[BRIEF NOTE] On religion and community

[rfmcdonald]

I'd like to thank an anonymous LJ friend for linking to this study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December 2009, "Believers’ estimates of God’s beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people’s beliefs" by Epley, Converse et al. I'll quote their abstract below.

People often reason egocentrically about others’ beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about a religious agent’s beliefs (e.g., God). In both nationally representative and more local samples, people’s own beliefs on important social and ethical issues were consistently correlated more strongly with estimates of God’s beliefs than with estimates of other people’s beliefs (Studies 1–4). Manipulating people’s beliefs similarly influenced estimates of God’s beliefs but did not as consistently influence estimates of other people’s beliefs (Studies 5 and 6). A final neuroimaging study demonstrated a clear convergence in neural activity when reasoning about one’s own beliefs and God’s beliefs, but clear divergences when reasoning about another person’s beliefs (Study 7). In particular, reasoning about God’s beliefs activated areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person’s beliefs. Believers commonly use inferences about God’s beliefs as a moral compass, but that compass appears especially dependent on one’s own existing beliefs.

And now, their conclusion.

We believe these findings provide important insights into the origins and variability of religious beliefs and have interesting implications for their impact on everyday judgment, decisionmaking, and behavior. First, these data join a growing body of literature demonstrating that religious beliefs are guided by the same basic or natural mechanisms that guide social cognition more generally (4, 10, 25, 26). Religious beliefs need not be explained by any unique psychological mechanisms, but instead are likely to be the natural outcome of existing mechanisms that enable people to reason about other social agents more generally. Insights into the basic mechanisms that guide social cognition are therefore likely to be of considerable value for understanding religious experience and belief.

Second, these data provide insight into the sources of people’s own religious beliefs. Although people obviously acquire religious beliefs from a variety of external sources, from parents to broader cultural influences, these data suggest that the self may serve as an important source of religious beliefs as well. Not only are believers likely to acquire the beliefs and theology of others around them, but may also seek out believers and theologies that share their own personal beliefs. If people seek out religious communities that match their own personal views on major social, moral, or political issues, then the information coming from religious sources is likely to further validate and strengthen their own personal convictions and values. Religious belief has generally been treated as a process of socialization whereby people’s personal beliefs about God come to reflect what they learn from those around them, but these data suggest that the inverse causal process may be important as well: people’s personal beliefs may guide their own religious beliefs and the religious communities they seek to be part of.

Finally, these data have interesting implications for the impact of religious thought on judgment and decision-making. People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want. The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God’s beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing.

I find this fascinating research, since it pegs not only with my personal experiences and the experiences of my friends but with what I know about the sociology of religion. Religion, even so-called universal religions, are very frequently often intimately associated with ethnicity and nationality, ethnic religions in fact if not in name. It's not just a factor present among ethnoreligious minorities like Jews and the Amish--just think of Roman Catholicism's association with French Canada and Poland, say, or Orthodox Christianity with Russia, or Shinto with Japan, or Shi'ite Islam with Iran, or the religious differences between immigrants and natives in many societies. Many members of these communities stop practising their religions entirely or mostly, instead using it as a marker of group identity. Wide-spread conversions from one faith to another are actually pretty rare, precipitated often by state action (think of the emergence of Anglicanism) or by some systematic failure of the old religion or particular attractiveness of the new religion (the appeal of Islam to lower-caste Hindus in South Asia, say). If a common religion helps define a community of identity, why wouldn't said religion reflect other shared elements of identity, whether political or sociological?