The Satisfaction of Empty Form
For as long as pollsters have been asking the question, roughly 90% of Americans have been claiming to believe in God, and a sizeable majority believes that God takes a personal interest in their lives and intervenes to help them.
Psychology experiments reveal that people are often satisfied by empty form. When experimenters approached people who were standing in line at a photocopy machine and said, “Can I get ahead of you?” the typical answer was no. But when they added to the end of this request the words “because I need to make some copies,” the typical answer was yes. The second request used the word “because” and hence sounded like an explanation, and the fact that this explanation told them nothing that they didn’t already know was oddly irrelevant.
In another study, experimenters approached people in a library, handed them a card with a $1 coin attached, and then walked away. Some people received the card on the top, and some received the card on the bottom.
Although the two extra questions on the bottom card — “Who are we?” and “Why do we do this?” — provide no information whatsoever, they do give one the sense that puzzling questions have been posed and then answered. The people who received the bottom card were less curious and less delighted 20 minutes after receiving it than were people who received the top card because only the latter felt that something wonderful and inexplicable had happened.
Research in psychology has shown that people tend to mistake the products of random processes for the products of non-random processes but not the other way around. For example, if we tossed a coin and it came up heads five times in a row, many of us would suspect that the outcome of these flips was non-random. That’s a mistake. Because while the odds of tossing five heads in a row by random chance are not tremendous, they are not slight — roughly three in a hundred.
If we glance at a Necker cube we have the sense that we are looking across at a box that has a dot on its left inside corner. But if we stare for a few moments, the cube suddenly shifts, and we have the sense that we are looking down at a box that has a dot sitting on its lower left edge. (A more riveting version of this is here.). Experiments show that if we are rewarded for seeing the cube one way rather than the other — rewarded with a jellybean, a dollar bill, or a friendly pat on the back — our brains begin to hold on to the rewarding view, and the cube stops changing. Human brains like the most rewarding view and thus they search for and hold on to that view whenever they can.
Research suggests that people may mistakenly attribute the good fortune that is the natural product of a helpful brain to the intervention of a helpful agent. For instance, in a study done in my laboratory, female volunteers were told that they would be working on a two-person task that required them to have a teammate whom they liked and trusted. The volunteers were shown four folders, each of which contained the biography of a potential teammate. They were told that before reading the biographies they must choose a folder randomly, and that the person whose biography was in the chosen folder would be their teammate. The volunteers looked at the four folders, chose one randomly, and then read the biography they found inside. What the volunteers did not know was that the experimenter had put the same biography in all four folders, and that it was the biography of someone who was not particularly likeable or trustworthy.
As the volunteers read the biography, their brains searched for, found, and held on to the best possible view of the teammate. When volunteers finished reading their new teammate’s biography, they were given three other biographies to read, and they were then asked to rate all four of the biographies. The volunteers rated their teammate as superior to the others.
After the volunteers read and rated the biographies, the experimenter took the volunteer aside and explained that while the volunteer had been “randomly choosing” a folder, the experimenter had been using a subliminal message to try to make the volunteer choose the best possible partner. This wasn’t true but the volunteers believed it. Then the volunteers were asked: “Do you think the subliminal message had any effect on your choice of folders?” By and large, volunteers thought the subliminal message had guided their choice of folders. Although they had been given a relatively dislikeable teammate, their brains had managed to find a rewarding view of that teammate; but because they did not know that their brains deserved the credit for their good fortune, they gave the credit to a subliminal message.
The experiments described are drawn from the following papers: “The illusion of external agency,” “The mindlessness of ostensibly thoughtful action,” & “The pleasures of uncertainty.”