Why People Believe Weird Things: Excerpt - Michael Shermer

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Why People Believe Weird Things: Excerpt

Preface to the Second Edition: Why Smart People Believe Weird Things

Through my work as the Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic magazine, the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and as the Skeptic columnist for Scientific American,the analysis and explanation of what we loosely refer to as “weird things” is a daily routine. Unfortunately, there is no formal definition of a weird thing that most people can agree upon, because it depends so much on the particular claim being made in the context of the knowledge base that surrounds it and the individual or community proclaiming it. One person’s weird belief might be another’s normal theory, and a weird belief at one time might subsequently become normal. Stones falling from the sky were once the belief of a few daffy Englishmen; today we have an accepted theory of meteorites. In the jargon of science philosopher Thomas Kuhn, revolutionary ideas that are initially anathema to the accepted paradigm, in time may become normal science as the field undergoes a paradigm shift.12

Still, we can formulate a general outline of what might constitute a weird thing as we consider specific examples. For the most part, what I mean by a “weird thing” is:

1. a claim unaccepted by most people in that particular field of study,
2. a claim that is either logically impossible or highly unlikely, and/or
3. a claim for which the evidence is largely anecdotal and uncorroborated.

In my introductory example, most theologians recognize that God’s existence cannot be proven in any scientific sense, and thus Dembski’s and Tipler’s goal of using science to prove God is not only unacceptable to most members of his knowledge community, it is uncorroborated because it is logically impossible. Cold fusion, to pick another example, is unaccepted by almost all physicists and chemists, is highly unlikely, and positive results have not been corroborated. Yet there are a handful of smart people (Arthur C. Clarke is the most notable) who hold out hope for cold fusion’s future.

“Smart people” suffers from a similar problem in operational definition, but at least here our task is aided by achievement criteria that most would agree, and the research shows, requires a minimum level of intelligence. Graduate degrees (especially the Ph.D.), university positions (especially at recognized and reputable institutions), peer-reviewed publications, and the like, allow us to concur that, while we might quibble over how smart some of these people are, the problem of smart people believing weird things is a genuine one that is quantifiable through measurable data. Additionally, there is a subjective evaluation that comes from the experiences I have had in dealing directly with so many people whose claims I have evaluated. While I have not had the opportunity to administer intelligence tests to my various subjects, through numerous television and radio appearances and personal interviews I have conducted with such claimants, and especially through the lecture series that I organize and host at the California Institute of Technology, I have had the good fortune to meet a lot of really smart people, some out and out brilliant scholars and scientists, and even a handful of geniuses so far off the scale that they strike me as wholly Other. All of these factors combined affords me a reasonable assessment of my subjects’ intelligence.

An Easy Answer to a Hard Question

“The gentleman has eaten no small quantity of flapdoodle in his lifetime.” “What’s that, O’Brien?” replied I … “Why, Peter,” rejoined he, “it’s the stuff they feed fools on.”

— P. Simple, Marryat, 1833

It is a given assumption in the skeptical movement — elevated to a maxim really — that intelligence and education serve as an impenetrable prophylactic against the flim flam that we assume the unintelligent and uneducated masses swallow with credulity. Indeed, at the Skeptics Society we invest considerable resources in educational materials distributed to schools and the media under the assumption that this will make a difference in our struggle against pseudoscience and superstition. These efforts do make a difference, particularly for those who are aware of the phenomena we study but have not heard a scientific explanation for them, but are the cognitive elite protected against the nonsense that passes for sense in our culture? Is flapdoodle the fodder for only fools? The answer is no. The question is why?

For those of us in the business of debunking bunk and explaining the unexplained, this is what I call the Hard Question: why do smart people believe weird things? My Easy Answer will seem somewhat paradoxical at first: Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

That is to say, most of us most of the time come to our beliefs for a variety of reasons having little to do with empirical evidence and logical reasoning (that, presumably, smart people are better at employing). Rather, such variables as genetic predispositions, parental predilections, sibling influences, peer pressures, educational experiences, and life impressions all shape the personality preferences and emotional inclinations that, in conjunction with numerous social and cultural influences, lead us to make certain belief choices. Rarely do any of us sit down before a table of facts, weigh them pro and con, and choose the most logical and rational belief, regardless of what we previously believed. Instead, the facts of the world come to us through the colored filters of the theories, hypotheses, hunches, biases, and prejudices we have accumulated through our lifetime. We then sort through the body of data and select those most confirming what we already believe, and ignore or rationalize away those that are disconfirming.

