Religion, Belief and Social Connections – An Interview with Jonathan Morgan and Connor Wood

Geoff Mitelman: Hi, I’m Rabbi Geoff Mitelman. I’m the founding director of Sinai and Synapses, and I’m thrilled to be sitting here with two of our former Sinai and Synapses fellows, Connor Wood and Jonathan Morgan, who not only are both former Sinai and Synapses fellows, not only both went through the Religion and Science Program at Boston University, not only are they both researchers for the Center for Mind and Culture, they’ve actually just published a chapter in a book together, focusing on individualism and intuitive and analytic thinking, and the implications of that – those two different ways of thinking, for both religion and science. And having read a little bit of their article, and they had a blog post on Patheos a few weeks ago, I’m excited to be able to talk to the two of them about their work and this new research that they’re doing. So Connor and Jonathan, welcome.

Connor Wood and Jonathan Morgan: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Geoff Mitelman: So why don’t you guys just start a little bit about some of the work that you are exploring, and a little bit about this new book chapter that you’ve published?

Jonathan Morgan: Yeah, I can start things off and then [I’d] be eager to hear from Connor as well. So I think part of what we’re writing about is [that] within the psychology of religion, or the cognitive science of religion, there’s this persistent finding that people who are more analytically-minded tend to be religious nonbelievers. They tend to be either atheist or have not very conventional views of God. And so this has been found across a bunch of different studies. I think the most recent meta-analysis had like 35 studies, over 15,000 people. It seems to be a pretty persistent trend of intuitive thinking being associated with religious belief and analytical thinking being associated with non-belief.

And so the finding is pretty persistent, but I think what Connor and I are really interested in is the explanation for like, trying to figure out why this association would hold. And so, in the past, a lot of the explanation has been dependent on this view of religious beliefs as these intuitive defaults, you know, like we have these cognitive predispositions towards theory of mind, perceiving agency and purpose in the world, and so these intuitive dispositions get sort of elaborated into religious belief. If you are an analytical thinker, part of the tendency of analytical thinking is to sort of reflect on, or be skeptical about, these intuitions, and so the theory was that this analytical thinking, this sort of causally is skeptical about these intuitive dispositions and then that leads to disbelief.

So I mean, that seems like a fairly straightforward explanation, and is probably part of what’s going on, but I think Connor and I, coming from a humanities background, have a rich appreciation of the sort of beliefs that religious beliefs are, and that they’re really connected to social groups and social dynamics. So it’s not just a propositional belief about the type of world we live in, but it’s also about who we affiliate with, and sort of, what we imagine about the world, and our connection to those groups. So I think that’s where Connor has really done a lot of work and sort of came up with this Social Foundations Hypothesis to look at how bringing the social dimension into the equation changes this relationship, or how we view this relationship. 

Geoff Mitelman: And it sounds like it’s important – a lot of times when I teach, I’ll get a pushback about religion, because they conflate religion and faith and spirituality, but religion is really from the Latin, of “religio,” of a connector, that there is a social element of this that is arguably, I think, more important than any proposition or connection with the divine. Religion is, by definition, something that is social.

Connor Wood: That’s certainly what Durkheim said. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim famously said that religion is “eminently social,” and argued that rituals and religious beliefs help bind believers into a shared collective that he called a “moral community,” or a church. By moral community, that doesn’t mean like a good community, it means a community that shares specific moral understandings about how we’re supposed to behave towards one another, what kind of roles we’re supposed to take on, you know, how you’re supposed to treat the rabbi in your temple, in your community, how you’re supposed to treat people who are just coming out for a bar mitzvah.

These distinctions of roles sort of being unified into a coherent unity is what Durkheim talked about. And I think that is true. I wouldn’t say that people who have, like William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, who argued that – he didn’t really argue, he just kind of said, “look, I’m going to look at religion as an individual affair, as just what people believe in their inner core.” And I wouldn’t discount what he has to say about religion, either.

