[acb-hsp] Signs, Signs

[peter altschul]

Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs: Seeing God in Tsunamis and 
Everyday Events
  By Jesse Bering bar Mar 13, 2011 06:25 PM bar 94 
httpccwwwddscientificamericanddcom/blog/postddcfm"id equals 
signs-signs-everywhere-signs-seeing-2011-03-13andWTDDMCID equals 
SAWR20110317
  It's only a matter of time--in fact, they've already started 
cropping up--before reality-challenged individuals begin 
pontificating about what God could have possibly been so 
hot-and-bothered about to trigger last week's devastating 
earthquake and tsunami in Japan.  (Surely, if we were to ask 
Westboro Baptist Church members, it must have something to do 
with the gays.) But from a psychological perspective, what type 
of mind does it take to see unexpected natural events such as the 
horrifying scenes still unfolding in Japan as "signs" or "omens" 
related to human behaviors?
  In the summer of 2005, my University of Arkansas colleague 
Becky Parker and I began the first experimental study to 
investigate the psychology underlying this strange phenomenon.  
In this experiment, published the following year in Developmental 
Psychology, we invited a group of three- to nine-year- old 
children into our lab and told them they were about to play a fun 
guessing game.  It was a simple game in which each child was 
tested individually.  The child was asked to go to the corner of 
the room and to cover his or her eyes before coming back and 
guessing which of two large boxes contained a hidden ball.  All 
the child had to do was place a hand on the box that he or she 
believed contained the ball.  A short time was allowed for the 
decision to be made but, importantly, during that time the 
children were allowed to change their mind at any time by moving 
their hand to the other box.  The final answer on each of the 
four trials was reflected simply by where the child's hand was 
when the experimenter said, "Time's up!" Children who guessed 
right won a sticker prize.
  In reality, the game was a little more complicated than this.  
There were secretly two balls, one in each box, and we had 
decided in advance whether the children were going to get it 
"right" or "wrong" on each of the four guessing trials.  At the 
conclusion of each trial, the child was shown the contents of 
only one of the boxes.  The other box remained closed.  For 
example, for "wrong" guesses, only the unselected box was opened, 
and the child was told to look inside ("Aw, too bad.  The ball 
was in the other box this time.  See?").  Children who had been 
randomly assigned to the control condition were told that they 
had been successful on a random two of the four trials.  Children 
assigned to the experimental condition received some additional 
information before starting the game.  These children were told 
that there was a friendly magic princess in the room, "Princess 
Alice," who had made herself invisible.  We showed them a picture 
of Princess Alice hanging against the door inside the room (one 
that looked remarkably like Barbie), and we gave them the 
following information: "Princess Alice really likes you, and 
she's going to help you play this game.  She's going to tell you, 
somehow, when you pick the wrong box." We repeated this 
information right before each of the four trials, in case the 
children had forgotten.
  For every child in the study, whether assigned to the standard 
control condition ("No Princess Alice") or to the experimental 
condition ("Princess Alice"), we engineered the room such that a 
spontaneous and unexpected event would occur just as the child 
placed a hand on one of the boxes.  For example, in one case, the 
picture of Princess Alice came crashing to the floor as soon as 
the child made a decision, and in another case a table lamp 
flickered on and off.  (We didn't have to consult with Industrial 
Light and Magic to rig these surprise events; we just arranged 
for an undergraduate student to lift a magnet on the other side 
of the door to make the picture fall, and we hid a remote control 
for the table lamp surreptitiously in the experimenter's pocket.) 
The predictions were clear: if the children in the experimental 
condition interpreted the picture falling and the light flashing 
as a sign from Princess Alice that they had chosen the wrong box, 
they would move their hand to the other box.
  What we found was rather surprising, even to us.  Only the 
oldest children, the seven- to nine-year-olds, from the 
experimental (Princess Alice) condition, moved their hands to the 
other box in response to the unexpected events.  By contrast, 
their same-aged peers from the control condition failed to move 
their hands.  This finding told us that the explicit concept of a 
specific supernatural agent-likely acquired from and reinforced 
by cultural sources-is needed for people to see communicative 
messages in natural events.  In other words, children, at least, 
don't automatically infer meaning in natural events without first 
being primed somehow with the idea of an identifiable 
supernatural agent such as Princess Alice (or God, one's dead 
mother, angels, etc.).
  More curious, though, was the fact that the slightly younger 
children in the study, even those who had been told about 
Princess Alice, apparently failed to see any communicative 
message in the light-flashing or picture- falling events.  These 
children kept their hands just where they were.  When we asked 
them later why these things happened, these five- and 
six-year-olds said that Princess Alice had caused them, but they 
saw her as simply an eccentric, invisible woman running around 
the room knocking pictures off the wall and causing the lights to 
flicker.  To them, Princess Alice was like a mischievous 
poltergeist with attention deficit disorder: she did things 
because she wanted to, and that's that.  One of these children 
answered that Princess Alice had knocked the picture off the wall 
because she thought it looked better on the ground.  In other 
words, they completely failed to see her "behavior" as having any 
meaningful connection with the decision they had just made on the 
guessing game; they saw no "signs" there.
  The youngest children in the study, the three- and 
four-year-olds in both conditions, only shrugged their shoulders 
or gave physical explanations for the events, such as the picture 
not being sticky enough to stay on the wall or the light being 
broken.  Ironically, these youngest children were actually the 
most scientific of the bunch, perhaps because they interpreted 
"invisible" to mean simply "not present in the room" rather than 
"transparent." Contrary to the common assumption that 
superstitious beliefs represent a childish mode of sloppy and 
undeveloped thinking, therefore, the ability to be superstitious 
actually demands some mental sophistication.  At the very least, 
it's an acquired cognitive skill.
