{808} revision 3 modified: 02-02-2010 20:39 gmt |
The Neural Markers of Religious Conviction PMID-19291205 Recently a friend pointed this article out to me, and while I found the scientific results interesting though slightly questionable - that religious people have less anterior cingulate cortex activation upon error - the introduction and discussion were stimulating. What follows are a few quotes and my interpretation and implications of the authors' viewpoint. "The absence of a cognitive map providing clear standards and goals is uncomfortable and leads people to search for and assert belief systems that quell their anxiety by allowing for clearer goal pursuit (McGregor, Zanna, Holmes, & Spencer, 2001)." I would argue that uncertainty itself is highly uncomfortable - whether it is uncertainty as to how much food you will have in the future, or uncertainty as to the best behavior. In this sense, of course religion decreases anxiety - it provides a structured way to think about this disordered and highly undecidable world, a filter to remove or explain away many of the random parts of our lives. In my personal experience, conviction is usually easier than trying to hold accurate probabalistic models in your mind - conviction is pleasurable, even if it is wrong. I find their short review of cognitive science in the introduction interesting - they claim that the septo-hippocampal system is concerned with the detection and correction of errors associated with concrete behaviors and goals, while in humans (and other primates?) the ACC allows error and feedback based operations on concepts and higher-order goals. The need for a higher-level error detection circuit makes sense in humans, as we are able to bootstrap our behavior to very complicated limits, but it also begs to question - what trains the ACC? To some degree, it must train itself in the via the typical loopy feedback-based brain way, but this only goes so far, as (at least in the modern world) the space of all possible behaviors, longterm and short term, given stochastic feedback is too large to be either decidable or fully parseable/generalizable into an accurate global model, even given a lifetime of experience. Religion, as this paper and many others posits, provides this global model against which behaviors and perceptions can be measured. But why does a uncertainty challenge causes a compensatory increase in the strength of convictions, almost to the point of zealousness (how is this adaptive? just as a means of reducing anxiety?); I've seen it happen, but why. From a Bayesian point of view, increased uncertainty necessitates decreased certainty, or fewer convictions. From a pragmatic point of view, increased uncertainty requires increased convictions purely because the convictions have to make up for the lack of environmental information from which to make a decision. Any theory must include the cost of not making a decision, the cost of delaying a decision, and the principle of sunk costs. There are other solutions to the 'undecidable' problems of life than religion - literary culture and science come to mind. The principle behind all may be that, while individual experience and intellect is possibly insufficient for generating global rules to guide behavior, the condensed experience of thousands/millions/billions of people is. This assumes that experience, as a random variable/signal, scales according to the laws of large numbers - noise decreases monotonically as sample size increases. This may not actually be true, it depends on the structure of the distributions, and the extent to which people's decisions/behaviors are orthogonal, and the fidelity of the communication / aggregation channels which operate on the data. I think the dimensionality increase afforded by larger sample size is slower than the concomitant noise decrease, hence (valid) global rules guiding behavior can be extracted from large populations of people. Regarding the communication channels, it seems there were always high fidelity channels of experience - e.g. Homer, Benjamin Franklin's transatlatic trips, the royal Society of London, (forgive my western pov) - and now, there are even more (the internet)! The latter invention should, at least within the framework here, allow larger groups of people to make 'harder' or 'more undecidable' decisions by virtue of greater information. Fairly standard rhetoric to the internet crowd (c.f. forums), I know. I would argue that this is better than using convictions... but the result of communication / aggregation is convictions anyway, so eh. Getting back to the uncertainty issue, the authors point out that conservative cultures there is usually greater uncertainty (which way is the arrow of causality?), and increasing uncertainty bolsters support zealous action, e.g. war. "For example, contemporary social psychological research indicates that uncertainty threats can cause people to become more extreme in their opinions, so that they exaggerate their religious convictions and become more willing to support a war to defend those convictions (McGregor, Haji, Nash, & Teper, 2008). In fact, even nonbelievers bolster their personal convictions to near-religious levels in order to reduce uncertainty-related distress (McGregor et al., 2001). Thus, in terms of feedback-loop models, the standards and predictions provided by religious convictions are strong enough that they can resist any discrepant feedback that might alert the comparator system." This, I believe, is fairly accurate, and it implies several dramatic things: if a despot or leader wishes to engender support for a war, particularly a religious war, then he should make the lives of his constituents uncertain. If their lives are stable and certain sans ideology, then they will be less likely to have the convictions ('the other side is bad!') to fight certain wars. (It of course depends on who/what the other side is!). Take Europe vs. America as an example - America has far fewer social support systems and greater uncertainty in life than in Europe. The Economist frequently phrases American businesses' penchant for hiring and firing people quickly and seemingly at whim, as it encourages creative reuse, economic flexibility, and better allocation of capital, but it has a clear downside - increased anxiety, uncertainty. We (well, not me, but many Americans) deal with this via religion, the article would argue (that said, I should guess that there are a great many other reasons people are religious). Still, in western Europe has less uncertainty in life, is more secular, and less tolerant of ideological wars. Hence the antidote for war is to give people stable, significant lives. More common-sense rhetoric. On to another suggestive point made by the article: "In terms of feedback-loop models, this explanation suggests that the standards and predictions provided by religion are inadequate and should, in fact, result in prediction errors; however, because religious beliefs are rigid, inconsistent information is reinterpreted in such a way that it becomes assimilated to preexisting convictions, further sustaining beliefs (Park, 2005)." I would be interested in an actual test of this hypothesis - if it is possible without bias (perhaps another EEG study? perhaps it has been already done?) The authors actually prove the opposite point, that religions people are more likely to answer correctly on the Stroop test. They take more time, but seem to be more careful. This reminds me of Matteo Ricci, who allegedly used his Jesuit training in sustained concentration and memorization to master the Chinese language; clearly religion is far more than just a means of reducing perceived uncertainty about the world. To loop the argument back on its tail - this is the 'meta' blog, afterall - one may question if the theory (looking at behavior in terms of the unpleasantness of uncertainty and the need for decidability) is a good way of looking at things, just as we questioned if religion is a good theory of the world. I think it generalizes; for example, Solaiman mentioned that the European children of the revolution of 1968 had parents who notably applied very little guidance to their lives; they were like the American hippies. These people grew up disliking their parents, and sought far more structure in their lives and in parenting their own children. One may imagine that they disliked the vast uncertainty their parents bluntly exposed them to, and paucity of guiding principles - something that the parents, after years of living in the world, probably had. Secondly, Solaiman recalled that all his favorite teachers were those that were strictest, strongest in their conviction, and most structured in their pedagogy. People seek to make decisions decidable whether through parents, teachers, religion, science or even art and literature. To summarize, uncertainty engenders convictions by the pragmatic principle. Best thing we can do is to either reduce uncertainty or found those convictions on aggregate data(*) (*) Google publication. The principle of data is our zeitgist, but history suggests that independent of what we think now it will not be the last. comments? edit this, write below. |