The Psychology of Religious Intuitions: Randomness & Chance

This series explores the psychology of intuition and cognitive illusion, specifically as applied to religious intuitions.  See background and representativeness. 

Randomness & Chance

Consider two questions:

1) You flip a fair coin six times.  Which of the following two sequences is more likely to occur:  H-T-H-T-T-H or H-H-H-H-T-H?

2) A basketball player is on a major hot streak, landing him a spot on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Soon afterwards, his performance drops and he is no longer noteworthy.  Is this evidence for the "Sports Illustrated Jinx," according to which appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated jinxes athletes to bad performance?

1) If you're like most people surveyed in the experiments of famed psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, you probably think the answer to question 1 is the first sequence: it just looks more random, right?  The correct answer is that they are both about equally likely under the laws of chance.

A random series of coin flips is expected to be half heads and half tails only in the very long run. But, people use a mental shortcut (the representativeness heuristic) that expects short runs to be representative of long runs: we think any sequence of coin flips should look as fair as a long run.  This leads to a systematic bias called the clustering illusion: people think clusters are meaningful patterns even when they are frequently produced by chance, because that's not what we expect chance to look like.  We are terrible intuitive statisticians.  Randomness actually creates clusters, according to the laws of probability--but we intuitively think it won't.

Religious intuitions often involve claims about patterns that "could not possibly be due to chance."  (I don't have in mind evolution here, because evolution is actually a systematic process, not a chance process--a point often misunderstood by creationists.)  People cite supposed miracles or facets of the world that "could not be coincidence;" they see shapes of Jesus in crackers when elements cluster together more than they intuitively expect, and see divine signs in the world around them.  But as we have seen, people are notoriously bad at judging intuitively what randomness looks like: we are very prone to seeing patterns where there are none.  The only way to ascertain randomness is by using formal statistical procedures; logic and scientific thinking are trustworthy where intuition leads astray. 

2) If you are like many people, you might intuitively think the Sports Illustrated jinx is real, or at least eery.  But, it is easily explained by an overlooked fact called regression toward the mean. A basketball player's performance is due both to his actual skill level and to some degree of luck--aka random chance.  If someone is suddenly performing well enough to make the cover of SI, they probably have been experiencing unusually good luck. Since unusually good luck is...well, unusual, we don't expect it to continue, meaning that they go back (regress) to how they normally play (their mean). Appearing on the cover of SI just coincides with the time of unusually good luck, which we expect to end anyway. The SI jinx is an example of a general tendency people have: we are very good at seeing cause and effect (or inventing explanations) when random fluctuations are actually at work.

In his book How We Know What Isn't So, psychologist Thomas Gilovich relates an experience he had on a trip to Israel:

"A flurry of deaths by natural causes in the northern part of the country led to speculation about some new and unusual threat. It was not determined whether the increase...was within the normal fluctuation in the death rate that one can expect by chance. Instead, remedies for the problem were quickly put in place.  In particular, a group of rabbis attributed the problem to the sacrilege of allowing women to attend funerals, formerly a forbidden practice. The remedy was a decree that subsequently barred women from funerals in the area. The decree was quickly enforced, and the rash of unusual deaths subsided" (Gilovich, 1991, pg. 28.)

A string of deaths can be expected by chance fluctuations, just like the string of "heads" above. But, people saw a meaningful pattern because we wrongly expect randomness not to come in clusters. Meanwhile, the actual death rate at a given moment is due to the average death rate plus some degree of luck (chance); if the death rate rose unusually, it means there was a string of unusually bad luck that is unlikely to continue (the death rate should regress to its mean). So, surprise, surprise: the rabbis enacted their decree while there was unusually bad luck and the death rate went down to normal, and--voilá!--they see cause and effect.

The moral of the story is that people are biased to see patterns and cause and effect where there is randomness, leading to religious intuitions. Scientific thinking must be employed to understand complex phenomena and the nature of the universe.  In this case, carefully applied statistics can tell us what is random and what is not, when our intuitions turn us into hyperactive pattern-detectors.
  

