The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (3 page)
Read The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life Online
Authors: Jesse Bering
Tags: #General, #Psychology, #Religion, #Spirituality, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Cognitive Psychology, #Personality, #Psychology of Religion
The clearest modern example of how this works comes from Nazi propaganda, which described the Jews as dirty, filthy, disease-ridden; they were portrayed as rats, garbage, and bacillus, agents of infection…Having trapped the Jews in conditions in which hygiene was difficult or impossible—as in the concentration camps and, to a lesser extent, the ghettos—[the Nazis] would speak with satisfaction of their filthiness…
Disgust is not the only way to diminish people. One can also try to rob them of individuality—describing them as “cargo,” designating them by number, and so on.
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In fact, Nick Haslam, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne, has found that we don’t have to be in the midst of genocide to catch a very scary glimpse of dehumanization at work—or at least, a slightly less toxic version of dehumanization he calls “infrahumanization.” In a 2009 article for the popular social psychology online magazine
In-Mind
, Haslam and coauthors Peter Koval and Joonha Park write, “It should be a sobering thought that mild forms of humanness denial are pervasive in our everyday perception of groups.”
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They base this conclusion on laboratory findings indicating that people implicitly perceive those of other groups (for example, Indonesians or Britons from the Australians’ point of view) as having emotions starker and less subtle than their own. While we’re happy enough to acknowledge that strangers from other groups have blunted, animal-like emotions such as happiness, fear, and anger, we’re much more reluctant to endow them with the more sumptuous, complicated affects, such as nostalgia, embarrassment, and admiration.
But the truth is, unless we’re professional mental health care providers or are unusually empathic, seldom do we really strive to understand someone else’s private reality—not in any meaningful way anyway. Instead, somewhere between solipsism and psychoanalysis is an everyday form of “mind reading,” one in which we tend to see others as doing things intentionally and for a reason but we stop short of trying to crawl into their skin to get a perfect phenomenological picture of their inner universe.
For instance, not so very long ago I found myself at a small academic conference at Cambridge University seated behind the noted philosopher Daniel Dennett. What was strange about this was that I couldn’t help but stare at the back of Dennett’s head—at the perfectly oblong shape of his skull, the sun-speckled skin stretched taut around it, the neatly trimmed ring of white hair…What irony, I thought, that I would be staring at the particular cranium containing the very mind that first posed the formal question of why understanding other minds is so central to evolved human psychology, only to realize that, though it literally lay at my fingertips, even this mind was no more than an airy hypothetical.
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Among cognitive scientists, Dennett is perhaps best known for his argument that humans are unique among other organisms because evolution has crafted our brains in such a way that we cannot help but assume an “intentional stance” when reasoning about others:
The intentional stance is the strategy of interpreting the behavior of an entity (person, animal, artifact, whatever) by treating it as if it were a rational agent who governed its “choice” of “action” by a consideration of its “beliefs” and “desires”…the basic strategy of the intentional stance is to treat the entity in question as an agent, in order to predict—and thereby explain, in one sense—its actions or moves.
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If Dennett were to have, say, turned suddenly around in his chair at that Cambridge conference and winked twice at me, well then I wouldn’t have simply seen the torso of a six-foot-three-inch human body capped by an oblong head that held a pair of eyes, one of which was peering peculiarly at me from under the fluttering sheath of a thin piece of skin. Rather, I would have instinctively asked myself what on earth these winks were supposed to be in reference to. In other words, I would have wondered what was going through Dennett’s mind that would cause him to act in such a manner. Perhaps the speaker we were both listening to just said something that reminded him of me? Maybe he just realized I was sitting behind him and he was simply saying hello? Perhaps it had something to do with our secret rendezvous from one very magical night before? When someone winks at you—or does anything else unexpected, for that matter—your brain isn’t content with just processing the superficial layer of behavior being exhibited by this other person, but without any conscious effort it launches a search of the other person’s mental reasons for acting this way. In other words, we ask, “What is the behavior we’re witnessing
about
?” Back at the conference I might think to myself, “Oh, I get it. Dan probably believes that I’m antagonistic to the speaker’s position, and he wants to show a sort of good-natured teasing with me by winking at me in playfulness.”
