Part 4 (1/2)

These studies have been extended to the world beyond college students. The games were played with fifteen small-scale societies on four continents and in New Guinea. Although the results were more widely varied (lowball offers were more readily accepted in some societies and not in others), the researchers concluded that in none of the societies did people play with a completely selfish behavior. How they played varied with how important local cooperation was and how dependent they were on marketing and trading goods. The individual player's personal economic status or demographic had no effect, and the play patterns pretty much resembled their everyday interactions.38 The more the society engaged in reciprocal trade beyond their kins.h.i.+p ties, the more equitable the offers were.

THE SUFFERING MODULE.

A concern for suffering, or a sensitivity to or a dislike of signs of physical pain in others, and a dislike for those who cause the pain, is a good adaptation for a mother raising an infant who has a long period of dependency. Any adaptation that increases the offspring's chance of survival would have been selected for, and an ability to detect suffering in one's offspring fits this criterion. Sympathy, compa.s.sion, and empathy most likely have their distant origins in mimicry, which result in mother-offspring bonding and attachment, which in turn tend to increase survival of offspring. The virtues Haidt concludes societies derive from this intuitive ethic are compa.s.sion and kindness, but we could add righteous anger.

THE HIERARCHY MODULE.

Hierarchy has to do with navigating in a social world where status matters. We evolved in social groups that were rife with dominance and status, both social and s.e.xual. Our cousins the chimps are forever concerned about rank and dominance, and so are humans. Even in egalitarian societies, hierarchy exists in social status, work organizations, and s.e.xual compet.i.tion. No matter how egalitarian the society, some individuals will be more fit, more attractive, and thus ranked higher by the opposite s.e.x. And somebody has to run the committee meetings, or chaos ensues. Intuitive behaviors that led to maneuvering this social web by being respectful to dominants or wielding power with aplomb would have been successful. We saw how the emotions of guilt and shame worked in social exchange, but they can also nudge one to act in a socially acceptable way, helping one navigate the hierarchical social world. Guilt is the belief that one has caused harm or suffering and can motivate helpful behavior, especially if one is caught in a reprehensible act, whereupon guilt becomes shame. Shame is violating a social norm knowing that someone is watching. It motivates one to hide or withdraw, which indicates that one understands the violation and is less likely to be attacked for committing it. Guilt and shame can be motivators for all the moral modules. Embarra.s.sment is often felt around people of higher status. It motivates one to present oneself properly and show respect for those in authority, thus avoiding conflict with more powerful individuals, increasing the odds of survival. We learned in the last chapter that the reward for those who punished cheaters was increased status. Other emotions that are a.s.sociated with hierarchy are respect and awe, or resentment. Virtues based in hierarchy are respect, loyalty, and obedience.

THE IN-GROUP/OUT-GROUP COALITION MODULE.

Coalitions are prevalent in chimpanzee society and among other social mammals, such as dolphins. They are endemic among humans, who organize themselves spontaneously into mutually exclusive groups. There are the sugar people and the salt people, farmers and herders, dog lovers and cat lovers. It is almost comic (if it didn't lead to so much tragedy) to look at an atlas of the world and see how many countries do not like their neighbors. Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides have found evidence for a specialized module that codes for coalition recognition.39 In an evolutionary world where kin groups live together, where hostile neighboring bands can be encountered, and where s.h.i.+fting power struggles erupt in social groups, it would be beneficial to be able to recognize patterns of cooperation, compet.i.tion, and political allegiance. Visible markers that suggested who was allied with whom would be important. Arbitrary cues, such as skin color, accent, or manner of dress, would become significant only if they had predictive validity for coalitional members.h.i.+p. Otherwise they would be unimportant. The hunter-gatherer societies in which we evolved would rarely, if ever, have come into contact with groups of another race. They rarely moved more than a short distance. But race could be used as a coalition marker in the right circ.u.mstances because it is highly visible. In sociological tests in the past, people always categorized other people according to race, no matter what social context they presented.

To test if there might be a module that specialized in coalition recognition rather than race recognition, which did not make evolutionary sense, Kurzban, Tooby, and Cosmides created a social context in which race was not predictive of a cooperative alliance. They found this drastically decreased the extent to which subjects noticed race. They also demonstrated that any visual marker (they used s.h.i.+rt color) that is correlated with patterns of cooperation and alliance would be encoded, and in fact was encoded more strongly than race. It was only four minutes into their experiment when their subjects no longer noticed race. They concluded that people are good at picking up on changing patterns of alliance, and this is why they can adapt to different social worlds, one where race was not the coalition predictor.

