Religion: A Force For Self-Control?

TOPICs: religion, evolutionary psychology

Prompted by a recent news release on Science Daily, I had promised myself time to blog about and review McCullough & Willoughby's recent meta-analysis article on Religion and self-regulation, due out in Psychological Bulletin.

As I sat down this evening to organize some thoughts, I was surprised (although in retrospect surely shouldn't have been) to see I'm behind the curve already, with several blogs already responding to the news release and journal article — for example, see: Tim Rees' brief critical response (Improve your self control... with religion?) at the BHA Science Group blog. Since most of the blogs I've seen, however, seem to be responding directly to the news release (or related articles, like John Tierney's of the New York Times) instead of the actual research article, it's clear there's still plenty of opportunity (and need) to look carefully at the research article itself (downloadable in pre-print pdf form from Prof Michael McCullough's University of Miami website.

And that's where I will pick up tomorrow, beginning with McCullough & Willoughby's stimulating introduction and description of half-dozen or so propositions laying out the potential connections between religion and self-regulation.

In the meantime, here are some related video comments from McCullough himself (courtesy of the University of Miami website):

RELATED REFERENCES

McCullough, Michael (2008). Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, CA.

See details at Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Revenge-Evolution-Forgiveness-Instinct/dp/078797756X/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product.

McCullough, Michael E. & Willoughby, Brian L. B. (2009). Religion, self-regulation, and self-control: associations, explanations, implications. Psychological Bulletin, in press.

A pre-print pdf of this article is available from the author's web site at http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/mmccullough/Religion_Research.htm

Rees, Tom (1/1/2009). Improve your self control... with religion? A BHA Science Group Blog entry accessed 1/4/2009 at http://bhascience.blogspot.com/2009/01/improve-your-self-control-with-religion.html?

Religion, Self-control, and Values (1/3/2009). TS-Si News Service, article accessed 1/4/2009 at http://www.ts-si.org/the-discussion/3708-religion-self-control-and-values.html

Religion May Have Evolved Because Of Its Ability To Help People Exercise Self-control (1/1/2009). Accessed 1/1/2009 at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081231005355.htm

Tierney, John (12/29/2008). For Good Self-Control, Try Getting Religious About It. The New York Times accessed 1/4/2009 at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/science/30tier.html?

Secular Camp featured on NPR (8/7/2008)

TOPIC: religion, summer camp

Not long ago I posted on Summer Camp, Hold The Religion — prompted by an AP article by Valerie Bauman on the secular summer camp called Camp Quest. Barbara Bradley Hagerty of NPR has just run a segment this afternoon (8/7/2008) on a similar camp called Camp Inquiry, described on the Camp inquiry website as "one of many educational initiatives offered by the Center for Inquiry," and the following mission statement:

This is a place where kids can be themselves. We work toward helping youth confront the challenges of living a non-theistic/secular lifestyle in a world dominated by religious belief and pseudoscience. Grounded on the conviction that kids can begin establishing habits of the good and ethical life early on, Camp Inquiry 2008 adopts a three-part focus: The arts and sciences, the skeptical perspective, and ethical character development comprise an integrated approach to this “Age of Discovery.” Campers, counselors, and teachers will address key issues around individual identity, forging trusting relationships, establishing a sense of local and global community, and living with respect for the natural world.

Hagerty's NPR segment is available at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93174374 and will be available shortly in audio. The segment/article is a bit condescending, but she was dealing with relatively young kids and the attention itself was generally positive. It will be interesting to see the listener/reader reactions.

Angie McQuaid (one of the camp counselors, pictured above) spoke well in the segment:

"It's a brain spa," says Angie McQuaig, one of the counselors. McQuaig is an elementary school administrator in Georgia.

"As an educator, I like to teach critical thinking at a deep and erudite level, because it's not embedded in the curriculum as much as I'd like to see," McQuaig says. "And this provides a place for kids to talk about deep questions that many into adulthood don't even consider and contemplate."