All of us do this, of course, but smart people are better at it through both talent and training. Some beliefs really are more logical, rational, and supported by the evidence than others, of course, but it is not my purpose here to judge the validity of beliefs; rather, I am interested in the question of how we came to them in the first place, and how we hold on to them in the face of either no evidence or contradictory evidence.

The Psychology of Belief

There are a number of principles of the psychology of belief that go to the heart of fleshing out my Easy Answer to the Hard Question.

1. Intelligence and Belief

Although there is some evidence that intelligent people are slightly less likely to believe in some superstitions and paranormal beliefs, overall conclusions are equivocal and limited. A study conducted in 1974 with Georgia high-school seniors, for example, found that those who scored higher on an I.Q. test were significantly less superstitious than students with lower I.Q. scores.13 A 1980 study by psychologists James Alcock and L. P. Otis found that belief in various paranormal phenomena was correlated with lower critical thinking skills.14 In 1989, W. S. Messer and R. A. Griggs found that belief in such psi phenomena as out-of-body experiences, ESP, and precognition was negatively correlated with classroom performance as measured by grades (as belief goes up, grades go down).15

But it should be noted that these three studies are using three different measures: I.Q., critical thinking skills, and educational performance. These may not always be indicative of someone being “smart.” And what we mean by “weird things” here is not strictly limited to superstition and the paranormal. For example, cold fusion, creationism, and Holocaust revisionism could not reasonably be classified as superstitions or paranormal phenomena. In his review of the literature in one of the best books on this subject (Believing in Magic), psychologist Stuart Vyse concludes that while the relationship between intelligence and belief holds for some populations, it can be just the opposite in others. He notes that the New Age movement in particular “has led to the increased popularity of these ideas among groups previously thought to be immune to superstition: those with higher intelligence, higher socioeconomic status, and higher educational levels. As a result, the time-honored view of believers as less intelligent than nonbelievers may only hold for certain ideas or particular social groups.”16

For the most part intelligence is orthogonal to and independent of belief. In geometry, orthogonal means “at right angles to something else”; in psychology orthogonal means “statistically independent. Of an experimental design: such that the variates under investigation can be treated as statistically independent,” for example, “the concept that creativity and intelligence are relatively orthogonal (i.e., unrelated statistically) at high levels of intelligence.”17 Intuitively it seems like the more intelligent people are the more creative they will be. In fact, in almost any profession significantly affected by intelligence (e.g., science, medicine, the creative arts), once you are at a certain level among the population of practitioners (and that level appears to be an I.Q. score of about 125), there is no difference in intelligence between the most successful and the average in that profession. At that point other variables, independent of intelligence, take over, such as creativity, or achievement motivation and the drive to succeed.18

Cognitive psychologist Dean Keith Simonton’s research on genius, creativity, and leadership, for example, has revealed that the raw intelligence of creative geniuses and leaders is not as important as their ability to generate a lot of ideas and select from them those that are most likely to succeed. Simonton argues that creative genius is best understood as a Darwinian process of variation and selection. Creative geniuses generate a massive variety of ideas from which they select only those most likely to survive and reproduce. As the two-time Nobel laureate and scientific genius Linus Pauling observed, one must “have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones … You aren’t going to have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas and and some sort of principle of selection.” Like Forest Gump, genius is as genius does, says Simonton: “these are individuals credited with creative ideas or products that have left a large impression on a particular domain of intellectual or aesthetic activity. In other words, the creative genius attains eminence by leaving for posterity an impressive body of contributions that are both original and adaptive. In fact, empirical studies have repeatedly shown that the single most powerful predictor of eminence within any creative domain is the sheer number of influential products an individual has given the world.” In science, for example, the number one predictor of receiving the Nobel Prize is the rate of journal citation, a measure, in part, of one’s productivity. As well, Simonton notes, Shakespeare is a literary genius not just because he was good, but because “probably only the Bible is more likely to be found in English-speaking homes than is a volume containing the complete works of Shakespeare.” In music, Simonton notes that “Mozart is considered a greater musical genius than Tartini in part because the former accounts for 30 times as much music in the classical repertoire as does the latter. Indeed, almost a fifth of all classical music performed in modern times was written by just three composers: Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.”19 In other words, it is not so much that these creative geniuses were smart, but that they were productive and selective.

