Posted by
Jack Fisher on Saturday, October 03, 2009 11:49:25 PM
Is it harder to believe or not to believe? The intuitive response is to assume that belief is more difficult. It seems logical on the surface. To believe in something in the absence of evidence is a great challenge. It’s easy to assume how hard someone would have to push themselves to accept it. It’s one of the reasons people of strong convictions are so admired on most societies. It seems as though they’re stronger in their ability to accept a premise that some may deem impossible.
But is that really the case? Is believing in something really as hard as people make it out to be? Most modern psychological studies are remarkably consistent. Belief is much easier than non-belief. To blindly accept something, whether it involves religion or politics or government, is far more preferable than to question or to reason.
It starts at a young age. It has been will documented that children in their infancy are highly impressionable. It is their tendency to adopt and accept the wishes of elders and authority figures. In a strictly survival context, it makes sense. If children always questioned authority figures, it would be distracting and dangerous for both the parents the child. By having the child blindly believe, it helps humans be more social and coordinated. That leads to advantageous survival functions that evolution has favored since the days of hunter gatherers.
It isn’t just children’s impressionability that makes belief easier. Even as rational adults, people are subject to peer pressure. A classic example is the Asch Conformity Experiment where three test subjects, one of which was a random volunteer, were asked to decide which line out of three was longer. Two controls voted on one that was obviously shorter, thus pressuring the volunteer to make a decision. Should they conform to what they know is wrong or act on their own? Most would assume a rational person would do what was right, but that was not the case. Nearly 75 percent of participants went with the group, doing what was clearly wrong for the sake of conformity.
The Psychology of Conformity
Religion and government hijack these two deeply held traits. For religion, belief in a supernatural deity is easy. Nobody has to know anything about anything to believe. They don’t have to have any special knowledge or special skills. They don’t have to do anything other than blindly believe and in return they get acceptance from other believers and hope that they will be rewarded when they die, even though there’s no evidence that they do. It’s a cheap, easy way to feel good about one’s self and it is often abused, fostering irrational superstition, bigotry, corruption, greed, and sometimes murder. The hijackers of 9/11 truly believed that their invisible god that they never saw or experienced was real and that this god would grant them 72 virgins in the afterlife for murdering innocent people. It’s an appealing belief and one that is much easier to accept than question when it is preached with the fiery rhetoric of dogmatic clerics.
Psychology of Religious Belief
Every religion is guilty of abusing humanity’s susceptibility to belief. Government is just as bad as religion. They play off that same childhood tendency to believe in one’s parents and authority figures even when what they’re doing is obviously wrong. It came full circle in the build-up to the Iraq war. Everybody was drunk with patriotism, blindly believing in the government’s assertion that Iraq posed a danger. Anybody that questioned this was deemed unpatriotic and cast aside, a clear show of the power of peer pressure.
In every state, democratic and authoritarian, leaders use their status against people. From the communist states of China and Russia to the ancient powers of Rome and Egypt, authority figures have used and abused the capacity to believe. Free societies are supposed to open these figures to questioning, but it is rare that people do so because it is so much easier and so much more convenient to just believe.
Disbelief, it turns out, is much harder. It creates a lot of discomfort in people because rejecting something is often looked down upon. Rejecting the government or rejecting religion just doesn’t seem as noble to people. Some dare to call it heretical. It’s also hard to reject the appeal of some beliefs. For many, it is very nice to believe that there is a just and loving god who will reward those that die after living a righteous life. But no matter how much someone believes in something, that doesn’t make it true. There’s no proof that there’s anything after death. There’s no proof that there’s a god of any kind or that supernatural forces exist. Not believing in them is hard because it means rejecting some mystery from the world.
In many ways, it is those that believe the strongest that are the most dangerous. The religious fanatics and authoritarian bureaucrats are so convinced they will not even consider questioning themselves. It takes a great deal of hubris, arrogance, and narcissism. To not question is not only irrational, it is cowardice. From the priests to the kings, they may have the power of influence. But at their very core, they are cowards of the highest degree.