So just to finesse that point, I totally agree, and our chapter lays out that religion is deeply, deeply social, it’s a Durkheimian chapter, I think. But religion is so complex, and it just covers so many different areas and nooks and crannies and heights and depths within human life, that no single perspective really ever nails it down. The fact that I just said that does pin me as a humanities scholar, by the way (laughs).

So yeah, I think that our chapter sort of tries to bring in that Durkheimian understanding of the connection between religious beliefs and social commitments to help shed light on this relatively reliable, although weak, correlation between analytic thinking and irreligion – non-religion.

And so for example, we argue that when people make assertions about what they believe, like “I believe that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet” (that’s the Shahada of Islam – that’s the core belief of Islam), when people make that claim, they’re not just saying “I propositionally believe that there is a god named Allah and he sent Muhammad to be his prophet on earth.” They’re also saying “I accept X, Y and Z authorities,” “I accept the Qur’an,” “I probably accept the word, you know, the teachings of the imam that I know and the mosque that I attend,” “I probably believe X, Y and Z about how marriage should function, about how people should relate to their neighbors, what you can do with your extra income” (pay Zakat, the tithe). 

So there’s a multivocality to these kind of beliefs that are not just – that make them not just one-pointed beliefs about a particular proposition, but a sort of signifier of all these other things that you have to probably believe and do and expect, in order to be part of a functioning religious community.

Geoff Mitelman: And you talk a little bit about how one of the challenges of analytic thinking is inherent skepticism, of, “wait a second, why should I believe this?” And that kind of perspective can also often undermine authority, which is, I think, really important when you’re looking at, from a scientific perspective, science – one of the great lines is “science is true whether you believe in it or not.” You’re designed to be impersonal in that way, but that isn’t necessarily the right framework when you are at a wedding, or at any kind of ritual there.  Well, why does somebody need to put this particular object in this particular place at this particular time? There’s no necessarily objective reason to do that, but there’s a social function as well.

Jonathan Morgan: Yeah, I think that’s sort of part of what we’re also arguing in the chapter, is that there are actually moments, or social groups, where analytical thinking is definitely the right way to go. So like, if you’re in a cosmopolitan setting, you’re interacting with a bunch of different people who you might or might not see again, you can’t really assume that you and these people share the same sort of set of norms, so your best way of interacting is gonna be sort of at this analytical mode, where nothing is taken for granted – you’re not sort of adopting these tacit norms.

But there’s also other sort of social organizations that are – well, in the chapter we call that sort of “dense sociality.” So in the forms of groups you have a lot of tacit understanding about the way things are. You have a lot of obligations to each other. And that mode of cooperating and interacting in the group is incredibly complex. Like, if you had to parse all of the interactions and the cost and benefit of helping so-and-so now, so that they’ll help you later, the calculus of that would get way too complex for us to handle. But intuitively, we’re very effective at handling that, and like managing our own reputation, and who to trust, and who not to trust.

And so part of what we’re trying to highlight is that oftentimes, religiosity fosters this sort of social density. Not always – like you can definitely be in religious groups that are highly individualistic and sort of foster a sort of analytical thinking – but oftentimes, being religious means being involved in a community where you’re sort of accepting these tacit norms and abiding by them. And there are a lot of advantages to that.  And so that’s one of the reasons why we would expect being part of that community to actually foster a sort of intuitive way of approaching the world, and that intuitive way would be pretty functional and strategic within that setting – like, it would pay off in the long run. And if you are in that setting, and are very analytically minded, I think that sort of comes across as challenging these identities, and challenging everyone else’s trust and reliance on the group, so sometimes that can be a very dangerous – dangerous, you know, metaphorically I guess, position to be in. You know, you’re going to stand out, and it’s going to be uncomfortable.

