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. With Why do believers believe?
This is something I meant to bring up a while ago (but instead found myself dealing with hard drive failure etc.): A piece on Beliefnet by Michael Shermer on the subject of who believes in God and why. Really it’s about the “why” part, more than the who. The basic point of it is that believers tend to give one answer for why they believe, and a different kind of answer for why they figure other believers believe.
When speaking of themselves, the most popular answer believers gave was some varation on “The good design / natural beauty / perfection / complexity of the world or universe.”
When speaking of others, their top answer was something like: “Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life.”
Shermer suggests that the results are evidence of:
intellectual attribution bias, in which people consider their own beliefs as being rationally motivated, whereas they see the beliefs of others as being emotionally driven. By analogy, one’s commitment to a political belief is generally attributed to a rational decision (“I am for gun control because statistics show that crime decreases when gun ownership decreases”), whereas another person’s opinion on the same subject is attributed to need or emotional reasons (“he is for gun control because he is a bleeding-heart liberal”). This intellectual attribution bias appears to be equal opportunity on the subject of God. The apparent good design of the universe, and the perceived action of a higher intelligence in daily activities, are powerful intellectual justifications for belief. But we readily attribute other people’s belief in God to their emotional needs and how they were raised.
I guess I would have thought that — to take the gun control example — a person who holds that position not only sees his or her point of view as rational, but would see those who agree as being rational, and those who disagree as being half-cocked, emotion-driven thinkers. It seems surprising that someone who professes belief in God would be so cynical in evaluating the thought processes of others who believe the same thing.
On the other hand, this gap between how we think of our own decisions vs. how we think of other people’s is something that, obviously, I ponder all the time in writing about consumer behavior. And it’s actually not that unusual to hear people suggest that while they like the good design / natural beauty / perfection / complexity of [insert trendy brand/product here] — everybody else who is consuming that same thing is just following the trend or joining the herd or whatever. I suspect this is not just a matter of cynicism about other people’s decisions — although that may be part of it — but a form of self-flattery: The more everybody else’s decision process seems suspect, the more more mine seems pure and considered.
How’s that for cynical?
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There’s also the possibility that a person is unwilling or unable to acknowledge why he believes something — that to respond to the question “why do you believe in a higher power?” with “because doing so comforts me” feels embarassing or silly or stupid, or in some way not an appropriate grownup response.
Of course I don’t mean that such a response isn’t grownup or smart. Rather, one might not be confident in telling another person — particularly a person who is writing down the answer for some polling or scientific purpose — that he sometimes feels confused and overwhelmed by the world, and is comforted by the thought that some Higher Power is in charge.