Are they trying to create little atheists?

"Absolutely not!" McQuaig says. "We want to create little thinkers. Little thinkers that explore their own capacity and the external world, with all of the tools of science and humanity. That's why we're here."

Of course, the participants in any such summer camp will be uniquely self- or parent-selected. But the critical point for me is the opportunity for such kids.

Go visit the Camp Inquiry website. It's good reading.

RELATED REFERENCES

Bauman, Valerie (updated 5/28/2008). Atheist, agnostic families opt for own sleep-away camp. Accessed 8/7/2008 at web address: http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-05-27-atheist-camp_N.htm.

Camp Inquiry website, accessed 8/7/2008 at web address: http://www.campinquiry.org/.

Camp Quest website, accessed 8/7/2008 at web address: http://camp-quest.org/.

Center for Inquiry website, accessed 8/7/2008 at web address: http://www.centerforinquiry.net/.

Craft, W. D. (5/27/2008). Summer camp, hold the religion. Available at web address: http://psychescientia.blogspot.com/2008/05/summer-camp-hold-religion.html.

Hagerty, Barbara Bradley (8/7/2008). Camp Offers Training Ground For Little Skeptics. Segment broadcast on All Things Considered, National Public Radio, with text (and related figures) available (8/7/2008) at web address: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93174374.

Computer Simulation of the Evolution of Religious Belief

TOPIC: evolution of religion

Adding to the general melee that is the debate about the evolution of religious belief, here's some stimulating news about a computer simulation created by evolutionary anthropologist James Dow (Oakland University in Rochester, Mi):

Religion is a product of evolution, software suggests
[NewScientist.com, 5/27/2008]

and the original research paper can be found here: Is Religion an Evolutionary Adaptation?

I'll take some time soon to blog more carefully on the original paper, but immediately tantalizing was the general concept: a computer simulation of interactions between "believers" and "non-believers," with the believers eventually flourishing! How cool … but of course this all depends on the assumptions built into the simulation. How were "believers" and "non-believers" defined? What type of interactions were being modeled? And how was adaptive fitness defined?

Dow used a co-evolutionary agent-based model allowing for influences of both genetically determined behavior and learned behavior. Dow explains that

The model does not include a large external storehouse of cultural memory, such as books or databases, from which agents learn. Therefore, it is more applicable to an early, pre-literate culture than to a modern civilization. The brain underwent most of its evolution when people lived such cultures. [§2.4]

The simulated agents have both inherited and learned capacities to communicate "real information" vs. "unreal information." The assumptions here are that:

Real communication carries information about the environment that the receiver can use to increase its fitness. Unreal communication carries no information about the environment and may decrease the fitness of the receiver by diverting its attention. Religious communication is of the unreal type. Although religious communication has benefits, these have nothing to do with the information in the communication. It is precisely the lack of material real-world information that defines religious belief. The simulation examines how unreal communication can evolve by means of social selection. [§2.5]

So "believers" are essentially defined as communicators of unreal information, and eventually fitness is manifest in terms of the number of offspring an agent leaves when it dies. Agent fitness is affected in the simulation, though, through the complex interactions (communications) among the multiple agents. Basically: agents that receive real information increase in fitness; agents who receive unreal information decrease in fitness. But an agent's tendency to communicate either type of information is affected by the type of information being received from other agents, a form of cultural learning.

In most of the simulations, the general population increases and the non-believers dominate the believers — under these basic conditions, populations increase, but the gene frequencies for real communication rise and those for unreal communication fall.

The interesting variant occurs, prompting the article title and the pop media coverage, when Dow plays with the greenbeard parameter that determines with whom an agent communicates. [see the Green-beard effect on wikipedia]. The simulations mentioned so far used greenbeard = 0, designating that the agents with whom an agent communicates is chosen randomly from a uniform distribution of the agents (i.e. no agents are preferred for communication). When Dow incorporates the greenbeard effect, then "If one agent sees that another agent is more likely to communicate unreal information, it can select that agent as a recipient of its communication with a greater probability." Basically, Dow simulates a situation in which agents are more likely to communicate with agents that themselves are more likely to disseminate unreal information.

