Interesting essay in New Scientist about how humans appear to be predisposed to belief in spiritual patterns (like, but not limited to religion).
I think this has some implications for how economists should think about how people feel about recessions.
Back to religion for a moment.
- … Some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking.
First, we are able to split our worldview along these lines:
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… Our brains have separate cognitive systems for dealing with living things - things with minds, or at least volition - and inanimate objects.
... Objects ought to obey the laws of physics and move in a predictable way. People, on the other hand, have their own intentions and goals, and move however they choose.
… Calls this innate assumption that mind and matter are distinct "common-sense dualism". The body is for physical processes, like eating and moving, while the mind carries our consciousness in a separate - and separable - package. …
There is plenty of evidence that thinking about disembodied minds comes naturally. People readily form relationships with non-existent others: roughly half of all 4-year-olds have had an imaginary friend, and adults often form and maintain relationships with dead relatives, fictional characters and fantasy partners. As Barrett points out, this is an evolutionarily useful skill. Without it we would be unable to maintain large social hierarchies and alliances or anticipate what an unseen enemy might be planning. "Requiring a body around to think about its mind would be a great liability," he says.
Second, we see patterns where they don’t exist:
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The ability to conceive of gods, however, is not sufficient to give rise to religion. The mind has another essential attribute: an overdeveloped sense of cause and effect which primes us to see purpose and design everywhere, even where there is none.
…Experiments on young children reveal this default state of the mind.
These features lead to something broader than religion:
- … Even adults who describe themselves as atheists and agnostics are prone to supernatural thinking. Bering has seen this too. When one of his students carried out interviews with atheists, it became clear that they often tacitly attribute purpose to significant or traumatic moments in their lives, as if some agency were intervening to make it happen.
We also suffer for our brainpower:
- The problem is something he calls "the tragedy of cognition". Humans can anticipate future events, remember the past and conceive of how things could go wrong …
Now catch this result:
[Whitson and Galinsky] asked people what patterns they could see in arrangements of dots or stock market information. Before asking [they] made half their participants feel a lack of control …
… The subjects who sensed a loss of control were much more likely to see patterns where there were none. … "We were surprised that the phenomenon is as widespread as it is," Whitson says. What's going on, she suggests, is that when we feel a lack of control we fall back on superstitious ways of thinking.
To summarize:
- Objects are predictable, thinkers are not.
- We see more patterns than are really there.
- We’re biased towards seeing more patterns when we feel like we have less control.
Now let’s apply this to the macroeconomy.
- What’s predictable about the macroeconomy is growth. What isn’t predictable are deviations from growth that we call recessions (there is a large literature in macroeconomics that recessions are very difficult to predict).
- There are correlation patterns for recessions, but macroeconomists know that these are considerably less striking than the public believes. A good catch phrase to identify the macroeconomist in the wild is “this recession isn’t like the last one”.
- Consider our current recession, where arguably people feel less in control than for at least a generation: it’s watercooler sport to try and figure out what went wrong, but 2 years ago no one was trying to figure out was going right. The psychologists are telling us this is normal.
Tie all this together, and I see a “spiritual belief” in the cause of recessions. Many people seem to believe that some other, acting with volition, did this to them.
I’m not envisioning a religious explanation, but an argument that runs parallel to religious belief. For many people, there is no more reality to belief in God than there is to investment bankers, real estate developers, Republican lobbyists, big oil, world government conspirators, deficit spenders, insurance companies, the CIA, Arabs, speculators, the Chinese, and so on.
It’s an insult to believers in God to lump all these together.
But, having said that, is the level and depth of belief of people who think someone else caused the recession on purpose any less?
I don’t think so.
Is it any wonder then, that if when religion was stronger we used to burn heretics, that today we have the collective urge to punish just about everyone who might be macroeconomically guilty?
Perhaps we ought to ask people who used to work for Arthur Anderson how they feel about the direction we’re going.
