Psychologist Bruce Hood explores why religious belief is universal across cultures — rooting it not in indoctrination alone but in the structure of the developing mind, which naturally generates causal stories, intentional agents, and supernatural inference.
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Bruce, you've studied the science of superstition as it expresses itself in many ways. Can we learn anything about religion, the development of religion, the causes of religion from an understanding of superstition? >> Well, I think that there are different viewpoints about the origins of religion. Um, it's always been thought that religion is entirely cultural and that we're indoctrinating children. And I think there's some truth to the idea that, you know, no child is born to be Jewish or born to be Christian. whatever religion they adopt as of you know it's what environment they're raised in but I think it can't be entirely indoctrination I think there must be another component which is having a receptive mind now when you you said I studied superstition I've studied the mechanisms of the way that children think and I think that superstitions are a byproduct of what our natural ways of seeing the world so children think about the world conceptualize the world try to understand it and come up with causal models of why things happened and generally those models are pretty accurate but they do lead to misconceptions and it's those misconceptions I think when you look at them can form the basis of supernatural beliefs. >> What's an example? >> Well, causal determinism is assuming that if one event follows another there's a causal relationship between them. This is >> tell tell me an experiment that you worked on with children that has the causal problem. >> Well, we look at uh children's um understanding as objects go through occlusion. So, if you uh for example have a uh a rail track, we've done this experiment just recently, and you have one object go down and pass behind a a barrier and a second object come out. If you get the timing just perfect, the child assumes the object has been transformed into the the other object. So, you put a carrot down one end and out comes a line and then children just assume that the carrot has transformed into a line. Now, that's simple, you know, perceptual causality because the timing is perfect. In the same way, an adult who uh experiences event followed by an unusual outcome will tend to automatically link these together. This is what David Hume pointed out many years ago that we have a mind which is predisposed to seeing causality. >> So these are [clears throat] the sorts of things that we study uh in >> that's fascinating. And so what type of a a time um flexibility do you have to where the causal determination is made and when is it not made? How much leeway do you have? Well, then you're getting into how flexible is the system for seeing the relationship. Uh, so for example, some things have to happen almost seamlessly in time for them to be perceived as being causal, you know, causal. Other ones can take a little bit longer. For example, this is not my area of work, but uh you know, it's well known that if you uh have an unusual food and they get food poisoning eight hours later, uh sorry, or you feel sick eight hours later, you'll you'll think that one has caused the other because from an evolutionary point of view, uh you're that's important. >> It's important to to to make that link. But if you feel immediately sick after trying an unusual food, you tend not to make the the connection. So it is there's sort of sort of biological determinance or there are mechanisms which allow you to see the relationship. Uh so it's not there's not one time frame as it were. >> So what are some other examples of superstitions that um have their origin in some a cognitive activity that we can see in children? >> Well, essentialism is one of my big interests and that's uh you know the way that we infer visible dimensions and properties to objects. And this is a non-materialist way of seeing the world. And I think that that explains uh some of the rituals that people engage in when they think they've come into contact with something which might be evil and treating evil as if it's a a biological contaminant. So >> So how does that work? >> Well, for example, we uh we've uh done some experiments uh showing that people when they've touched a cardigan, now this is not children, this is a little bit older now. if you ask them to to wear a cardigan or touch it and then they discover later on that it's belonged to somebody uh evil then they uh feel that they need to wash their hands. So uh there's this sort of consequence of coming into direct contact with something. Now how could that be explained? Well, I think essentialism is one way of thinking about it that there is this this invisible property. Uh and we we've been thinking about essentialism as just a way of perceiving the world and chopping it up. >> Okay. So now let's go from that to religious belief or religious ritual uh purification in religion or or uh touching holy objects or uh religious belief. How do you then make the transition? >> Well, I mean we can show for example, let me give you another example which might seem a little bit more clear. Children um are not clear about the relationship between pictures and objects. Okay? So they don't necessarily know what a representation is and how it differs from the original object. This is something that they develop as they learn about drawing. Uh now as adults we know a picture is totally different to to the object. And yet we're not so sure that damaging a picture of a of a of an object has no consequence. So we've been doing studies for example destroying representations of of uh treasured objects, sentimental objects and pictures of loved ones. And whilst on an explicit level an adult knows there couldn't be any possible damage, nevertheless implicitly we can measure their their brain activation whilst this is going on there is some concern that you're actually doing. Now if you think about that that's the basis for voodoo where you try and influence an outcome by acting upon. >> So just to say if you had if picture of my three children Yeah. >> and you had me in a scanner or >> wired up with a galvanic >> skin response, right? And then you took the picture and you burned it. Yeah, >> that I would have a different reaction than if you burned a picture of a mountain. >> Yes, absolutely. So, we've done we've published studies where you don't have to burn it. You just cut the pictures up. And so, if you cut a picture of your uh childhood sentimental object, you feel great arousal in comparison to somebody else's teddy bear. So, we do have these implicit processes which stay with us. And I happen to think that uh a lot of these intuitions and ways of seeing the world as children stay with us. Now, you might educate someone out of that, but they're there implicitly all the time. >> I'm trying to make the connection between that, which is fascinating in its own right, >> and and a religious belief. So, if what you're saying is that that uh essentialism is what's happening is I'm reading into this object something that is not contained in the material object. So I am it's either enabling me or coercing me or facilitating my capacity to have a dualistic approach that there's something extra >> right >> and and if it does that now I have that capability of seeing non-material things around and then and then that becomes part of my my toolkit for for for constructing the world. >> Exactly. I mean it's that toolkit which has a variety of different mechanism but religion just has to come along with a story about magical objects that just totally fits with this kind of action. >> It plugs into what's already been developed. >> Exactly. And I think when you look at it if you look at a number of those common beliefs which are shared universally in different religions they all fit with childhood ways of seeing the world. To give you another example mindbody dualism you talked about this again is a natural stance to assume that the mind is independent to the body. Now this emerges very early on. Now if you actually believe that then that means the mind is not constrained by the same laws which constrain bodies which then opens up the possibility for minds existing after bodies have gone or minds which can do things which are not constrained by the laws of bodies. So religious folk would say yes you're right Bruce I can accept that and that reaffirms my belief because God put it there. God enabled the human beings to be able to relate to God to have this capacity to see beyond the physical. >> Well, that's an irrefutable argument. [laughter] >> I can't I can't deny it. You know, you can you can't uh deny the existence of that. So, that's unfortunate. But yeah, um I think that's one of the ways that actually you can have people holding u you know, religious uh positions as well as being scientists. Although personally I find that a difficult uh you know juization myself. >> Uh h how how strong is this belief uh in terms of the uh the the linkage between the essentialism that we see developing as a child and the the the later commitment to u essential non material elements uh in in in a in a religious worldview. I mean, is [clears throat] is that an essential linkage or is that just one of the ways you get there? >> Well, the essentialist perspective um I think makes a lot of sense of a lot of religious positions. So, to give you a classic example, um if you think about natural selection, that is non-intuitive. Okay, that that's counterintuitive in fact because if you think that things are essentially different, then you think that animals for example are all different and humans are different to animals, then if you're presented with a an account based on natural selection that all life forms are actually all derived from originally the same ancestry, then that's very difficult to accept. So that's an example where the essentialist position impedes your capability of of adopting the scientific position which is that we're all on the same contin >> but facilitates you accepting the religious position. >> Exactly.