So intelligence is also orthogonal to the variables that go into shaping someone’s beliefs. Think of this relationship visually as follows:

Magic is a useful analogue for this relationship. Folk wisdom has it that smart people are harder for magicians to fool because they are cleverer at figuring out how the tricks are done. But ask any magician (I have asked lots) and they will tell you that there is no better audience than a room full of scientists, academics, or, best of all, members of the high I.Q. club Mensa. Members of such cohorts, by virtue of their intelligence and education, think they will be better at discerning the secrets of the magician, but since they aren’t they are easier to fool because in watching the tricks so intensely they more easily fall for the misdirection cues. The magician James “the Amazing” Randi, one of the smartest people I know, gleefully deceives Nobel laureates with the simplest of magic, knowing that intelligence is unrelated (or perhaps in this case slightly inversely correlated) to the ability to discern the real magic behind the tricks. Tellingly, over the years I have given a number of lectures to Mensa groups around the country and have been struck by the number of weird beliefs such exceptionally smart people hold, including and especially ESP. At one conference there was much discussion about whether Mensa members also had higher Psi.Q.s (Psychic Quotient) than regular people!

Another problem is that smart people might be smart in only one field. We say that their intelligence is domain specific. In the field of intelligence studies there is a long-standing debate about whether the brain is “domain general” or “domain specific.” Evolutionary psychologists John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and Steve Pinker, for example, reject the idea of a domain-general processor, focusing on brain modules that evolved to solve specific problems in our evolutionary history. On the other hand, many psychologists accept the notion of a global intelligence that could be considered domain general.20 Archaeologist Steven Mithen goes so far as to say that it was a domain-general processor that made us human: “The critical step in the evolution of the modern mind was the switch from a mind designed like a Swiss army knife to one with cognitive fluidity, from a specialized to a generalized type of mentality. This enabled people to design complex tools, to create art and believe in religious ideologies. Moreover, the potential for other types of thought which are critical to the modern world can be laid at the door of cognitive fluidity.”21 It seems reasonable to argue that the brain consists of both domain specific and domain general modules. David Noelle, of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at the Carnegie Mellon University, informs me that “modern neuroscience has made it clear that the adult brain does contain functionally distinct circuits. As our understanding of the brain advances, however, we find that these circuits rarely map directly onto complex domains of human experience, such as ‘religion’ or ‘belief.’ Instead, we find circuits for more basic things, such as recognizing our location in space, predicting when something good is going to happen (e.g., when we will be rewarded), remembering events from our own lives, and keeping focused on our current goal. Complex aspects of behavior, like religious practices, arise from the interaction of these systems — not from any one module.22

What happens when smart people may be smart in one field (domain specificity) but are not smart in an entirely different field, out of which may arise weird beliefs. When Harvard marine biologist Barry Fell jumped fields into archaeology and wrote a best-selling book about all the people who discovered American before Columbus (America B.C.), he was woefully unprepared and obviously unaware that archaeologists had already considered his different hypotheses of who first discovered America (Egyptians, Greeks, Roman, Phoenicians, etc.) but rejected them for lack of credible evidence. This is a splendid example of the social aspects of science, and why being smart in one field does not make one smart in another. Science is a social process, where one is trained in a certain paradigm and works with others in the field. A community of scientists read the same journals, go to the same conferences, review each others papers and books, and generally exchange ideas about the facts, hypotheses, and theories in that field. Through vast experience they know, fairly quickly, which new ideas stand a chance of succeeding and which are obviously wrong. Newcomers from other fields, who typically dive in with both feet without the requisite training and experience, and proceed to generate new ideas that they think — because of their success in their own field — will be revolutionary. Instead, they are usually greeted with disdain (or, more typically, simply ignored) by the professionals in the field. This is not because (as they usually think is the reason) insiders don’t like outsiders (or that all great revolutionaries are persecuted or ignored), but because in most cases those ideas were considered years or decades before and rejected for perfectly legitimate reasons.