  Still, the real puzzle to our findings was to be found in the 
reactions of the five- and six-year-olds from the Princess Alice 
condition.  Clearly they possessed the same understanding of 
invisibility as did the older children, because they also 
believed Princess Alice caused these spooky things to happen in 
the lab.  Yet although we reminded these children repeatedly that 
Princess Alice would tell them, somehow, if they chose the wrong 
box, they failed to put two and two together.  So what is the 
critical change between the ages of about six and seven that 
allows older children to perceive natural events as being 
communicative messages about their own behaviors (in this case, 
their choice of box) rather than simply the capricious, arbitrary 
actions of some invisible or otherwise supernatural entity?
  The answer probably lies in the maturation of children's 
theory-of-mind abilities in this critical period of brain 
development.  Research by University of Salzburg psychologist 
Josef Perner, for instance, has revealed that it's not until 
about the age of seven that children are first able to reason 
about "multiple orders" of mental states.  This is the type of 
everyday, grown-up social cognition whereby theory of mind 
becomes effortlessly layered in complex, soap opera- style 
interactions with other people.  Not only do we reason about 
what's going on inside someone else's head, but we also reason 
about what other people are reasoning is happening inside still 
other people's heads! For example, in the everyday 
(nonsupernatural) social domain, one would need this kind of 
mature theory of mind to reason in the following manner:
  "Jakob thinks that Adrienne doesn't know I stole the jewels."
  Whereas a basic ("first-order") theory of mind allows even a 
young preschooler to understand the first propositional clause in 
this statement, "Jakob thinks that . . .  ,was it takes a 
somewhat more mature ("second- order") theory of mind to fully 
comprehend the entire social scenario: "Jakob thinks that 
[Adrienne doesn't know] . . .was
  Most people can't go much beyond four orders of mental- state 
reasoning (consider the Machiavellian complexities of, say, Leo 
Tolstoy's novels), but studies show that the absolute maximum in 
adults hovers around seven orders of mental state.  The important 
thing to note is that, owing to their still-developing 
theory-of-mind skills, children younger than seven years of age 
have great difficulty reasoning about multiple orders of mental 
states.  Knowing this then helps us understand the surprising 
results from the Princess Alice experiment.  To pass the test 
(move their hand) in response to the picture falling or the light 
flashing, the children essentially had to be reasoning in the 
following manner:
  "Princess Alice knows that [I don't know] where the ball is 
hidden."
  To interpret the events as communicative messages, as being 
about their choice on the guessing game, demands a sort of 
third-person perspective of the self's actions: "What must this 
other entity, who is watching my behavior, think is happening 
inside my head?" The Princess Alice findings are important 
because they tell us that, before the age of seven, children's 
minds aren't quite cognitively ripe enough to allow them to be 
superstitious thinkers.  The inner lives of slightly older 
children, by contrast, are drenched in symbolic meaning.  One 
second-grader was even convinced that the bell in the nearby 
university clock tower was Princess Alice "talking" to him.
  Princess Alice may not have the je ne sais quoi of Mother Mary 
or the fiery charisma of the Abrahamic God we're all familiar 
with, but she's arguably a sort of empirically constructed 
god-by-proxy in her own right.  The point is, the same basic 
cognitive processes- namely, a mature theory of mind-are also 
involved in the believer's sense of receiving divine guidance 
from these other members of the more popular holy family.  When 
people ask God to give them a sign, they're often at a 
standstill, a fork in the road, paralyzed in a critical moment of 
existential ambivalence.  In such cases, our ears are pricked, 
our eyes widened, our thoughts ruminating on a particular 
problem-often "only God knows" what's on our minds and the extent 
to which we're struggling to make a decision.  It's not questions 
like whether we should choose a different box, but rather 
decisions such as these: Should I stay with this person or leave 
him? Should I risk everything, start all over in a new city, or 
stay here where I'm stifled and bored? Should I have another 
baby? Should I continue receiving harsh treatment for my disease, 
or should I just pack it in and call it a life? Just like the 
location of the hidden ball inside one of those two boxes, we're 
convinced that there's a right and a wrong answer to such 
important life questions.  And for most of us, it's God, not 
Princess Alice, who holds the privileged answers.
  God doesn't tell us the answers directly, of course.  There's 
no nod to the left, no telling elbow poke in our side or "psst" 
in our ear.  Rather, many envision God, and other entities like 
Him, as encrypting strategic information in an almost infinite 
array of natural events: the prognostic stopping of a clock at a 
certain hour and time; the sudden shrieking of a hawk; an 
embarrassing blemish on our nose appearing on the eve of an 
important interview; a choice parking spot opening up at a 
crowded mall just as we pull around; an interesting stranger 
sitting next to us on a plane.  The possibilities are endless.  
When the emotional climate is just right, there's hardly a shape 
or form that "evidence" cannot assume.  Our minds make meaning by 
disambiguating the meaningless.
  This sign-reading tendency has a distinct and clear 
relationship with morality.  When it comes to unexpected 
heartache and tragedy, our appetite for unraveling the meaning of 
these ambiguous "messages" can become ravenous.  Misfortunes 
appear cryptic, symbolic; they seem clearly to be about our 
behaviors.  Our minds restlessly gather up bits of the past as if 
they were important clues to what just happened.  And no stone 
goes unturned.  Nothing is too mundane or trivial; anything to 
settle our peripatetic thoughts from arriving at the unthinkable 
truth that there is no answer because there is no riddle, that 
life is life and that is that.
  (Author's note: Some of the foregoing material is excerpted, 
with edits, from my new book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology 
of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life.)