Various emotions can be aroused by coalition members.h.i.+p: compa.s.sion for other groups (by Shriners and walkathon partic.i.p.ants, for example), contempt for other groups (nonsmokers' feelings for smokers), anger (by nonsmokers against smokers), guilt (for not supporting your group), shame (for betraying your group), embarra.s.sment (for letting ”the team” down), and grat.i.tude (house owners to firemen). So this module would work: Recognized as part of my group: good, approach; not part of my group: bad, avoid. Coalition recognition has its roots in mimicry; like mannerisms generate a positive bias. Virtues that are sp.a.w.ned from in-group coalitions are trust, cooperation, self-sacrifice, loyalty, patriotism, and heroism.

THE PURITY MODULE.

Purity has its roots in defending against disease: bacteria, fungi, and parasites-what Matt Ridley considers the compet.i.tion.40 Without their threatening presence, there is no need for gene recombination or s.e.xual (versus as.e.xual) reproduction. We wouldn't have to keep up with the Joneses, or in this case the Escherichia coli or the Entamoeba histolytica, which are constantly mutating to get better at attacking us so they can reproduce and survive. Disgust is the emotion that protects purity. Haidt suggests that the emotion of disgust arose when hominids became meat eaters. It appears to be a uniquely human emotion.41 Obviously your dog doesn't feel it. Look what he eats. Disgust is only one of the four reasons that humans reject food, but we share the other three reasons with other animals: distaste, inappropriateness (a stick), and danger. Disgust implies the knowledge of the origins or the nature of food. Young infants will reject food that is bitter, but disgust doesn't appear until around age five. Haidt and his colleagues suggest that the emotion of disgust initially acted as a food rejection system, evidenced by its connection to nausea, concerns with contamination (contact with a disgusting substance), and facial expressions a.s.sociated with it, which mostly use the nose and mouth. They refer to this as core disgust.

Initially, disgust would guard against disease transmitters, such as rotting corpses and carca.s.ses, rotting fruit, feces, parasites, vomit, and the ill. Haidt suggests, ”Human societies, however, need to reject many things, including s.e.xual and social 'deviants.' Core disgust may have been preadapted as a rejection system, easily harnessed to other kinds of rejection.”41 Its purview expanded, and at some point disgust became more generalized to include aspects of appearance, bodily functions, and some activities, including overindulgence and some occupations, such as those having to do with corpses.

But if disgust evolved to serve these important adaptive functions-food selection and disease avoidance-then it is particularly surprising that the disgust response is almost totally lacking in young children. Indeed, young children will put almost anything into their mouths, including feces, and the full disgust response (including contamination sensitivity) is not in place until around the age of five to seven. Contamination sensitivity is also not found, so far as we know, in any non-human species.* Caution is therefore warranted in proposing that disgust is important for biological survival. The social functions of disgust...may be more important than its biological functions.41 Indeed when the researchers had people from many different countries list things that they found disgusting, they could be grouped into three general categories beyond that of core disgust. The first category was things that reminded people of their animal nature, including death, s.e.x, hygiene, all body fluids except tears (which only humans have), and body envelope violations such as a missing part, deformity, or obesity. The next category consisted of things that were thought to risk interpersonal contamination, which turns out to be less a form of body product contamination (people were only slightly less reluctant to wear laundered clothes of another) than of contamination of their essence. People were more reluctant to wear the clothes of a murderer or of Adolph Hitler, than of a well-liked person. The majority of things listed as disgusting by people from India fell in this category. The last grouping was moral offenses. For American and j.a.panese subjects, the majority of disgusting things on their lists came from this category, although they were very different. Americans were disgusted at the violation of a person's rights and dignity, whereas j.a.panese were disgusted at violations to a person's place in society.

Disgust has a cultural component that varies among cultures, and children are coached as to what it includes. This module mostly likely had biological origins, which have widely expanded to include disgust that is not only elicited by food but now can even include the actions of others. Unconsciously this module would say, Disgusting: dirty, bad, avoid; clean: good, approach. I recently saw a sign that read, CLEAN HANDS MAKE GOOD FOOD. The purity module is alive and well in Santa Barbara.