2. Gender and Belief

In many ways the orthogonal relationship of intelligence and beliefs is not unlike that of gender and beliefs. With the surge of popularity of psychic mediums like John Edward, James Van Praagh, and Sylvia Browne, it has become obvious to observers, particularly among journalists assigned to cover them, that at any given group gathering (usually at large hotel conference rooms holding several hundred people, each of whom paid several hundred dollars to be there), that the vast majority (at least seventy-five percent) are women. Understandably, journalists inquire whether women, therefore, are more superstitious or less rational than men, who typically disdain such mediums and scoff at the notion of talking to the dead. Indeed, a number of studies have found that women hold more superstitious beliefs and accept more paranormal phenomena as real than men. In one study of 132 men and women in New York City, for example, scientists found that more women than men believed that knocking on wood or walking under a ladder brought bad luck.23 Another study showed that more college women than men professed belief in precognition.24

Although the general conclusion from such studies seems compelling, it is wrong. The problem here is with limited sampling. If you attend any meeting of creationists, Holocaust “revisionists,” or UFOlogists, for instance, you will find almost no women at all (the few that I see at such conferences are the spouses of attending members and, for the most part, they look bored out of their skulls). For a variety of reasons related to the subject matter and style of reasoning, creationism, revisionism, and UFOlogy are guy beliefs. So, while gender is related to the target of one’s beliefs, it appears to be unrelated to the process of believing. In fact, in the same study that found more women than men believed in precognition, it turns out that more men than women believe in Big Foot and the Loch Ness monster.25 Seeing into the future is a woman’s thing, tracking down chimerical monsters is a man’s thing. There are no differences between men and women in the power of belief, only in what they choose to believe.

3. Age and Belief

The relationship between age and belief is also mixed. Some studies show that older people are more skeptical than younger people, such as a 1990 Gallup poll indicating that people under thirty were more superstitious than older age groups.26 Another study showed that younger police officers were more likely to believe in the full-moon effect (where allegedly crime rates are higher during full moons) than older police officers. Other studies are less clear about the relationship. British folklorist Gillian Bennett discovered that older retired English women were more likely to believe in premonition than younger women.27 Psychologist Seymour Epstein surveyed three different age groups (9–12, 18–22, 27–65) and discovered that the percentage of belief in each age division depended on the specific phenomena under question. For telepathy and precognition there were no age group differences. For good luck charms more older adults said they had one than did college students or children. The belief that wishing something to happen will make it so decreased steadily with age.28 Finally, Frank Sulloway and I found that religiosity and belief in God steadily decreased with age, until about age seventy-five, when it went back up.29

These mixed results are due to what is known as person-by-situation effects, where a simple linear causal relationship between two variables rarely exists. Instead, to the question “does X cause Y?” the answer is often “it depends.” Bennett, for example, concluded that the older women in her study had lost power, status, and especially loved ones for which belief in the supernatural helped them recover. Sulloway and I concluded in our study that age and religiosity varies according to one’s situation in relation to both early powerful influences and the later perceived impending end of life.

4. Education and Belief

Studies on the relationship between education and belief are, like intelligence, gender, and age, mixed. Psychologist Chris Brand, for example, discovered a powerful inverse correlation of -.50 between I.Q. and authoritarianism (as I.Q. increases authoritarianism decreases). Brand concluded that authoritarians are characterized not by an affection for authority, but by “some simple-minded way in which the world has been divided up for them.” In this case, authoritarianism was being expressed through prejudice by dividing the world up by race, gender, and age. Brand attributes the correlation to “crystallized intelligence,” a relatively flexible form of intelligence shaped by education and life experience. But Brand is quick to point out that only when this type of intelligence is modified by a liberal education does one see a sharp decrease in authoritarianism. In other words, it is not so much that smart people are less prejudice and authoritarian, but that educated people are less so.30

Psychologists S.H. and L.H. Blum found a negative correlation between education and superstition (as education increased superstitious beliefs decreased).31 Laura Otis and James Alcock showed that college professors are more skeptical than either college students or the general public (with the latter two groups showing no difference in belief), but that within college professors there was variation in the types of beliefs held, with English professors more likely to believe in ghosts, ESP, and fortunetelling.32 Another study found, not surprisingly, that natural and social scientists were more skeptical than their colleagues in the arts and humanities; most appropriately, in this context, psychologists were the most skeptical of all (perhaps because they best understand the psychology of belief and how easy it is to be fooled).33