Further reading:
Gilovich, T. (1991) How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. Chapter 2: Something Out of Nothing: The Misperception and Misinterpretation of Random Data.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1972) Subjective Probability: A Judgment of Representativeness. Cognitive Psychology. 

The Psychology of Religious Intuitions: Representativeness

This series explores the psychology of intuition and cognitive illusion, specifically as applied to religious intuitions.  See background.

Representativeness

Consider the following: 

Lisa is 30 years old, single, bright, and outspoken. She majored in philosophy in college, where she became very concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice. How likely would you judge each of the following possibilities to be?

-Lisa is a bank teller
-Lisa sells insurance
-Lisa is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement. 

If you have the intuitions of most people surveyed in psychology experiments, you would report a low likelihood for the first option and a higher likelihood for the third option. It intuitively fits, right?  In actuality, the third option is less likely than the first: the probability of A and B happening is always lower than the probability of A alone (see here for an explanation). So why do we intuitively think otherwise?

In the 1960s and 1970s, famed psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky found that people aren't usually as rational as we think.  We rely on mental shortcuts called heuristics that save time and energy and are often useful, but are prone to systematic error. It is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy, and it makes us bad intuitive statisticians in predictable ways.

In this case, the mental juicer in our analogy delivers a cup of intuition about what is likely.  The process that makes the juice, though, is not proper statistical calculation. It is a shortcut called "representativeness:" we judge each option in terms of how much it is representative of, or similar to, an imagined prototype.  In this case, the image of Lisa as a bank teller and feminist is more representative of how we imagine someone like her, so we think it's more likely--even though it is not.  Many judgments of probability can be shown to be wrong for this reason.

This heuristic leads people to expect that causes will resemble (be representative of) their effects; that outcomes will resemble the process that created them; that big effects will have big causes; etc. While this is true often enough to be useful, it is often not true: small viruses can cause massive epidemics, and cigarettes can create raging forest fires (small cause, big effect). Or, people incorrectly expect sons to be the same height as their fathers more often than would be predicted by the laws of chance (outcome does not resemble what created it). 

The representativeness heuristic has been argued to underlie magical thinking: in superstition and in homeopathy, people believe that "like cures like"--i.e., tree bark that causes malaria-like symptoms supposedly cures malaria (causes should resemble their effects). Intuitively, many people think something as complex and intelligent as humans must have been caused by something complex and intelligent, rather than a systematic but "blind" natural process (outcomes should resemble the process that created them). Or, many people think that disasters like earthquakes must have deeper spiritual causes, rather than mere tectonic plate shifts (big effects should have big causes).  

But, all these intuitions rely on a shorthand rule known to produce wrong results.  As such, these intuitions cannot be taken at face value; it takes scientific investigation and critical analysis to determine probabilities and causes.  (That being said, if any of these intuitions still have some pull on you, hold on until we get to later installments--I believe representativeness is one contributor to these intuitions, but that there are others as well.) 

Further reading:
Kahneman, D, & Tversky, A. (1974). Judgments Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.

The Psychology of Religious Intuitions

Intuitions are very useful. When it comes to complex decisions (like buying a house or deciding who to marry) or when using expertise (like a grand master in chess deciding on a move), intuition is undoubtedly the way to go, as evidenced by common sense and psychological research.

But people often also use intuitions to try to understand the nature of the universe or religious truth. At this point, are intuitions still reliable or do they lead us astray? If you have any interest in the psychology of intuitions and cognitive illusions, or if you wonder whether and when you should trust religious intuitions (and why or why not), you should find this series of interest. To be up-front about it: I will explore evidence suggesting that many types of religious intuitions are indeed based on cognitive illusions that yield fascinating insight into our minds.