Over the pa.s.sage of time, religious and secular laws and rituals have been made regulating food and bodily functions, including hygiene, health, and diet. Once these laws are accepted, their violation results in a negative bias and a moral intuition. Other religious and moral concerns have been generalized to the purity of the mind and body. Many cultures make virtues of cleanliness, chast.i.ty, and purity.

Thalia Wheatley and Haidt42 have run an experiment to see if they could affect moral judgments by increasing an emotion. They hypnotized two groups of people and told one group that whenever they read the word that, they would be disgusted, and told the other group they would be disgusted by the word often. Then they had them read stories that had either one or the other word in them. Each group found the moral stories with their hypnotically suggested word in it more disgusting. They even found that one-third of people will judge a story with no moral violation in it somewhat morally wrong. Schnall, Haidt, and Clore tried a different approach by asking subjects moral questions while seated either at a dirty desk strewn with used fast-food wrappers and tissues or at a clean desk. People who had tested at the upper end of the scale for ”private body consciousness” (those who are more aware of their physical state) made more severe moral judgments when sitting at the dirty desk. A take-home lesson from this is that if you have had a forbidden party at your parents' house while they are gone for the weekend, be sure the house is spotless when they get home, because if they find out about it and the house is dirty...

So if we all have these universal modules, why are cultures so different in their moral standards? Haidt and Joseph answer this question by looking at the link between our innate moral intuitions and the socially defined virtues. In Hauser's model, we have an innate preparedness to respond to the social world in particular constrained ways. That means some things are easier to learn than others, and some things can't be learned at all. Studies on animals have shown that some things can be taught with just one trial, others can take hundreds of trials, and some can never be learned. The cla.s.sic example for humans is the fact that it is very easy to be taught to be afraid of snakes but nearly impossible to be taught to be afraid of flowers. Our fear module is prepared to learn about snakes, which were a danger in our ancestral environment, but not flowers, which weren't. When you ask children what they are afraid of, the answer is lions and tigers and monsters, but not cars, which are very much more likely to hurt them nowadays. Likewise, some virtues are easily learned, whereas others are not. It is easy to learn to punish cheaters; it is difficult to learn to forgive them.

Virtues are what the culture has defined as morally praiseworthy. Different cultures value the output of the moral modules differently. Different cultures will link more than one module together so they apply to broader stimuli. Hindus have linked purity to hierarchy and coalitions and come up with a caste system. Monarchies have done much the same and ended up with a cla.s.s system, royals keeping their bloodlines pure within a hierarchy of n.o.bility. Cultures may define the virtues elicited by the different modules differently. Fairness is considered a virtue, but with what as its basis-fairness based on need? Or fairness based on those who work harder? Or fairness based on equal distribution? And consider loyalty. Certain societies value loyalty to family whereas others value loyalty to peer groups or a hierarchical structure, such as a town or country. In some cultures there may be complex virtues derived from different modules that are linked together to create a super virtue such as honor, derived from the hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity modules in most traditional cultures.30 THE RATIONAL PROCESS.

With modules seemingly for almost everything, when does rational thinking kick in? Balzac marked the moment in Modeste Mignon with the statement ”In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is simply seeing clearly.”43 When this may happen is under debate at the current time. When are we motivated to think rationally? Well, we are motivated when we want to find the optimal solution. But what is the optimal solution? Is it the actual truth, or is it one that verifies how you see the world, or one that maintains your status and reputation?

Let us say you want the accurate actual truth unaffected by any bias you have. This is easier when moral interpretations are not at stake. For example, ”I really want to know which medication is best for me, and I don't care how much it costs, where it came from, who makes it, how often I have to take it, or whether it is a pill, an injection, or a salve.” That is a much less threatening question than ”Is it OK to harvest organs from condemned felons?” The other condition is that we have enough time to think about it, so the automatic response doesn't kick in. On the spur of the moment, will you take one of the darling kittens being offered in front of the grocery store back to the apartment where you aren't allowed to have pets and your roommate is allergic to cat dander? Or do you go home and think about it? And of course, one has to have the cognitive ability to understand and use information that is pertinent.