Under such conditions, we see the population of believer agents eventually thrive.

Now, why would one implement such a greenbeard effect in the simulation? That's not clear, and makes a nice topic for another post.

Related References

Dawkins, R. (1976) The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dow, James (2006). The Evolution of Religion: Three Anthropological Approaches. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 18(1), 67-91.

Dow, James (2007). A Scientific Definition of Religion. Anpere: Anthropological Perspectives on Religion <http://www.anpere.net/ccount/click.php?id=13>.

Dow, James (2008). Is religion an evolutionary adaptation? Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 11(22) <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/11/2/2.html>.

Summer Camp, Hold The Religion

TOPICS: religion, summer camp, popular press

As a child, I was truly puzzled by the religious beliefs of family, of friends, and of adults in general. The beliefs and belief systems seemed so . . . blatantly irrational, and the vigor with which people espoused their fantastic beliefs seemed inversely correlated with the humanity with which they lived their lives and treated those around them. But as a youngster, this was difficult to articulate.

Difficult in part because I was too young, too inexperienced, to understand what I was seeing and feeling, often leading me to simply dismiss the beliefs and associated behaviors as unimportant — because (my innocent self thought) how could such irrationality have any great force in the world? Wouldn't that be bizarre? So (my naive self concluded), such irrational beliefs and related behaviors must not, could not, be terribly important or influential in the day-to-day “real world” of people and things and schools and governments, etc. It must be merely some odd quirkiness of human society, so I thought. Older now, but not much wiser, I still feel that pull of amazed disbelief. How could someone be so … blatantly irrational? Surely such irrational beliefs and related behaviors couldn't (and couldn't be allowed to) influence society in any but the most superficial ways? But the amazed disbelief is increasingly tempered with outrage, disgust, and discouragement: how can people be so … blatantly irrational? And how can such irrationality be so pervasive, insidious, and so forceful?

My concerns as a youngster were difficult to articulate also because I never, ever encountered anyone else questioning such things. Friends, family, children and adults around me … the only criticism I witnessed of religious belief was leveled by others with a different religious belief. Our irrational belief system, they seemed to say, is better than that irrational belief system over there. As a kid, who was I going to talk to about my lack of belief? And why did I feel embarrassed when confronted with weird religious beliefs and rituals of my friends? I wasn't embarrassed for them — I was truly embarrassed myself.

I think I would have really appreciated an escape to something like Camp Quest, described on the Camp Quest website as “The Secular Summer Camp” founded explicitly to

… provide children of freethinking parents a residential summer camp dedicated to improving the human condition through rational inquiry, critical and creative thinking, scientific method, self-respect, ethics, competency, democracy, free speech, and the separation of religion and government guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.

USAToday picked up a piece on Camp Quest by Valerie Bauman of the Associated Press.

Camper Caitlin Fox, 16, said the camp has helped her build confidence.

“Before I attended I used to feel really embarrassed,” she said. “I was afraid my friends would reject me if I didn't believe in some higher power.”

Bauman points out, of course, that

Critics say the camps appear to espouse a particular point of view.

Erika Chopich, a psychotherapist, chaplain and founder of the nonprofit Hope America Ministries Foundation, said the invisible creatures in the exercise are obvious metaphors for God. "It's clearly meant to teach that God cannot possibly exist," Chopich said. "... There's obviously some teaching going on, there's some philosophy there. It's not completely neutral."

Chopich has a good point, of course, although it's not the point she intended. Rational thought is never neutral when used to confront nonsense.

And I wish I had such support when I was a kid.

Quick note: try a Google search on this topic — it's amazing (and encouraging? I don't know) how many sites have picked up this news item.