionally compelling the wants and means of the imaginary friends are but nevertheless Taylor is is insistent that the children never confuse the sense in which the imaginary friend is real with the sense in which say mom or dad are real so so the children never lose that that to map cognitive structure but to grant your point the the second you can have a lot of phenomenology that makes it feel like the imaginary companion is really there without ever confusing the imaginary with with the mundane with the Monday and in factual right so so I would say sure for a lot of for a lot of make-believe play you know maybe the green piece of paper never really does feel like a frog and but for a lot of it when you're engrossed it really does and I think a perfectly analogous parent point applies to religious experience in practice so so just thinking about Tanya Luhrmann's a great economics and ethnography of the vineyard church people have to try really hard to get that feeling of God being of God being real so it doesn't it doesn't just you know hit you like you you ran into a tree you have to try to you have to try to make that experience happen and it does it does happen but importantly the the people in the vineyard use a lot of the same techniques that say kids playing make-believe play youth in order to achieve that sense that that sense of feeling real at least if I if I understand if I understand her work correctly so that's that's how I'd answer the second question with regard to the first one people are actually very good at catching balls I'll make this brief there are different intuitive physical systems and one so catching balls people are pretty accurate pressing a button that for estimating when a ball will hit the ground people are much worse at and even you know even physicists and so I think I think the point remains that when you're pressing that button to estimate when the ball will hit the ground you're not doing you're not doing Newtonian Newtonian or Einstein mechanics why not well because that you know kind of reflective propositional processing of a theoretical representations is too disciplined right if there's a question here that's waited for quite a while so if we go ahead [Music] Miguel you're talking a lot about culture and divergent processes with respect to religion across cultures and I don't understand why we assume intuition to operate in similar frameworks across cultures for me religion is not intuitive because I've lived with in a secular framework for a long time whereas somebody even in this state who's lived in a different framework religion is intuitive just based on the kind of concept knowledge we have your theory about you know religion being just kind of make-believe play that we can buy into sometimes I it may it may be the case when you're surrounded by people who could you know have a lot of evidence against religion who are pressing you against religion like it you know surrounded by secular people but I think in most cultures outside of the Western world the intuitive framework is very strongly religion and the reality is religion it is factual and so I think that you'd probably see a lot of variance if you're going to sample in other cultures you know I'm not sure what experimental methods you've used well what am I having having this conversation because since he's done his experimental stuff he's done more recent cross-cultural work where these standard tasks of intuitive analytical thinking doesn't come up as significant as he's producing my stuff has yeah it's interesting there's a recent meta-analysis just looking at kind of the same cognitive reflection task measure of intuitive versus analytic thinking and especially 30-odd published studies and pretty reliable evidence but they're almost all coming out of the US so as part of the 13 country when I was talking about we also had the CRT in there and measures of religious belief and yeah that relationship shows up in the US and Singapore and Australia and none of the other 13 which is weird man give the problem is that's when we're talking about intuition we're talking about different things so when Pascal is talking about the heart and God being related to emotional processes he's talking about something intuition in a completely different way in which cognitive scientists are but so I mean in the UK we have one two three four studies I didn't mention one in which we don't get any any sort of correlation between either supernatural belief or religious belief or religious affiliation and these kind of intuitive analytical processing tasks nothing so I think it's mostly cultural based and I suspect your intuition is right that if you're living in a culture where there is strong cultural scaffolding supporting religion that kind of becomes the default into disbands yeah let me let me just respond to the last suggestion there I think we just have to acknowledge it it's it's an empirical question so so I think thinking in terms of make believe on the playground is a very useful paradigm and I think I think it will extend beyond beyond Western cultures but whether it does is very much an empirical question so I cited a little bit of cross-cultural data from the Paul Harris study and then there's also maybe ethnographic reasons for thinking that you know thinking about the ancestors or what-have-you is akin to kind of make believe play but whether or not it so is is an empirical question and and what I was offering today I think of as a framework for asking asking the empirical question in in a more sharp fashion right so I'm entirely open open-minded about that your life has no an alternative route there's not a way to focus it it wants to be genomic early cousin said don't leave a lot of us at there is the alter rebbe people that understand huh and gee well I mean that's a very that's a very strong claim and I would say it it's an empirical question whether you're right that people's psychology works that way but I think I think we should ask that question as opposed to presupposing that we know the answer and I think I think we should we should reassess a lot of the very strong claims that have been made in that line of research yeah I I have a convention with one of your major assumptions your one of your major assumptions is so we've religious people aren't thinking religiously you're trying to find out why that is so your assumption there is that we have a unifying mind right you'll have a unified sense of beliefs and we're applying them invariably all the time and that's not how we work at all we have a mass of congruent or series most air time yeah and religious people aren't thinking religiously most of the time particularly within Western secular culture they're not really disagree with me no because your your implicit assumption is that these people are religious they would be thinking religiously most of the time they should be if is why I mean they're all the examples you're coming up why is it that on on Sundays they watch less porn because of their thinking more of God in it I thought is it so so that I think that what you're disagreeing with is is what I'm saying about factual beliefs right so so I I do say and this you know might seem like a starting claim that that our ordinary factual beliefs are kind of constantly there for guiding behavior right whether it's Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday or Thursday you know we we you know if there's a dog we assume that it has teeth if there's concrete we assume that it's hard and so on and so forth and so what I'm saying is is that our our religious credence is art like that right and of course there are many reasons why you know internal representations that we happen to have might be fragmented or might not guide behavior in every setting but I think it's important just to be clear for which class of of attitudes that failure to guide behavior is is not guiding it is what's going on I don't know I don't that clarified things they're very huge social psychological literature talking about this connection between attitudes or beliefs and behavior right so we've known this for decades it's almost as if they're trying to adopt a priest I'm puritanical idea about religion that is mm-hmm looks like funny also you got about 20 seconds to respond to to that and then and then we're going to have a coffee break and and we can keep talking all of us I really sort of hate to cut this off now but we we solve a lot of days yeah so I think it sounds like you're saying there's there's nothing to be explained and I guess my responses that's not quite right maybe I'm not noticed I'm I'm not saying that or not surprising but we still have to give an explanation for the the patterns of behavior in on behavior that we see and the question is what's the right explanation so we've got coffee now we've got beer later so let's thank our panelists I think I want again and then so yeah I think if you if you just step out into the hallway you'll find some some caffeine and maybe something sweet there we'll be reconvening soon for the day's second second symposium

Channel: Berkley Center

Views: 350

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Berkley Center, Religion, Peace, World Affairs, Georgetown University, Washington, DC

Id: Q1hU8SKHhfk

Length: 104min 8sec (6248 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2017