Then again, even when we are trying to think rationally, we may not be. Research has shown that people will use the first argument that satisfies their opinion and then stop thinking. David Perkins, a Harvard psychologist, calls this the ”makes sense” rule.44 However, what people consider makes sense varies widely. It is the difference between anecdotal evidence (an isolated story that presumes a cause and effect) and factual evidence (a proven cause and effect.) For instance, a woman may believe birth control pills will make her sterile, because her aunt took birth control pills in the past, and now she can't get pregnant. Anecdotal evidence, one story, was all she needed to support her opinion, and it made sense. However, she does not consider the possibility that her aunt may have been unable to get pregnant before she started taking the birth control pills, nor the possibility her aunt could have been infected with s.e.xually transmitted bacteria, such as gonorrhea or chlamydia, that caused scarring in the Fallopian tubes-which in fact is the leading cause of infertility. She also does not know that using birth control pills will actually preserve her fertility better than nonhormonal methods (factual evidence). Predominantly, people use anecdotal evidence.45, 46 Try this example, one of many that Deanna Kuhn, a psychologist at Columbia University, used to investigate knowledge acquisition: Which statement is stronger?

A. Why do teenagers start smoking? Smith says it's because they see ads that make smoking look attractive. A good-looking guy in neat clothes with a cigarette in his mouth is someone you would like to be like.

B. Why do teenagers start smoking? Jones says it's because they see ads that make smoking look attractive. When cigarette ads were banned from TV, smoking went down.

In a large group of students ranging from eighth grade to graduate school, few understood the differences between the two types of argument these represented, although the graduate students did the best. The first is anecdotal, and the second is factual. The implications of this are that even if a person seeks to make a rational judgment, most people don't use information in an a.n.a.lytical manner.47 Looking at our evolutionary environment, Haidt points out that if our moral judgment machinery were designed to always be accurate, the results could be disastrous if you occasionally sided with the enemy, against your friends and family.1 He presents the social intuitionist model of moral reasoning. After the intuitive judgment and the post-hoc reasoning occur, Haidt suggests that there are four possible circ.u.mstances in which this intuitive judgment may be altered. The first two involve the social world either by reasoned (not necessarily rational) persuasion or by merely doing what everyone else is doing (again, not necessarily rational). He suggests rational reasoning has an opportunity to bloom when an issue gets discussed with another person.

Remember those social groups I talked about in the last chapter, in relation to gossip? And what does gossip accomplish? It helps set standards of moral behavior in a community. And what does everyone love to gossip about? Juicy tidbits, and the juiciest of all are moral violations. That will turn a desultory conversation into a hot one. It's much more interesting to learn that Sally is having an affair with a married man than to hear that she is having a party. You can feel righteous yourself, and agree with your friend that married men are off-limits, but what if you don't agree with your friend? What if you know that the man is married to a gold digger who married him for his money, they have no children, their house is now part.i.tioned in two-she is on one side having extravagant parties, and he is on the other spending his spare time managing the Web site for the local United Way-and they have no contact, except for her refusing to sign divorce papers? Can you two have a rational discussion of facts and leave with someone having changed his or her mind?

It depends on how strongly your emotions have kicked in on the case. We have already learned that people will tend to agree with people they like, so if the issue is neutral or of little consequence, or if an argument hasn't already arisen, then social persuasion can come into play. These persuasive arguments may or may not be rational, as we just learned. You will use anything you think will persuade the other to your viewpoint. If the two of you have really strong reactions, then don't waste your time. And of course, really strong reactions are what are at stake with moral issues. There is a reason for the adage of not talking about religion or politics over a meal. Strong emotions lead to arguments, which are disruptive to the taste buds and lead to indigestion.

As Robert Wright puts it in his book The Moral Animal, ”By the time the arguing starts, the work has already been done.” In steps the interpreter, and the bad news is, your interpreter is a lawyer. Wright describes the brain as a machine for winning arguments, not as a truth finder. ”The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue.”48 He points out that one would think that if we were rational creatures, then at some point, we should wonder at the probability of always being right. Come to think of it, if we were all rational creatures, wouldn't we all use pocket protectors?

Persuasion can come in the form of merely being in a group of people. How many times have you thought people act like sheep? For instance, my daughter related her experience at the San Diego train station the day before Thanksgiving. The train was late arriving, and when it was finally available for boarding, only one of the several doors to the platform was standing open. A long line of people formed at that door. She walked to one of the closed doors and pushed it open and stepped onto the train. Many studies have been done to ill.u.s.trate how people are influenced by those around them. The creators of the TV show Candid Camera did some of their most hilarious skits with this in mind.

Solomon Asch, a pioneer of social psychology, did a cla.s.sic experiment. He set up a room of eight subjects (seven of whom were ”plants”) and showed them a line. After concealing that line, he showed them another line that was obviously much longer. He asked each person in the room if one of the lines was longer than the other, but asked the real subject last. If the first seven people all said the lines were of equal length, the majority of test subjects agreed with them.49 Social pressure made a person say something that was obviously incorrect.

