Psychological Foundations of Religious Belief
UBC Professor Ara Norenzayan probes the psychological foundations of religious belief in his research. At issue, how and why people believe in the supernatural.
Sigmund Freud, possibly the world’s most famous psychologist, argued in his book Civilizations and Its Discontent that religious belief ought to be classified as a mass delusion.
While much of Freud’s writing has been left behind, his dismissal of religion persists in much of academia today. In what became known as the "secularization hypothesis," many academics believed that religious belief would die off as society became more advanced.
Professor Ara Norenzayan, a social psychologist at UBC, is out to show that religious belief still has a powerful effect on those who believe. Armed with $105,000 over three years from Canada’s granting body, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Norenzayan is using psychological experiments to show how and why people believe in the supernatural.
"The idea is that, with the growth of science and technology and affluent societies, religions have become less and less powerful," says Norenzayan, who came to UBC in 2002 from the University of Illinois.
"Many great thinkers in social sciences, from Hume to Freud, have speculated that, as people become more exposed to science and their lives get better economically, religion would become less of a grip on people’s minds. Except, it seems that all the evidence shows that that is not the case."
Indeed, with the religious overtones to violence in Iraq, Palestine and Israel, as well as countless other places, the grasp that religion wields on contemporary society is still very potent. But while religious belief can lead some to kill, Norenzayan believes religion can also motivate people to dedicate their lives to humanitarian causes.
"I am most interested in the question of why is it that some aspects of religiosity lead to hatred, violence, war, [while] other aspects of equally strong religiosity may lead to peaceful, tolerant kinds of attitudes towards the world."
He cites a recent study by Jeremy Ginges — a researcher at his alma mater, the University of Michigan — that looked at support for suicide bombers in the Palestinian Territories. What the study found was that support for bombings was related to the frequency with which a person attended mosque, but unrelated to how often a person prayed at home.
"It goes to show, in a very important social issue like this, that these kinds of questions are very important to learn about," he says. "It’s the communal aspect of religion which seems to be much more the issue and not the devotional side."
Norenzayan’s research has already looked at this issue. One particular study, conducted with graduate student Ian Hansen in Canada and Malaysia using Buddhist, Christian and Muslim university students, studied at different forms of religiosity. He found two distinct types: devotion, or faith, and religious exclusivity, or how much people privileged their own religion over others. He found that devotion promoted tolerance, whereas exclusivity, not surprisingly, led to intolerance.
He mentions a quote by prominent British biologist Richard Dawkins who once argued that, along with the atomic bomb, the belief in God was one of the greatest dangers to world peace.
"What I would say to Dawkins is, it’s not the belief in God that seems to be the culprit — it’s something else. It’s the social cohesion aspect of religion that gets entangled in real life with the belief in God, but that belief — in and of itself — does not seem to be the origin of the connection between religion and intolerance."
Another study that Norenzayan conducted asked: what psychological factors motivate the belief in supernatural agents? He set out to prove that, at a fundamental level, religious belief was tied to a fear of death.
"In a series of studies," he says, "we found reliable evidence that the more you remind people of death, the more likely they would be to say they believe in God, the more likely they are to say that they’re religious."
More striking was Norenzayan’s findings in regards to people’s openness to belief systems from other religions. While he concedes that atheists remained unfazed, Christians, for example, were more willing to believe in Buddha and ancestor spirits.
"The reason this is very striking is that this shows that the connection between thoughts of death and belief in a supernatural world is not simply identification with your own culture," he says. "There seems to be an openness to the supernatural that is triggered by the thoughts of death… In a strange way, it is an interesting and hopeful finding that people could become temporarily open-minded about other worldviews."
Norenzayan has several more years of research planned for this topic. His next goal is to study religious fundamentalism, for which he plans on traveling to parts of the world where radical religious movements are thriving.
He says a big factor in his move to UBC was the University’s position as a leader in the growing field of cultural psychology. "My interests are in understanding how is it that individual psychology relates to the larger collective processes in which people live," he says.
"For a long time psychologists weren’t involved in understanding or studying culture or cultural differences, assuming that psychological processes are universal anyway. Now there is a growing movement in psychology to acknowledge and examine these issues and UBC is one of the centres of this field."
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