Consider how your everyday social experiences would look without this capacity to instantaneously translate other people’s behaviors into ideas, emotions, and thoughts. Developmental psychologists Alison Gopnik and Andrew Meltzoff provide a nightmarish example in their book the
The Scientist in the Crib
(2000). Imagine, the authors tell us, taking the perspective of a guest sitting at a restaurant table and simply observing a banal dinner party conservation among the members of a young family, one of whom, a child, erupts into tears after a bout of teasing by an older sibling:
We seem to see husbands and wives and little brothers. But what we really see are bags of skin stuffed into pieces of cloth and draped over chairs. There are small restless black spots that move at the top of the bags of skin, and a hole underneath that irregularly makes noise. The bags move in unpredictable ways, and sometimes one of them will touch us. The holes change shape, and occasionally salty liquid pours from the two spots.
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Dennett’s landmark set of essays on the subject of perceiving other minds in
The Intentional Stance
(1987) was published on the heels of an important change in attitude and mind toward other animals. Through the mainstreaming of scientific findings, more people than ever before were being made aware just how much we had in common with other animals. Much of this awareness could be traced directly back to the early 1960s, when the well-known paleontologist Louis Leakey encouraged the first of a trio of young women to begin studying our closest living relatives—the great apes—in their natural environments. Jane Goodall, a British graduate student who had previously accompanied Leakey as an assistant during his archaeological digs for prehuman fossils at Olduvai Gorge in eastern Africa, soon set up camp in Tanzania, where for the next few decades she took copious field notes revealing the secret, everyday lives of wild chimpanzees. It was Goodall, of course, who obliterated the old definition of our species as being “Man the Toolmaker” when she observed the chimps at Gombe fashioning twigs and inserting them into termite mounds, fishing for insects. When Leakey learned of this behavior, he replied excitedly in a telegram to Goodall, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans!”
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A few years later, another of Leakey’s young protégés, a Canadian student named Biruté Galdikas, set up her own camp at the edge of the Java Sea in Borneo and began the world’s first observational studies of wild orangutans. By contrast to Goodall, Galdikas didn’t initially spy any such clear incidences of tool use. But, like her colleague’s observations of chimp behavior, Galdikas’s observations of orangutan social behavior were often mirror images of our own proclivities; and what the mirror reflected wasn’t always so pretty. Among a few other things in her many years spent watching these elusive red apes, Galdikas discovered that human males aren’t the only animals on earth that, occasionally, brutally rape females while they are struggling to get away. According to Galdikas’s autobiography, in fact, one adolescent orangutan even had his way with an unsuspecting human field-worker from her camp.
Finally, the third of “Leakey’s Angels,” as they came to be known, was American Dian Fossey, portrayed in the Academy Award–winning performance by Sigourney Weaver in the film
Gorillas in the Mist
(1988). Before she was martyred in her campaign to save mountain gorillas from extinction, Fossey captivated members of the public with her heartfelt descriptions of these giant, very humanlike creatures living deep in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda.
Meanwhile, as these primatological field endeavors were gaining ever-wider press, making starlets of Leakey’s Angels and stirring up heated, popular debates about Darwinian evolution and the nature of human nature, a somewhat lesser-known researcher working alongside the Rwanda team had his own peculiarly staggering thought:
In the grandeur of the mountains, half-accepted into the gorilla family, watching and watched by a dozen black eyes, far from any other person, left with my own thoughts, I began musing about an issue that has fascinated me ever since: What’s it like, for a gorilla, to be a gorilla? What does a gorilla know about what it’s like to be me? How do we read minds?…
It dawned on me that this could be the answer to much that is special about human evolution. We humans—and to a lesser extent maybe gorillas and chimps too—have evolved to be “natural psychologists.” The most promising but also the most dangerous elements in our environment are other members of our own species. Success for our human ancestors must have depended on being able to get inside the minds of those they lived with, second-guess them, anticipate where they were going, help them if they needed it, challenge them, or manipulate them. To do this they had to develop brains that would deliver a story about what it’s like to be another person from the inside.