Stanley Milgram was a student of Asch. After receiving his doctorate in social psychology, he did some shock experiments that were truly shocking. No persuasion was involved here, just obedience. He told his subjects he was researching the effects of punishment on learning. However, what he was really researching was obedience to an authority figure. He measured the willingness of his subjects to obey an authority figure, the researcher, who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their consciences. He told his subjects they were randomly a.s.signed to play either a teacher or a student role. The subject, however, was always a.s.signed the teacher role. Milgram told the teacher to administer an electric shock to the student (who, unbeknownst to the teacher, was an actor playing the part) every time the student got an answer wrong on a word-matching memory task, and to increase the shock for each mistake. The actor was not actually shocked but pretended to be. The subject playing the teacher was told that real shocks were being given. The instrument panel on the shock machine read ”slight shock” on one side of a dial and ”severe shock” on the other, with numerical values from 0 to 30. Having previously asked people what they would do in such a circ.u.mstance, he expected most people would stop at a level of 9. However, he was quite wrong. The subjects continued shocking the student to an average intensity of 20 to 25, with or without prodding from the experimenter, even when the student was screaming or asking to leave. And 30 percent went to the highest-level shock even when the student was pretending to be listless or unconscious! If the teacher and student were in closer proximity, however, there was a 20 percent drop in obedience, suggesting that empathy encouraged disobedience.50, 51 This study has been replicated in many countries. Obedience to the instructions has been universal in several countries where the studies have been replicated, but among the countries, it varied from Germany, where 85 percent were willing to send the highest levels of shocks, to Australia, where it dropped to 40 percent. This is an interesting finding, considering that modern Australia was originally populated by prisoners, a rather disobedient gene pool! In the United States, 65 percent followed the instructions. That may be good news for traffic laws, but we know where blind obedience leads.

Haidt's third possible scenario in which rational judgment is most likely to be used is what he refers to as the reasoned judgment link. In this instance, a person logically reasons out a judgment and overrides his intuition. Haidt suggests that this happens only when the initial intuition is weak and the a.n.a.lytical capacity is high. Thus, if it is a low-profile case, in which there is no emotional investment or only a little, the lawyer might go on vacation. If you are lucky, a scientist*52 covers for him-but don't count on it. If it is a high-profile issue, and the intuition is strong, an a.n.a.lytical mind can force logic on its owner, but he may end up with a dual att.i.tude, with his intuition just below the surface. So just maybe, if it is a high-profile case, the scientist may sit in on the argument and later, while sipping a digestivo, nudge the lawyer to shut up already.

The fourth possible scenario is the private reflection link. Here, a person may have no intuition at all about an issue, or might be mulling over the situation, when suddenly a new intuition hits her that may override the initial one. This can happen by imagining yourself on the other side of the issue. Then you are presented with two competing intuitions. However, as Haidt points out, is this really rational thinking? Aren't you right smack back in Damasio's lap needing an emotional bias to help you pick between the two?

MORAL BEHAVIOR.

How much does all this matter? Does moral reasoning correlate with moral behavior? Do people who rationally evaluate moral behavior act in a more moral way? Apparently not exactly. There appear to be two variables that do correlate to moral behavior: intelligence and inhibition. Criminologists have found that criminal behavior is inversely related to intelligence, independent of race or social-economic cla.s.s.53 Augus...o...b..asi found that IQ was positively related to honesty.54 In this context, inhibition basically refers to self-control or the ability to override an objective that your emotional system wants. You may want to sleep in, but you will get up to go to work.

Researchers headed by Walter Mischel, a psychologist at Columbia University, have been doing a very interesting long-term study on inhibition. They began with a study of preschoolers, using a food reward. One by one, children were seated at a table and asked which was better, one marshmallow or two. We all know what they answered. On the table were a marshmallow and a bell. The researcher (let's call her Jeanne) told the child (Tom) that she had to leave the room for a few minutes, and when she returned, he could have two marshmallows. However, if Tom wanted her to come back early, then he could ring the bell, but if he did that, she would give him only one marshmallow. Ten years later, the researchers sent questionnaires to the parents about their then adolescent children, and found that those who delayed eating the marshmallow longer in preschool were rated as more likely to exhibit self-control in frustrating situations, less likely to yield to temptation, more intelligent, and less distractible when trying to concentrate, and they earned higher SAT scores.55 The team continues to follow these people today.

