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[cartoon thanks to treelobsters.com]
I remember watching an episode of Penn and Teller’s HBO series “Bullshit!” and reacting to something Penn Jillette said with an enthusiastic “huzzah!”
What had he said? That more people should read the Bible. Because we need more atheists.
Which made sense to me. The first time I read the whole dang thing through as an adult I was amazed by what was in it. And further amazed that people could consider it a holy book.
But I’m not your average reader. In fact, there is no such animal as an average reader. As new research suggests. In, How you read the Bible is tied to fellow worshippers’ education, Baylor researcher finds, I read:
Regardless of a person’s educational background, he or she is less likely to approach the Bible in a literal word-for-word fashion when surrounded by a greater number of church members who went to college, according to a Baylor University sociology researcher.
Oh. So blunt familiarity with the Bible may not help liberate folk. Notice that the finding was not about the individual’s education level, but that of their peers. Social environments matter.
For me this reinforces the idea that atheists and humanists need to speak up more. Why? We are members of many social groups. And a social group can influence the thinking of others, even if it is ever so subtly.
Tags: belief, religion, social psychology
Yes, it is conventient to write-off bullying as merely a case of one bad apple messing up things for others… As if the entire social phenomenon can be entirely accounted for by the influence of one anti-social personality.
But maybe there is more to it than that — as the following quote from a scientific news-release proposes:
“People have traditionally framed bullying as social incompetence, thinking that bullies have low self-esteem or impulse problems,” said Patricia Hawley, KU associate professor of developmental psychology. “But recent research shows that bullying perpetrators can be socially competent and can win esteem from their peers.” [source]
Oh-oh. Looks like we can’t pin 100% of the blame on the bullies themselves. Damn. Don’t you hate it when things get complicated?
The following quote further argues that bullies aren’t simply warped individuals, but are fundamentally like you and me. It may be that they different strategies and opportunities for winning social status:
“It changes the rewards structure,” Hawley said. “At the end of the day, the goals of the bully are like yours and mine — they want friendship and status. They have human goals, not pathological ones.”
Hmm. So maybe if bullies were capable of winning blue ribbons for something else, their victims could rest easier.
Food for thought, certainly.
Holy smokes, Batman! And by smokes I mean “Lucky Strikes.” Check out this heading and subhead to a research finding:
Lifestyles of the old and healthy defy expectations -
Einstein researchers find centenarians just as likely as the rest of population to smoke, drink and pack on pounds. [source]
Damn. That doesn’t fit in with our mantra of “you are what you eat” and “you are what you smoke and drink, or don’t.”
By the way, the Einstein researchers aren’t necessarily brilliant. Rather they are affiliated with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University.
Okay, this was one study. And the data isn’t fantastic. But in some regards, it’s not bad either. The researchers interviewed nearly 500 Ashkenazi Jews, living independently and more than 95 years old, about their health and lifestyle. Ashkenazi Jews were chosen as the subject pool both due to their alleged longevity and their relative genetic uniformity. They then compared this to previous information gathered from roughly three thousand cohorts. In brief, this what they found:
Overall, people with exceptional longevity did not have healthier habits than the comparison group in terms of BMI, smoking, physical activity, or diet.
What? Really? Okay, so maybe those really long-lived individuals benefit from good genes. Yet lifestyle might matter more for those with so-so genes. Might.
If the human brain is a toolkit, individuals tend to have not only somewhat different kits, but they also have favored ‘tools.’ And perhaps these tools, these capacities, influence how we perceive our world.
Research published in September of last year offers this proposition:
Intuitive thinking may influence belief in God
Does thinking style (variable one), influence belief in a supernatural “numero uno” (variable two)?
First, a nitpick about the news release and actual paper: The consistent, unqualified use of the word “God.” There are quite a few assumptions that go into the use of “belief in God,” or simply “God.” I’ve raised these before. Suffice it to say that a more scientific wording would be “a god” or “an ultimate god.”
That said, the studies that generated the finding were quite innovative and perhaps revealing. In the first study, the researchers from Harvard University measured intuitive problem-solving in individuals, via a number of math problems that lent themselves to intuitive short-cuts that resulted in incorrect answers. The finding:
Participants who gave intuitive answers to all three problems were 1 ½ times as likely to report they were convinced of God’s existence as those who answered all of the questions correctly.
Interesting. Is belief in a god the result of taking a similar sort of mistake-prone, cognitive short-cut? Notice that intuition does not equal true. Nor does it always equal false.
A second study was equally revealing:
In another study, with 373 participants, the researchers found they could temporarily influence levels of faith by instructing participants to write a paragraph describing a personal experience where either intuitive or reflective thinking led to a good result. One group was told to describe a time in their lives when intuition or first instinct led to a good outcome, while a second group was instructed to write about an experience where a good outcome resulted from reflecting and carefully reasoning through a problem. When they were surveyed about their beliefs after the writing exercise, participants who wrote about a successful intuitive experience were more likely to report they were convinced of God’s existence than those who wrote about a successful reflective experience.
It seems if we encourage intuitive thinking and the mental short-cuts it entails we are likely to promote more error-prone thoughts and conclusions/beliefs.
Of course, there is way more to the question of why people believe in an ultimate god than this. But thinking style may be a factor.
Tags: belief, rationality
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