Geoff Mitelman: So another question I wanted to ask – this is a line that a lot of innovators use, and I take it from one of my teachers, Rabbi Irwin Kula, who asks that, really, any kind of question, from a business perspective, from a scientific perspective, from a religious perspective, is “what’s the job this gets done, and for whom?” And these are going to be different questions for different places, in different communities. Being able to say “I want to be skeptical about every single claim,” that’s a great job to get done in the scientific community; it’s not going to be so valuable at a wedding, you know. You’re not going to say, “well, wait a second, are you actually married, can you prove to me that you’re married?”

So how does that play into some of your research here about individualism and the community and intuitive thinking and analytic thinking? What’s the job, in your mind, each of those gets done, and do they get a different job done for different people?

Connor Wood: Yeah, I think that’s a great way of parsing the different roles that intuitive or holistic vs. analytical thinking play in our lives. Because they do play different roles for different folks at different times. When, like Jonathan was just saying, if you’re in a market setting, a cosmopolitan setting – a trading port – you know, midtown Manhattan, Cambridge, Massachusetts, places where there are many different cultures from many different backgrounds all sort of interacting at once, people aren’t going to share the normal, you know, tacit background assumptions that you do if you’re all part of one community. So you have to sort of lower the amount that you rely on intuitive expectations in order to be able to interact helpfully, you know.

And that sort of market-oriented social surrounding is also really important for science. I mean, science really got going in Europe after the Renaissance, often in trading settings, right, like the Northern European cities, where you had ports where, you know, people come in and out of these different goods and services. So I think that’s a setting where analytic thinking really does a great job. You need to be able to question your assumptions and focus on things that everybody can objectively agree on. Whether I speak Dutch and you speak Portuguese, we can both agree that these tulips are valuable, and that that gold is also valuable, and we can exchange them in our broken versions of each other’s languages.

What intuitive thinking is good for (and this is not something directly that we have in the chapter, this is actually a project that I’m pursuing right now in a separate paper that’s forthcoming later this year with my colleague John Shaver at the University of Otago in New Zealand): intuitive thinking helps institutional thinking. It helps us to deal with institutions, which are in the words, in the thought of the philosopher John Searle, institutions are social facts, beliefs that we have that are not based on objective reality, but which instead we co-create through performance and obligation and what he calls status functions.

So you can have a room that’s just a bunch of walls and a door, but if you treat it like a court room, and you say – and then somebody comes in wearing robes and then bangs the gavel and says “Court is in session,” right, that’s an illocutionary act, as John Austin called it. It’s a thing that we say, that only by saying it, is automatically true, if it’s said by the right person in the right context. So “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” that’s another version of an illocutionary act. When the officiant at a wedding says that, it is automatically true by tautology at that moment.

So these types of behaviors, these institutional behaviors, where we co-create something that didn’t exist in the objective world before that – that’s what makes human sociality possible. That’s the difference between humans and chimpanzees and gorillas. Gorillas and chimpanzees have social emotions, sometimes they even cooperate a little bit, they have reciprocity, right, like “I’ll groom you and you’ll groom me but neither one of us will groom that guy over there because we don’t like him,” right, they have these bands and cohorts and alliances.

Humans have badges, we have roles, we have statuses, that are not reducible to dominance, right. The only role differences in a chimpanzee band is “I’m the alpha, you’re omega, watch out,” right, or whatever. It’s dominance. We have lawyers, priests, professors, husbands, wives, teachers, students. We have these roles that are abstract, that you can move into and out of, and that remain the same, even as people move in and out of them.

So my contention, and I think in that separate paper, and Jonathan and I, in our chapter that was just published, argue that that way of dealing with the world, co-creating a reality, that depends on some level of intuitive thinking. Why? Because you have to accept that it’s true before it even happens, right. If you say “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” and I say “yeah, prove it,” well, at some level, if everybody says “yeah, prove it,” it’s not going to be true. You have to have a certain level of acceptance.

