Science helps overcome habits of mind

Elizabeth Culotta has an article titled "On the Origin of Religion" in a recent Science magazine (Science, 6 November 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5954, pp. 784 - 787). I quote extensively from one portion of the article:

According to the emerging cognitive model of religion, we are so keenly attuned to the designs and desires of other people that we are hypersensitive to signs of "agents": thinking minds like our own. In what anthropologist Pascal Boyer of Washington University in St. Louis in Missouri has described as a "hypertrophy of social cognition," we tend to attribute random events or natural phenomena to the agency of another being.

When it comes to natural phenomena, "we may be intuitive theists," says cognitive psychologist Deborah Kelemen of Boston University (BU). She has shown in a series of papers that young children prefer "teleological," or purpose-driven, explanations rather than mechanical ones for natural phenomena.

For example, in several studies British and American children in first, second, and fourth grades were asked whether rocks are pointy because they are composed of small bits of material or in order to keep animals from sitting on them. The children preferred the teleological explanation. "They give an animistic quality to the rock; it's protecting itself," Kelemen explains. Further studies have confirmed this tendency. Even Kelemen's own son—who "gets mechanistic explanations of everything"—is not immune: At age 3, after hearing how flowers grow from seeds, his question was, "Who makes the seeds?"

The point of studying children is that they may better reflect innate rather than cultural biases, says Kelemen. But recent work suggests that it's not just children: Kelemen and Krista Casler of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, found the same tendency to ascribe purpose to phenomena like rocks, sand, and lakes in uneducated Romany adults. They also tested BU undergraduates who had taken an average of three college science classes. When the undergrads had to respond under time pressure, they were likely to agree with nonscientific statements such as "The sun radiates heat because warmth nurtures life."

"It's hard work to overcome these teleological explanations," says Kelemen, who adds that the data also suggest an uphill battle for scientific literacy. "When you speed people up, their hard work goes by the wayside." She's now investigating how professional scientists perform on her tests. Such purpose-driven beliefs are a step on the way to religion, she says. "Things exist for purposes, things are intentionally caused, things are intentionally caused for a purpose by some agent. ... You begin to see that a god is a likely thing for a human mind to construct."

I suggest that people seek patterns in what they perceive -- the appearance of order. This is not a novel observation, and indeed the survival value of recognizing patters is so obvious and large that I suggest it is common not only to man but to other species. How can an organism find food or avoid being eaten if it can not recognize patterns indicating where food is to be found and where predators are likely to lurk.

I also tend to agree that people impute intentionality to the things that they perceive. While usually it is assumed that there is an imputation of intentionality only when order is perceived, it is possible and I suggest likely that there is an imputation of intentionality when disorder is perceived. Thus when ones plans do not result in the order one expects, one may assume the intervention of forces with a malevolent intent. Indeed, when one sees lack of pattern, one may assume that an external force has intentionally randomized things or "messed things up". Thus the intuitive alternatives may be represented by the bottom row on the matrix.
The thrust of a couple of centuries of science has been to explore the explanation of natural and social phenomena as the result of natural processes and not planning. I suggest that modern science has shown how order may emerge without planning as the result of properties of statistics, of natural or market selection, or of feedback. As a result of centuries of scientific analysis it now is possible to understand order as unplanned.

Similarly, science has suggested in quantum mechanics, genetics and other areas that there are things in nature that are best understood as unordered and unplanned.

Perhaps even more important has been the willingness of science to treat all explanations as tentative, recognizing that (at least at the current state of knowledge) there are things we can not explain and that current explanations may be flawed or erroneous.

Implications for Decision Making

If we are genetically and culturally predisposed to search for patterns, then it seems likely that we are often going to see patterns where they do not in fact exist.

So too, if we are genetically and culturally predisposed to impute intentionality, then it seems likely that we are often going to see intent where none exists.

It may well be that we assign too much confidence to the patterns we observe and the intentions we impute. Decision making may well be improved by reducing the confidence we assign to such observations and making judgments more tentative, seeking further evidence to challenge such observations and imputations. Science has progressed by seeking observations specifically designed to challenge hypotheses, rather than to add evidence to support them.

When something goes wrong in an organization, some people first suspect malevolence, but I tend to suspect bureaucracy gone awry or incompetence.