Finally, Richard Walker, Steven Hoekstra, and Rodney Vogl discovered that there was no relationship between science education and belief in the paranormal among three groups of science students at three different colleges. That is, “having a strong scientific knowledge base is not enough to insulate a person against irrational beliefs. Students that scored well on these tests were no more or less skeptical of pseudoscientific claims than students that scored very poorly. Apparently, the students were not able to apply their scientific knowledge to evaluate these pseudoscientific claims.We suggest that this inability stems in part from the way that science is traditionally presented to students: Students are taught what to think but not how to think.”34

Whether teaching students how to think will attenuate belief in the paranormal remains to be seen. Supposedly this is what the critical thinking movement has been emphasizing for three decades now, yet polls show that paranormal beliefs continue to rise. A June 8, 2001 Gallup Poll, for example, reported a significant increase in belief in a number of paranormal phenomena since 1990, including haunted houses, ghosts, witches, communicating with the dead, psychic or spiritual healing, that extraterrestrial beings have visited earth, and clairvoyance. In support of my claim that the effects of gender, age, and education show content dependent effects, the Gallup poll found:

• Gender: Women are slightly more likely than men to believe in ghosts and that people can communicate with the dead. Men, on the other hand, are more likely than women to believe in only one of the dimensions tested: that extraterrestrials have visited earth at some point in the past.
• Age: Younger Americans — those 18–29 — are much more likely than those who are older to believe in haunted houses, in witches, in ghosts, that extraterrestrials have visited earth, and in clairvoyance. There is little significant difference in belief in the other items by age group. Those 30 and older are somewhat more likely to believe in possession by the devil than are the younger group.
• Education: Americans with the highest levels of education are more likely than others to believe in the power of the mind to heal the body. On the other hand, belief in three of the phenomena tested goes up as the educational level of the respondent goes down: possession by the devil, astrology and haunted houses. Additional results from the survey included:

phenomenon	believe	not sure	don’t believe
ESP:	50%	20%	27%
Haunted Houses:	42%	16%	41%
Possession by the devil:	41%	16%	41%
Ghosts and spirits:	38%	17%	44%
Telepathy:	36%	26%	35%
Extraterrestrial contact:	33%	27%	38%
Clairvoyance:	32%	23%	45%
Talking to the dead:	28%	26%	46%
Astrology:	28%	18%	52%
Witches:	26%	15%	59%
Reincarnation:	25%	20%	54%
Channeling:	15%	21%	62% 35

An even more striking poll result was reported by Gallup on March 5, 2001, about the surprising lack of belief in and understanding of the theory of evolution. Specifically, of those Americans polled:

• 45% agreed with the statement: “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”
• 37% agreed with the statement: “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.”
• 12% agreed with the statement: “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.”

Despite enormous funds and efforts allocated toward the teaching of evolution in public schools, and the proliferation of documentaries, books, and magazines presenting the theory on all levels, Americans have not noticeably changed their opinion on this question since Gallup started asking it in 1982. Gallup did find that individuals with more education and people with higher incomes are more likely to think that evidence supports the theory of evolution, and that younger people are also more likely than older people to think that evidence supports Darwin’s theory (again confounding the age variable). Nevertheless, only 34 percent of Americans consider themselves to be “very informed” about the theory of evolution, while a slightly greater percentage — 40 percent — consider themselves to be “very informed” about the theory of creation. Younger people, people with more education, and people with higher incomes are more likely to say they are very informed about both theories.36

5. Personality and Belief

Clearly human thought and behavior is complex and thus studies such as those reported above rarely show simple and consistent findings. Studies on the causes and effects of mystical experiences, for example, show mixed findings. The religious scholar Andrew Greeley, and others, have found a slight but significant tendency for mystical experiences to increase with age, education, and income, but there were no gender differences.37 J.S. Levin, by contrast, in analyzing the 1988 General Social Survey data, found no significant age trends in mystical experiences.38

But within any group, as defined by intelligence, gender, age, or education, are there any personality characteristics related to belief or disbelief in weird things? First, we note that personality is best characterized by traits, or relatively stable dispositions. The assumption is that these traits, in being “relatively stable,” are not provisional states, or conditions of the environment, the altering of which changes the personality. Today’s most popular trait theory is what is known as the Five Factor model, or the “Big Five”:

1. Conscientiousness (competence, order, dutifulness),
2. Agreeableness (trust, altruism, modesty),
3. Openness to Experience (fantasy, feelings, values),
4. Extroversion (gregariousness, assertiveness, excitement seeking), and
5. Neuroticism (anxiety, anger, depression).

