We have a tendency to imbue agents with a living force or intentionality. This is what allows us to understand that others have beliefs, intents, and desires that may differ from our own and we can infer what they are (it is, at present, being termed mind-mapping). Furthermore, we evolved to favor type 1 errors because our ancestors were more likely to survive if they erred on the side of caution and assumed that the rustle in the grass was a predator and not just the wind.
Because of our tendency towards type 1 errors, we are said to have Hyperactive Agency Detector Devices (HADD) and are more likely to perceive agency where there is none. In psychological terms this is known as Theory of Mind and it is the basis for animistic belief as well as other belief systems which hold that, often invisible, agents control the world. An extension of HADD is that it is natural for us, prior to cultural inundation, to think of disembodied minds. Consider that half of all four year-olds have imaginary friends. While dualism is not amenable to scientific exploration, the most common idea among people is that there are separate entities: mind and body. This persistent view across all ages insinuates a default perspective of reality.
Children have a tendency to “over read causality”; yet, this extends well beyond children into the entire population and into the rest of the animal kingdom. B.F. Skinner proved this when he demonstrated the formation of superstition in pigeons. Within the Skinner box, he had set it to release food at regular intervals. He found that whatever action they had been doing just before receiving the food they would repeat in the hopes of triggering the release of more food. Yet again the evolutionary benefit is clear, type 1 errors are more advantageous because it is better to carry around relatively harmless superstitions that to miss genuine causations. Our brains are pattern seekers, and positive or negative reinforcements influence every aspect of our lives whether we are conscious of it or not.
The most definitive evidence comes from the 2008 study entitled
Cognitive and Neural Foundations of Religious Belief. Using an fMRI and armed with a list of statements containing topics such as God’s level of involvement and God’s emotion. Participants were then asked if they agreed with the statements. The abstract best states their findings:
Our analysis reveals 3 psychological dimensions of religious belief (God's perceived level of involvement, God's perceived emotion, and doctrinal/experiential religious knowledge), which functional MRI localizes within networks processing Theory of Mind regarding intent and emotion, abstract semantics, and imagery. Our results are unique in demonstrating that specific components of religious belief are mediated by well-known brain networks, and support contemporary psychological theories that ground religious belief within evolutionary adaptive cognitive functions.
Previous studies focused on extremes, such as temporal-lobe epilepsy and other pathological religious manifestations. None of these had an acceptable “degree of correspondence to any proposed psychological architecture underlying religious belief.” By selecting participants that fell within the normative range they were able to establish that aspects of religious belief lie within neuronal networks that have been previously marked and accepted as a region of social cognitive mechanisms. (Kapogiannis, et al, 2009)
Before I ramble on for too long, one last interesting bit. There was an interesting study done by Peter Brugger that shows a correlational link between dopamine and belief. Those with higher levels of dopamine also had higher rates of causation detection. Participants included those who subscribed to supernatural beliefs as well as skeptics. Subjects with higher levels of self-reported religiosity consistently made more type 1 errors, seeing faces within the random patterns that were not present. Alternatively, the self-reported skeptics made type 2 errors and were more likely to miss the faces within the images. Brugger administered L-DOPA to the skeptics; it is used to increase dopamine concentrations within the central nervous system. Armed with higher concentrations of dopamine, the skeptics showed a type 1 error bias and significantly less type 2 errors. These results are compounded by the information that schizophrenics tend to have high levels of dopamine.
And for those that made it through all of that, thanks. This was the topic of my thesis for neuropsychology.