How does self-control work? How does one say no to a tempting stimulus? Why did some of those kids wait until the researcher returned while staring at the marshmallow? In the adult world, why are some people able to refuse the Death by Chocolate cake on the dessert tray, or drive at the speed limit while everyone is pa.s.sing them?

In order to explain how that aspect of willpower, ”the ability to inhibit an impulsive response that undoes one's commitment,” aka self-control, works, Walter Mischel and his colleague Janet Metcalfe proposed that there are two types of processing. One is ”hot” and the other is ”cool”; they involve neural systems that are distinct but still interact.56 The hot emotional system is specialized for quick emotional processing. It responds to a trigger and makes use of the amygdala-based memory. This is the ”go” system. The cool cognitive system is slower and is specialized for complex spatiotemporal and episodic representation and thought. The researchers call it the ”know” system. Its neuronal basis is in the hippocampus and the frontal lobes. Does this sound familiar? In their theory, they stress that the interaction of these two systems is of critical importance to self-regulation and to decision making in regard to self-control. The cool system develops later in life and becomes increasingly active. How the two systems interact depends on age, stress (under increasing stress, the hot system takes over), and temperament. Studies have shown that criminal behavior decreases with age,57 giving support to the idea that the cool system that increases self-control becomes more active with age.

MORALITY-FREE HUMANS: THE CASE OF THE PSYCHOPATH.

What about psychopaths? Are they different from most criminals or just way worse? Psychopaths appear different on neuroimaging studies.58 They have specific abnormalities that can be differentiated from simply antisocial individuals and normal individuals. This suggests that their amoral behavior is due to specific malformations of the cognitive structure of the brain. Psychopaths exhibit high intelligence and rational thinking. They are not delusional. They know the rules of society and of moral behavior, but a moral precept is just a rule to them.59 They don't understand that it is OK to suspend the societal rule ”Do not eat with your hands at the table,” but it is not OK to suspend the moral rule ”Do not spit in the face of the person next to you at the table.” They have a measurable decrease in ectodermal response to emotionally significant60 and empathetic stimuli61 compared with normal control subjects. They don't have the moral emotions of empathy, guilt, or shame. Although they do not show impulsive behavior in one sense, they do have a one-track mindedness that is not inhibited, which distinguishes them from normal individuals. It appears that they are born psychopaths.

PUTTING YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS.

It has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people. In fact, in most recent studies, none has been found,62, 63 except in one study done on young adults, in which there was a small correlation.64 As one might predict based on what we have learned so far, moral behavior, as evidenced by helping others, is more correlated with emotion and self-control. Interestingly, Sam and Pearl Oliner, professors at Humboldt State University and founding directors of the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Inst.i.tute, studied moral exemplars by looking at European rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.65 Whereas 37 percent were empathically motivated (suffering module), 52 percent were primarily motivated by ”expressing and strengthening their affiliations with their social groups” (coalition module), and only 11 percent were motivated by principled stands (rational thinking).

The Religion a.s.sumption.

Where does religion fit in with all of this? If we have these moral intuitions we are born with, what's up with religion? Good question. But you have made an a.s.sumption. Haven't you a.s.sumed that morals came from religion and that religion is about morals? Religions have been around since the very beginnings of human culture, but in fact, only sometimes do they have anything to do with morality and the salvation of a soul. You might say ”But my religion does, and it is true, and all the other ones are false.” Why are you so special? Every other religion thinks the same thing. Think about the coalition in-group intuitive bias. Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist who studies the transmission of cultural knowledge at Was.h.i.+ngton University in Saint Louis, points out that it is a common temptation to search for the origin of religion in general human urges, such as the desire to define a moral system or explain natural phenomena. He attributes this to people's incorrect a.s.sumptions about religion and psychological urges. With our current research techniques, we are able to do better than just throw ideas about religion out into the wind; we can prove or disprove many of them. He has come up with a list of commonly posited reasons for the origins of religion, and he suggests a different viewpoint.66 Do not say...

But say...

Religion answers people's metaphysical questions.

Religious thoughts are typically activated when people deal with concrete situations this crop, that disease, this new birth, this dead body, etc.).

Religion is about a transcendent G.o.d.

It is about a variety of agents: ghouls, ghosts, spirits, ancestors, G.o.ds, etc., in direct interaction with people.

Religion allays anxiety.