love and out-group genocidal hatred.
In some religions, people imagine that God is watching and evaluating their every action. Reputational concerns are expected to have obvious effects on human cooperative tendencies. One study shows that even a pair of eyelike objects on a small part of a computer screen can unconsciously increase cooperative behavior in an anonymous economic game. An awareness of observing, judging god(s) may have similar effects. Indeed, providing a “God prime” hidden in a game of sentence creation increases cooperative tendencies to about the same degree that primes of secular retribution do (police, courts, etc.). Insofar as fear of God’s judgment entrains more moral behavior on our part toward others, it can be seen either as a device that costs us some occasional selfish behavior but protects us from the greater cost of such behavior being detected by others and of being aggressed against, or as a form of imposed self-deception by others, in effect, scaring us into greater group orientation.
A tendency to detect agency in nature likely supplies the cognitive template supporting belief in supernatural agents transcending the usual limitations of nature. Since only in some religions do these gods watch, monitor, and respond to human behavior, it would be most interesting to know which religions do so and why. Is this, in part, a means of increasing in-group cooperation?
Although those Christians who frequently pray and attend religious services reliably report more altruistic behavior—such as charity donations and volunteer work—it is uncertain how much this applies only within the religious group or even whether it applies at all. This is because various measures of religiosity repeatedly have been shown to correlate with higher false opinions of self, suggesting an obvious self-deceptive effect of religion: you think better of yourself than you otherwise would. In Islam, it is mandatory to give to the poor, but there must be variability in doing so, and it would be most interesting to know what such variability correlates with.
One interesting fact on the effect of religion on cooperation emerges from comparing small religious organizations—“sects”—with small nonreligious communes. There is a striking tendency for the religious to outlast the secular (at least in the United States). In each year, the religious sect is four times as likely to survive into the next year as the secular. So religion provides some kind of social glue that makes organizations based on them more likely to endure than those based on nonreligious themes. Living in a cohesive and mutually supporting organization would be expected to have immune benefits as well, since one is less isolated and more likely, in a crisis, to be able to draw on the resources of others. As we have noted, the placebo effect is based partly on its expected association with caring acts by others.
Another interesting difference between the two kinds of communes is that the more costly the requirements imposed on group members in a commune (regarding food, tobacco, clothing, hairstyle, sex, communication with outsiders, fasts, and mutual criticism), the longer the survival of a religious commune, though there is no association between cost and survival in the nonreligious. This raises two questions: Why should cost be positively associated with commune survival, and why should this hold only for religious ones? According to cognitive dissonance theory, greater cost needs to be rationalized, leading to greater self-deception, in this case in the direction of group identity and solidarity. Why do religions provide more fertile ground for this process than secular communes? Perhaps because religions provide a much more comprehensive logic for justifying beliefs and actions. In religious communes, men’s participation in group prayer predicts their degree of sociality in an experimental economic game.
RELIGION: A RECIPE FOR SELF-DECEPTION
Whether religion is entirely devoted to self-deception from its very foundation to its every last branch seems unlikely, but the fact that this is even a theoretical possibility suggests the degree to which religion has been infected by forces of self-deception. Even a casual glance at most religions suggests that there is far more nonsense than revealed truth. Some of the key features of Western religions (and some Eastern ones) are the following.
A Unified, Privileged View of the Universe for Your Own Group
Most religions propose this view. Either you are the founding people and all others degenerate dogs, or else yours are the “chosen people” either by ethnicity (Jewish) or by attachment to this or that prophet (Jesus, Muhammad). Of course, any general system of thought that places you at the center is useful to