In the study on religiosity and belief in God conducted by Frank Sulloway and I, we found openness to experience to be the most significant predictor, with higher levels of openness related to lower levels of religiosity and belief in God.39 In studies of individual scientist’s personalities and their receptivity to fringe ideas like the paranormal, I found that a healthy balance between high conscientiousness and high openness to experience led to a moderate amount of skepticism. This was most clearly expressed in the careers of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and astronomer Carl Sagan.40 They were nearly off the scale in both conscientiousness and openness to experience, giving them that balance between being open-minded enough to accept the occasional extraordinary claim that turns out to be right, but not so open that one blindly accepts every crazy claim that anyone makes. Sagan, for example, was open to the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence which, at the time, was considered a moderately heretical idea; but he was too conscientious to accept the even more controversial claim that UFOs and aliens have actually landed on earth.41

The psychologist David Wulff, in a general survey of the literature on the psychology of mystical experiences (a subset of weird things), concluded that there were some consistent personality differences:

Persons who tend to score high on mysticism scales tend also to score high on such variables as complexity, openness to new experience, breadth of interests, innovation, tolerance of ambiguity, and creative personality. Furthermore, they are likely to score high on measures of hypnotizability, absorption, and fantasy proneness, suggesting a capacity to suspend the judging process that distinguishes imaginings and real events and to commit their mental resources to representing the imaginal object as vividly as possible. Individuals high on hypnotic susceptibility are also more likely to report having undergone religious conversion, which for them is primarily an experiential rather than a cognitive phenomenon — that is, one marked by notable alterations in perceptual, affective, and ideomotor response patterns.43

6. Locus of Control and Belief

One of the most interesting areas of research on the psychology of belief is in the area of what psychologists call locus of control. People who measure high on external locus of control tend to believe that circumstances are beyond their control and that things just happen to them. People who measure high on internal locus of control tend to believe they are in control of their circumstances and that they make things happen.43 External locus of control leads to greater anxiety about the world, whereas internal locus of control leads one to be more confident in one’s judgment, skeptical of authority, and less compliant and conforming to external influences. In relation to beliefs, studies show that skeptics are high in internal locus of control whereas believers are high in external locus of control.44 A 1983 study by Jerome Tobacyk and Gary Milford of introductory psychology students at Louisiana Tech University, for example, found that those who scored high in external locus of control tended to believe in ESP, witchcraft, spiritualism, reincarnation, precognition, and were more superstitious than those students who scored high in internal locus of control.45

An interesting twist to this effect, however, was found by James McGarry and Benjamin Newberry in a 1977 study of strong believers in and practitioners of ESP and psychic power. Surprisingly, this group scored high in internal locus of control. The authors offered this explanation: “These beliefs [in ESP] may render such a person’s problems less difficult and more solvable, lessen the probability of unpredictable occurrences, and offer hope that political and governmental decisions can be influenced.”46 In other words, a deep commitment to belief in ESP, which usually entails believing that one has it, changes the focus from external to internal locus of control.

The effect of locus of control on belief is also mitigated by the environment, where there is a relationship between the uncertainty of an environment and the level of superstitious belief (as uncertainty goes up so too does superstitions). The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, for example, discovered that among the Trobriand Islanders (off the coast of New Guinea), the further out to sea they went to fish the more they developed superstitious rituals. In the calm waters of the inner lagoon, there were very few rituals. By the time they reached the dangerous waters of deep sea fishing, the Trobrianders were also deep into magic. Malinowski concluded that magical thinking derived from environmental conditions, not inherent stupidities: “We find magic wherever the elements of chance and accident, and the emotional play between hope and fear have a wide and extensive range. We do not find magic wherever the pursuit is certain, reliable, and well under the control of rational methods and technological processes. Further, we find magic where the element of danger is conspicuous.”47 Think of the superstitions of baseball players. Hitting a baseball is exceedingly difficult, with the best succeeding barely more than three out of every ten times at bat. And hitters are known for their extensive reliance on rituals and superstitions that they believe will bring them good luck. These same superstitious players, however, drop the superstitions when they take the field, since most of them succeed in fielding the ball over 90 percent of the time. Thus, as with the other variables that go into shaping belief that are themselves orthogonal to intelligence, the context of the person and the belief system are important.

