The Physiology of Faith by N. Fakhr - HTML preview

Suppression of Dissenting Views

In 1951, Solomon Asch, one of the pioneers of social psychology, conducted an experiment on conformity. He placed participants together with confederates—people working with him who pretended to be ordinary, unbiased participants—and asked them to identify which of three lines was the same length as a target line.

The confederates answered first, all deliberately giving the same incorrect answer. The genuine participant was asked to answer last. In 32% of the trials, the participant conformed to the group and gave the same incorrect answer.

Asch found that when there was only one confederate alongside the participant, the rate of conformity was 3%. With two confederates giving the same incorrect answer, it rose to 13%; with three or more, it remained at about 32%. It seems that, for us humans, the agreement of three people can already carry the psychological weight of a consensus, and adding still more people does not greatly change its effect.

Asch also observed that if just one dissenter was introduced into the otherwise unanimous group and gave a different answer, conformity with the majority fell from 32% to 5%.

When participants were asked to give their answers privately rather than in the presence of the others, conformity decreased, although it did not disappear entirely.

There was also a control group in which the confederates did not deliberately give incorrect answers. In this group, only about 1% of the genuine participants gave an incorrect answer. [1]

In later years, fMRI studies of people subjected to this kind of social pressure revealed changes in several regions of the brain, particularly within the occipital-parietal network. One interpretation of such findings is that judgments expressed by a group can sometimes influence a person’s actual perception and understanding. In other words, people do not necessarily merely say what the group says in order to conform, while privately perceiving things differently. At times, they may actually come to see what the group sees and feel what the group expresses. If everyone says that a particular holy man has a radiant face, they too may perceive his face as radiant and illuminated by divine light. If the group says that they were overwhelmed by the sacred majesty of a particular shrine, they too may experience a special feeling there. If everyone weeps over a story, they too may experience that story as deeply sorrowful.

It has also been shown that when a group establishes a particular standard of beauty and identifies someone as attractive, dopamine-related activity in the ventral striatum of people influenced by the group can change when they see that person’s face. Activity in the ventral striatum is also associated with finding a member of the opposite sex attractive. This may help explain how prevailing fashions and advertising can influence whom we perceive as beautiful, and how celebrities may come to be perceived as especially attractive. [2]

In light of these findings, we can understand why portraying an entire population as being in agreement with religious beliefs, while preventing the expression of criticism or dissent, can be so important. If only defenders of the doctrines of a particular religion or denomination are permitted to speak, while no opponent is allowed to voice disagreement or criticism, the impression is created that everyone accepts those doctrines. This appearance of unanimity can itself encourage conformity and acceptance.

Suppressing dissent and creating fear can also leave religious preachers as the only voices being heard, allowing their beliefs to reach people before competing views do. The first explanation or belief we encounter often has an advantage over alternatives introduced later, and this is not limited to childhood. Even as adults, when we encounter a new subject, the first account presented to us may have a greater chance of being accepted and becoming the starting point from which we judge subsequent claims.

Daniel Gilbert, a social psychologist, argued in a 1991 paper that we can think of two different approaches to the acceptance of propositions: a Cartesian approach and a Spinozan approach. In the Cartesian model, before accepting a proposition, we occupy a neutral position: we neither accept nor reject it. In the Spinozan model, by contrast, we initially accept the proposition and only afterward, by investing additional time and mental effort, may analyze it and perhaps reject it. [3]

Gilbert argues that most of the time we operate in the Spinozan manner: we first accept, and because analyzing and rejecting propositions is effortful and cognitively demanding, in many cases we may never undertake that process at all. In other words, we exhibit an initial acceptance of propositions.

In a religiously monolithic society, where the media and educational system are controlled by the official religion and critics and dissenters are afraid to express disagreement, religious propositions—which are likely to be among the first propositions people encounter from childhood—can readily become accepted. Before long, these propositions may pass from being merely “accepted propositions” to becoming a person’s religious beliefs, articles of faith, and sacred convictions, without ever having been seriously exposed to doubt or critical examination.

If Gilbert’s account is correct, then children should, from an early age and during their school years, be intellectually “inoculated” before they are exposed to superstitious and pseudoscientific claims or other unfounded propositions. Science should therefore be taught in a way that enables children, when they encounter such claims, to test them against what they have learned—and to make this habit of critical evaluation part of their ordinary way of thinking. Otherwise, once superstitious or pseudoscientific propositions have been initially accepted and transformed into personal opinions and deeply held beliefs, they may be difficult to remove from the mind completely. Something of them may persist, and attempts at correction or enlightenment at a later stage may be far less effective.

People who believe in superstitious or pseudoscientific ideas may also gravitate toward groups of like-minded people. They may either avoid discussion with those who disagree with them or find that such confrontations drive them still further into communities of people who share their views, where the apparent consensus of the group provides further confirmation of their beliefs.