The researcher in question was a young Nicholas Humphrey, the psychologist we met earlier bemoaning the impenetrableness of other minds. But here he was, many years earlier as the twenty-eight-year-old assistant director of research at the Cambridge Department of Animal Behavior, swatting away insects, crouching in montane forest, the air laden with the musky odor of gorilla sweat, first realizing that we might well be the only species on the planet (perhaps even the universe) able to ponder the question of other minds to begin with.
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Over the ensuing years, it was largely Humphrey who reminded scholars that, although the religiously inspired
scala naturae
(or the “great chain of being,” which placed beasts in orders of magnitude below humans and humans below only the angels) had been thoroughly—and justly—knocked off its base by Darwinian logic, this didn’t imply that there weren’t in fact meaningful, evolved psychological differences between humans and other animals. Actually, there might well be one very big difference: the human capacity to think about minds.
Soon, two American psychologists, David Premack and Guy Woodruff, would become the first experimental researchers to explore the question under controlled laboratory conditions. Their 1978 article “Does the Chimpanzee Have a ‘Theory of Mind’?” kick-started a sort of revolution in the social cognitive sciences. (They answered “yes” to their own question, but this answer was based on such a flawed study that it’s hardly worth describing here.) This rather jargony term, “theory of mind,” was defined by the authors as follows:
A system of inferences of this kind may properly be viewed as a theory because such [mental] states are not directly observable, and the system can be used to make predictions about the behavior of others.
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Again, we can’t see minds, feel them, or weigh them in any literal sense; rather, we can only infer their existence through observing other actors’ behaviors. So Premack and Woodruff’s “theory of mind” was simply a more formalized version of Humphrey’s initial inklings out in that lonely African rain forest, and for our purposes it can be considered synonymous with Humphrey’s “natural psychologist” construct, as well as Dennett’s more philosophical “intentional stance.”
It’s perhaps easiest to grasp the concept of a theory of mind when considering how we struggle to make sense of someone else’s bizarre or unexpected behavior. If you’ve ever seen an unfortunate woman at the grocery store wearing a midriff-revealing top and packed into a pair of lavender tights like meat in a sausage wrapper, or a follicularly challenged man with a hairpiece two shades off and three centimeters adrift, and asked yourself what on earth those people were thinking when they looked in the mirror before leaving the house, this is a good sign that your theory of mind (not to mention your fashion sense!) is in working order. When others violate our expectations for normalcy, or stump us with surprising behaviors, our tendency to mind-read goes into overdrive.
The evolutionary significance of this mind-reading system hinges on one gigantic question: Is this psychological capacity—this theory of mind, this seeing souls glimmering beneath the skin, spirits twinkling behind orbiting eyes, thoughts in the flurry of movement—is this the “one big thing” that could help us finally understand what it means to be human? Forget tool use, never mind culture—and, for that matter, monogamy, love, play, politics, warfare, and all those other categories of behavior once deemed exclusively human. Leakey’s Angels and other anthropologists were scratching these candidates off the list of possibly unique human traits one by one. One prominent researcher, the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal, summed up his highly respected work on chimpanzee social behavior as showing that great apes were “inching closer to humanity.”
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Even our unique claim to language was up in the air. A few ragtag animals were allegedly learning human sign language in closely guarded studies in which they were raised, essentially, as children. One of the key researchers involved in this line of work, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh from Georgia State University, years later declared that she had met the mind of another species (in this case owned by one of her bonobo chimpanzee subjects) and discovered that it was just as human as her own: “I found out that it was the same as ours. I found out that ‘it’ was me!”
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