Read Online The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Bering - Free Book Online Page B

when they don’t adhere to basic social norms. For instance, breaches of linguistic rules—what language theorists call “conversational implicatures”—often encourage a frenzied search for the speaker’s intentions. If someone responds with “a whiskey sour, please” after being asked what the weather forecast is for tomorrow, most listeners will automatically think about the causes for this inappropriate—or at least unexpected—social response. Perhaps the person doesn’t speak English and didn’t understand the question; perhaps the person is mentally ill; or maybe he’s angry and is trying to frustrate the listener; perhaps the person is being sarcastic, playful, is hard of hearing—or maybe he’s just really thirsty. Although each of these explanations invokes different theories for the cause of the speaker’s strange response, they all share an appeal to his mental state. By contrast, it’s unlikely a similar search for meaning would occur if he had made an appropriate response, such as, “I think it’s supposed to rain.” Likewise, natural events that are expected or mundane are unlikely to be seen as signs or messages from God, because they fail to trigger our theory of mind. Most of the time, things unfold in a manner consistent with our expectations. It’s when they don’t that we become such willing slaves to illogical thinking.
     
     
    Without a general cognitive bias to see hidden messages as being embedded in natural events, much of religion as we know it would never have gotten off the ground. This is because such episodes are often taken as confirmation that there are communicative “others”—God, ancestors, whatever—capable of influencing our personal lives through causal interference with the natural world. This perceived feedback from the other side induces the powerful sense for us that we (and perhaps more importantly, our behavior) matter to something more than just the here and now. And without the belief that God cares enough about us as individuals to bother sending us a veiled, personalized “just thinking of you” message every once in a while, there’s not really much reason to pay attention to Him. 3
    If seeing signs in natural events hinges on the presence of a fully functioning theory of mind, then we might expect people with clinically impaired theory-of-mind abilities to be less susceptible to this type of thinking and so to manifest religion very differently from the rest of us. One such disorder is autism. Individuals along the autistic spectrum, including otherwise high-functioning people with Asperger’s syndrome who have very normal (or even high) general IQs, often have tremendous difficulty reasoning about other people’s psychological states, particularly the subtle, nuanced aspects of other minds, such as sarcasm, faux pas, and irony. University of Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen—who happens to be first cousin to the Borat (2006) and Brüno (2009) star—has referred to autistics as being “mindblind,” 4 although this characterization is probably a bit strong. A better way to conceptualize people with autism is to view them as having never developed a fully erect intentional stance. Their sensitivity to mental states is probably diluted rather than missing altogether.
    In recent years, Baron-Cohen and his colleagues have put forth the rather astonishing hypothesis that, although they tend to have profound difficulties in the social domain, people with autism may actually possess a superior understanding of folk physics when compared to the rest of us. “Folk physics,” according to Baron-Cohen, “is our everyday ability to understand and predict the behavior of inanimate objects in terms of principles relating to size, weight, motion, physical causality, etc.” 5 In short, autistics are preoccupied with the way things work in terms of how they work, not why. The parents of many autistic children, for instance, are often startled to