Background

What are intuitions? As I will consider them, intuitions are judgments or feelings we come to without knowing how we came to them. If you reason through each step, it's logic. If you have a gut feeling that you don't know how you got, it's intuition.

Intuitions do not emerge magically or from a sixth sense, though: they emerge from non-conscious processing. They are like a mill, or the juicer shown above: our brains take input, do something to it inside our mental machinery, and out comes an intuition. Because the processing is non-conscious--hidden inside the machinery, in the juicer analogy--we only see the output (the intuition). However, experimental psychologists can study how the juicer works: what input does it take and what does it do to it in order to produce this intuition?

Consider catching a baseball. In a sense, this involves intuition: your brain takes visual input and must solve some complex physics problems to determine where the ball will go, when it will go there, and at what speed. Consciously, though, you just intuitively know. Again, this can be incredibly useful and time-saving.

So what could go wrong? A few things. For example: 1) Intuitions often involve shortcuts, also called heuristics. These shortcuts usually serve us well, but are fallible and may lead to illusions. 2) Our intuitions developed to handle our ordinary-thing world and ordinary time lengths. Their usefulness can break down at the level of the microscopic or the astronomical, or nanoseconds or eons--but people still feel intuitive tugs at those levels.

Therefore, there are many times when our intuitions about what is true must be critically examined or restrained by logic and scientific thinking.

In future installments, I'll use this background to explore specific intuitions and heuristics we often rely on, examine how they work and when they go wrong, and identify how they connect to religious intuition.

Hirhurim Does Philosophy!

Hirhurim has a new post about philosophy and faith. I had been waiting for one of those as blog fodder!

His argument this time: philosopher Leo Strauss once argued "that neither religion nor purely secular philosophy can disprove each other." As such,

His conclusion is that since neither system can be be conclusively proven, the choice of either must be based on faith. Others would revise it to be that the choice of either must be based on non-rational reasons, such as tradition and personal predilections including faith.

What a mind-numbingly...mind-numbing argument. First, what's this abstract dichotomy of "religion" and "philosophy" being unable to disprove each other? I have not read Strauss, but this type of vagueness seems like meaningless hand-waving.

Second, Gil once more retreats into the sort of argument I have mentioned before. Instead of "X is true," he argues "I have the right to believe X without justification." This is intellectually lazy and, frankly, intellectually repulsive. Imagine the conversation:

"Why do you believe in Mormonism?"

"Oh, because I think you could still say that it's possible and plausible if you try hard enough."

"But why do you believe it?"

"Oh, because my personal predilections and upbringing lead me to believe in it as long as it hasn't been unquestionably disproven somehow."

"That's an explanation of why you believe in it, not a reason why you would believe in it."

"Er...Yes."

Unparsimonious Explanations

(A follow-up to "You Assume the Outside World Exists" Part 2)

1. "The ball moved because her hand exerted force on it, and an invisible friction demon pushed it at the same time; the effect is identical to that of her pushing it alone."

2. "The balloon floated because helium is lighter than air, and there is a complex network of magic levitation force field wires hoisting it up; the effect is identical to what we see just if helium is lighter than air."

3. "Species evolved through natural selection, and God guided the process; the effect is identical to that of evolution through natural selection alone."

4. "The Torah was written by humans, and they were divinely inspired; the result is identical to what we would expect if it were written by humans alone."

What Limits of Rationalism?

I'm kind of confused by this post. In discussing the limits of rationalism in Judaism, R' Slifkin writes:

In my view, although some of the Rishonim applied the rationalist approach to Judaism without limitations, we cannot do so. This is for both practical and theoretical reasons.

The practical problem is that

"there is considerable conflict between 21st century academic scholarship and 21st century Orthodox Jewish ideology."

The theoretical problem is that

"I think that there is an irreducible conflict between the very nature of emunah and rationalism."