7. Influence and Belief

Scholars who study cults (or, as many prefer to call them by the less pejorative term, “New Religious Movements”) explain that there is no simple answer to the question “who joins cults?” The only consistent variable seems to be age — young people are more likely to join cults than older people — but beyond that variables such as family background, intelligence, and gender are orthogonal to belief in and commitment to cults. Research shows that two-thirds of cult members come from normal functioning families and showed no psychological abnormalities whatsoever when they joined the cult.48 Smart people and non-smart people both readily join cults, and while women are more likely to join such groups as J.Z. Knight’s “Ramtha”-based cult (she allegedly channels a 35,000-year old guru named “Ramtha” who doles out life wisdom and advice, in English with an Indian accent no less!), men are more likely to join militias and other anti-government groups.

Again, although intelligence may be related to how well one is able to justify one’s membership in a group, and while gender may be related to which group is chosen for membership, intelligence and gender are unrelated to the general process of joining, the desire for membership in a cult, and belief in the cult’s tenets. Psychiatrist Marc Galanter, in fact, suggests that joining such groups is an integral part of the human condition to which we are all subject due to our common evolutionary heritage.49 Banning together in closely-knit groups was a common practice in our evolutionary history, because it reduced risk and increased survival by being with others of our perceived kind. But if the process of joining is common among most humans, why do some people join while others do not?

The answer is in the persuasive power of the principles of influence and the choice of what type of group to join. Cult experts and activists Steve Hassan and Margaret Singer outline a number of psychological influences that shape people’s thoughts and behaviors that lead them to join more dangerous groups (and that are quite independent of intelligence): cognitive dissonance, obedience to authority, group compliance and conformity, and especially the manipulation of rewards, punishments, and experiences with the purpose of controlling behavior, information, thought, and emotion (what Hassan calls the “BITE model”).50 Social psychologist Robert Cialdini demonstrates in his enormously persuasive book on influence, that all of us are influenced by a host of social and psychological variables, including physical attractiveness, similarity, repeated contact or exposure, familiarity, diffusion of responsibility, reciprocity, and many others.51

Smart Biases in Defending Weird Beliefs

In 1620 English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon offered his own Easy Answer to the Hard Question:

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate … And such is the way of all superstitions, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, although this happened much oftener, neglect and pass them by.52

Why do smart people believe weird things? Because, to restate my thesis in light of Bacon’s insight, smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

As we have already seen, there is a wealth of scientific evidence in support of this thesis, but none more so than two extremely powerful cognitive biases that make it difficult for any of us to objectively evaluate a claim. These biases, in fact, are especially well manipulated by smart people: the Intellectual Attribution Bias and the Confirmation Bias.

Intellectual Attribution Bias

When Sulloway and I asked our subjects why they believe in God, and why they think other people believe in God (and allowed them to provide written answers), we were inundated with thoughtful and lengthy treatises (many stapled multi-page, type-written answers to their survey) and we discovered that they could be a valuable source of data. Classifying the answers into categories, here was the top reasons given:

Why People Believe in God

1. Arguments based on good design/natural beauty/perfection/complexity of the world or universe. (28.6%)
2. The experience of God in everyday life/a feeling that God is in us. (20.6%)\
3. Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life. (10.3%)
4. The Bible says so. (9.8%)
5. Just because/faith/or the need to believe in something. (8.2%)

Why People Think Other People Believe in God

1. Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life. (26.3%)
2. Religious people have been raised to believe in God. (22.4%)
3. The experience of God in everyday life/a feeling that God is in us. (16.2%)
4. Just because/faith/or the need to believe in something. (13.0%)
5. People believe because they fear death and the unknown. (9.1%)
6. Arguments based on good design/natural beauty/perfection/complexity of the world or universe. (6.0%)

Note that the intellectually-based reasons for belief in God of “Good design” and “Experience of God,” which were in 1st and 2nd place in the first question of why do you believe in God?, dropped to 6th and 3rd place for the second question of why do you think other people believe in God? Taking their place as the two most common reasons given for why other people believe in God were the emotionally based categories of religion being judged as “comforting” and people having been “raised to believe” in God. Grouping the answers into two general categories of rational reasons and emotional reasons for belief in God, we performed a Chi-Square test and found the difference to be significant (Chi-Square[1]=328.63 [r=.49], N=1,356, p