The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (29 page)

20
.
Ibid.

21
.
Piaget,
Moral Judgment of the Child,
259.

22
.
Elie Wiesel,
The Gates of the Forest,
trans. Frances Frenaye (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1966), 197.

23
.
Janet Landman, “The Crime, Punishment, and Ethical Transformation of Two Radicals: Or How Katherine Power Improves on Dostoevsky,” in
Turns in the Road: Narrative Studies of Lives in Transition,
ed. Dan P. McAdams, Ruthellen Josselson, and Amia Lieblich (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001), 35–66.

24
.
Dan P. McAdams, “The Psychology of Life Stories,”
Review of General Psychology
5 (2001): 100–122.

25
.
Ibid.

26
.
Ibid.

27
.
Todd F. Heatherton and Patricia A. Nichols, “Personal Accounts of Successful versus Failed Attempts at Life Change,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
20 (1994): 664–75.

28
.
John Gunther,
Death Be Not Proud: A Memoir
(Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer, 1997). 206–7. Originally published in 1949.

29
.
Ibid., 63.

30
.
William James,
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
(New York: Megalodon Entertainment, 2008), 128. Originally published in 1902.

31
.
“David Chase Takes On Angry Sopranos Fans,”
The Chicago Syndicate
(October 19, 2007), www.thechicagosyndicate.com/ 2007/10/david-chase-takes-on- angry-sopranos.html.

32
.
Ibid.

33
.
Ibid.

34
.
Mikhail Bulgakov,
The Master and Margarita
(CreateSpace [www.createspace.com], 2009), 11. Originally published in 1967.

35
.
Harold S. Kushner,
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
(New York: Avon, 1983), 52.

36
.
Jay Dixit, “Cindy Chupack on Failure,”
Brainstorm
blog (
Psychology Today
), May 18, 2009, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ brainstorm/200905/cindy-chupack-failure.

37
.
Ibid.

38
.
Jesse M. Bering and Bethany T. Heywood, “Do Atheists Reason Implicitly in Theistic Terms? Evidence of Teleo-functional Biases in the Autobiographical Narratives of Nonbelievers” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Las Vegas, NV, January 2010).

39
.
Ibid.

40
.
Ibid.

41
.
Milan Kundera,
The Joke
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 164. Originally published in 1967.

C
HAPTER
6

1
.
Jean-Paul Sartre,
No Exit, and Three Other Plays
(New York: Vintage International, 1989), 45. Originally published in 1946.

2
.
Ibid., 22.

3
.
Ibid., 35.

4
.
Ibid., 44.

5
.
Dominic D. P. Johnson, “God’s Punishment and Public Goods: A Test of the Supernatural Punishment Hypothesis in 186 World Cultures,”
Human Nature
16 (2005): 410–46.

6
.
Ralph L. Rosnow, “Gossip and Marketplace Psychology,”
Journal of Communication
27 (2006): 158–63.

7
.
“Memorable Quotes for ‘Doubt’ (2008/I),” Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com/title/tt0918927/quotes (accessed March 25, 2010).

8
.
G. P. D. Ingram and J. M. Bering, “Children’s Tattling: Early Communicative Biases in the Reporting of Other Children’s Behavior,”
Child Development
81 (2010): 945–57.

9
.
Anita E. Kelly, “Revealing Personal Secrets,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
8 (1999): 105–9.

10
.
Erving Goffman,
Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963).

11
.
R. I. M. Dunbar, “Coevolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language in Humans,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
16 (1993): 681–735.

12
.
Hank Davis and S. Lyndsay McLeod, “Why Humans Value Sensational News: An Evolutionary Perspective,”
Evolution and Human Behavior
24 (2003): 208–16.

13
.
Dalhousie University anthropologist Jerome Barkow has argued persuasively that one of the reasons we become so interested in celebrities is that our evolved minds are essentially duped into thinking these people are among our close circle of friends (or at least, in-group members). Because television, cinema, newspapers, tabloids, the Internet, and so on are all evolutionary novelties—that is, they certainly weren’t present in the ancestral past when human social brains evolved—today our minds largely operate as though these strangers in our living rooms and on the front pages matter in our day-to-day social lives. So, sensationalized stories from the world of entertainment (such as, say, the intriguing “love triangle” of Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Jennifer Aniston) make for especially good gossip. Jerome H. Barkow, “Beneath New Culture Is Old Psychology,” in
The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture,
 ed. Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 626–37.

14
.
R. I. M. Dunbar, “Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective,”
Review of General Psychology
8 (2004): 100–110.

15
.
Ibid.

16
.
Roy F. Baumeister, Liqing Zhang, and Kathleen D. Vohs, “Gossip as Cultural Learning,”
Review of General Psychology
8 (2004): 111–21.

17
.
Robert Louis Stevenson,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(Clayton, DE: Prestwick House, 2005), 11. Originally published in 1886.