I agree with both these points, and think they are problems for rationalists who want to believe in Judaism. But R' Slifkin also writes:

I don't see this as reason to entirely discard the rationalist approach. Besides, it's just not possible to do so; you can't make people shut their minds off, and Judaism does not expect people to do so....Nevertheless, I think it should be accepted from the outset that there can be limits to this approach.

This is the part I don't understand. Asking people to accept that there can be limits to where their reason takes them is, indeed, asking people to shut off their minds. I agree that you can't do that. So how does he still wind up with the last sentence of the paragraph, that there still must be limits?

Rationalism and reason don't really have limits; Judaism does. I sympathize with his aim--to keep rationalism and Orthodox Judaism together--but I think he realizes they don't really mesh well, and this piece just comes across as somewhat confused to me. Either you end up "limiting reason"--which he recommends, despite recognizing that this is irrational and likely impossible in the same paragraph--or you end up compromising Jewish belief.

"You Assume the Outside World Exists" Part 2

After someone pointing out that his version of "divine revelation to multiple authors" is unfalsifiable, ModernOrthoprax commenter Moshe writes:

You mean like your strange idea that the world that you perceive actually exists, and that your consciousness is not, say, merely embedded in a memory chip?

I thought I would expand on my prior post on why this is a bad argument. Admittedly, this probably shouldn't be responded to that seriously, but I think it's interesting and I think his argument actually backfires on him.

1) Any time you see someone making an argument of this form, it is just about bound to fail. Moshe's argument here is not of the form, "God exists because [...]" or "The Torah is divine because [...]." Instead, it is of the form, "even though I don't have justification for believing the Torah is divine, I have the epistemic right to believe it is because [...]." The problem with this form of argument is that it can be applied indiscriminately to anything, from belief in the Koran to belief in Last Thursdayism. If you have the "right" to believe in things without justification, than so does everyone. And if everything is justified by your argument, nothing has been justified.

2) I think Moshe's argument backfires on him. The existence of the outside world is not, in fact, a strange idea. It's the simplest inference from and explanation of what we experience every time we open our eyes. Moshe's alternate interpretations of the data, in comparison, are extravagant, and so we reject them (beyond philosophical musings).

You can always make more and more complex interpretations of the same data:

-"The existence of dinosaurs is an unfalsifiable question, since God could have planted dinosaur bones and it would look the same."

-"The theory of gravity is unfalsifiable, since I propose a 'Gravity Demon,' whose tricky actions always make things look like they behave according to the theory of gravity."

This would be silly. A) Relative to the null hypothesis that dinosaurs never existed, dinosaur bones provide evidence that they did. B) Relative to different interpretations of the same data, we accept the simplest inference--that dinosaurs existed--and reject extravagant explanations that are interchangeable with the current evidence (e.g., God planted the bones). This point is the canon of parsimony, aka Occam's Razor. Same for a "gravity demon"--we cut down explanatory dead weight.

I don't see how our everyday experience is much different. A) Relative to the null hypothesis that the world does not exist, we have plenty of evidence and experience to suggest it does (i.e. open your eyes). B) Relative to alternate interpretations of the same data, we settle on the simplest one--that the world exists as we experience it. Proposing evil demons tricking us or brains in vats would be an extravagant interpretation.

This is where I think Moshe's argument backfires: the same reason that we accept that the the outside world exists is the same reason I reject divine revelation to the multiple authors of the Torah. Instead of the explanation "humans wrote this work," Moshe proposes, "humans wrote this work AND it was 'divinely inspired' AND it looks exactly the same as if humans wrote it." Obviously, the canon of simplicity dictates that we accept the first interpretation of the exact same data.

Thus, the same logic dictates that I accept the existence of the external world (the simplest interpretation) and reject divine inspiration of the Torah (an extravagant interpretation), rather than Moshe's claim to the contrary.

CAN one still doubt anything and everything? Sure; induction can always be mistaken, a complex explanation could end up correct, etc. But is it reasonable, consistent, and common-sensical to disbelieve in divine inspiration of the Torah in light of basic beliefs about the external world? I believe it is.