18
.
Goethe, the author of
Faust
(1808), once acknowledged of himself, “There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.” Far be it from us to say how secretly deranged our dear Goethe was, but I suspect this was probably a stretch—there are some pretty scary criminals. You get the idea, though. We’re only human, after all.

19
.
Pär Lagerkvist,
The Dwarf
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1953), 20. Originally published in 1944.

20
.
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr,
trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Braziller, 1963).

21
.
K. Causey and D. F. Bjorklund, “The Evolution of Cognition,” in
Evolutionary Psychology: A Critical Reader,
ed. V. Swami (London: British Psychological Society, forthcoming).

22
.
In fact, a recent study by University of Toronto psychologist Chen-Bo Zhong and colleagues demonstrated that ambient darkness—even darkness that is artificially induced by having participants wear sunglasses—encourages antisocial behavior in the laboratory. Presumably, argue the authors, this is because darkness renders in human beings the (often incorrect) perception of increased anonymity. Chen-Bo Zhong, Vanessa K. Bohns, and Francesca Gino, “Good Lamps Are the Best Police: Darkness Increases Dishonesty and Self-Interested Behavior,”
Psychological Science
21 (2010): 311–14.

23
.
After a long historical period during which people may have been able to emigrate to new social groups and start over if they spoiled their reputations, the present media age, in some ways, more accurately reflects the conditions faced by our Pleistocene ancestors. With newspapers, telephones, cameras, television, and the Internet at our disposal, personal details about medical problems, spending activities, criminal and financial history, and divorce records (to name just a few tidbits potentially costly to our reputations) are not only permanently archived, but can be distributed in microseconds to, literally, millions of other people. The Internet, in particular, is an active microcosm of human sociality. From background checks to matchmaking services, to anonymous website browsing, to piracy and identity theft; from Googling ourselves and peers to flaming bad professors (e.g., www.ratemyprofessor.com) and stingy customers (e.g., www.bitterwaitress.com)—the Internet is ancient social psychology meeting new information technology.

24
.
Consider, for example, the rather curious case of confession. From an evolutionary perspective, it seems counterintuitive that a person would ever confess to a wrongdoing, even if guilty. After all, although we humans are expert at making theoretical inferences about unobservable mental states, we are not literally mind readers. Knowing this, and knowing that confession guarantees social exposure of our transgression and usually some form of punishment, it seems the human mind would be designed to motivate absolute discretion in response to accusations of wrongdoing. Yet the urge to confess is real, and it is powerful. (I suspect just as many people have the urge to confess their sins to the dying as the dying are apt to confess to the living, since the dead, of course, tell no tales, which in the present case means that they are the terminal stumps of the gossip line.)
     Florida Atlantic University psychologist Todd Shackelford and I have argued that confession is a preemptive strategy against
statistically probable
exposure of a moral offense. (Jesse M. Bering and Todd K. Shackelford, “Evolutionary Psychology and False Confession,”
American Psychologist
60 [2005]: 1037–38.) Anxiety may be the primary emotional state that precipitates confession, with confession being the only available recourse that has a positive, anxiety-relieving effect; in conditions of likely exposure, confession should be the default response and should be difficult to inhibit. When the probability of exposure is high (as when there is incontrovertible evidence or there are witnesses to the crime), confession might serve to lessen inevitable punishment. In fact, in a study conducted with inmates of Arkansas penitentiaries, all of whom pled guilty to their offenses, we found that retrospective urge-to-confess feelings were significantly and positively correlated with the number of people who the convicts believed knew they had committed the crime. In other words, if they hadn’t confessed, exposure was virtually inevitable anyway, given the number of carriers.
     False confessions are another mystery. Saul Kassin, a forensic psychologist at Williams College, describes several standard police interrogation tactics—including lying about evidence, witnesses, and/or informants—that may contribute to the production of false confessions. (Saul M. Kassin, “On the Psychology of Confessions: Does Innocence Put Innocents at Risk?”
American Psychologist
60 [2005]: 215–28.) But keep in mind that punishment is the product of the group’s belief in the individual’s guilt rather than the actual truth of the matter. If innocents perceive the likelihood of their vindication to be outweighed by the reality of other people’s false belief in their guilt, then false confession may have been an adaptive strategy under certain conditions, particularly in ancestral environments in which trial by jury, judicial appeals, or DNA exclusion could not provide exoneration.
     Through confession, the individual has available multiple means of achieving payoffs in genetic fitness terms. For example, social psychologists have found that when confession is coupled with remorse signals (such as those accompanying genuine guilt), observers are more likely to reason that recidivism is unlikely or that the person has suffered enough through feeling ashamed. This combination of confession and remorse promotes forgiveness and a reduced punishment. In the ancestral past, the advantages of false confession may have therefore overridden the natural inclination to protest one’s suspected guilt; denying guilt, even if one was truly innocent, may actually have had a more calamitous impact on reproductive success if such protests fell on the ears of group members who held uncompromising false beliefs.