Geoff Mitelman: And the word that I keep coming back to in my mind is “trust,” in all of these different elements. That analytic thinking is very time-consuming, and a lot of mental energy. And intuitive thinking allows you to make faster decisions there, and if you’re saying “I’m going to trust this part of it, or this menu of different pieces,” it lightens the cognitive load, in the same way of being able to say I can trust that when I go to the ATM and I withdraw 20 dollars, that 20 dollars can then be used for the grocer down the street, and we don’t even have to interact in any kind of way, because there’s the trust of the institution, that Chase is going to ensure my money there. And I will trust what my religious authority is going to say about these different elements, or I am going to trust what the scientific community is going to say.

Now, how that manifests itself is slightly different in all those different elements, but the undergirding of all that is “I am going to trust the institution that I’m part of, and if I’m too distrusting of that, then society is going to break down.”

Jonathan Morgan: Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting way to think about it, because I think it points to how both of these sort of cognitive processing styles, cognitive reasoning styles, are actually about – they’re serving these very social functions. Like, it points to the way that they demonstrate which institutions we do trust and which we don’t trust.

And so part of what we’re saying is that there are some institutions [where] the institutional grammar kind of relies on this analytical mode of thinking, it relies on that reflective, very conscious, and slow mode of processing. And so if you trust that sort of institution, if you spend most of your time in that sort of institution, you’re going to become very accustomed to using sort of analytical modes of thinking for approaching the world. And if you trust and spend most of your time in an institution that’s relying much more on these sort of tacit norms, where the interactions aren’t mediated by a bank or government or the law, but instead are mediated by these sort of emotional connections that we have with people and each other, then you’re going to become accustomed to trusting intuitive thinking. Like, over the long run, that is the way that is the most beneficial for interacting within that community.

So I think that trust – what I hear within that is affiliation, like, where, who do we buy into? What is our connection? What is our identity?

And I think part of what I see within this chapter, and part of my driving interest in this sort of association, is reflecting in the past for a time when analytical thinkers remained religious and became these wild theologians, that, like, they were very attuned to inconsistencies within religious thought, and so were playing out and trying to resolve those problems, and creating very systematic, very rational portrayals of religion and defenses of religion.

And I think we exist within a cultural moment now, where if you’re an analytical thinker, you’re sort of faced with what feels like a contradiction of  – you either have to suppress that and partake in your religious community without questioning and trying to like, address or reinterpret things, or you just move and join a scientific community. And to me, that seems like a sort of unnecessary forced choice.

And I think it really depends on religious context and cultural context – I think that forced choice plays out oftentimes for Evangelicals within the US. And so I think it will be interesting, as this research pushes cross-culturally, to see which context this association between religious belief and intuitive thinking – in which context that association holds, and where it is nonexistent, because analytical thinkers remain religious, just engage with religion in a different way.

Connor Wood: There was a paper that came out, maybe six months ago or so, right around the time that our chapter came out, that found that the relationship between analytical thought styles and non-religion is not always robust across cultures. And that’s work that Jonathan and our other co-author, Catherine Caldwell-Harris, have looked at – the way that analytical thinking plays out in religion in Turkey, which is a much more sort of uniformly religious culture in the United States, not only in being more religious, but in being all basically one religion.

So there are some – Jonathan might be able to speak to that better – but some of the findings in different cultures find that when you’ve got a culture where everybody just is in the same faith world together, in a society, being analytic doesn’t necessarily always make you less religious, because it’s almost just not an option. I mean, it’s not like there aren’t Turkish atheists – in fact, we know some, one of our colleagues is an atheist who’s from Turkey – but it’s just much more rare, and it’s not as live of an option, to use another term from William James.

Jonathan Morgan: Yeah, I think, just to speak briefly about that research, part of what we found is that this association was, in some ways, moderated. It depended on socioeconomic status. So it seemed like the wealthier, the better-off, your family was, the stronger that connection between analytical thinking and religious non-belief.

And so I think that points to a lot of the complex social functions that religion’s serving. That, you know, if you’re wealthy enough that you can rely on these other institutions, then you don’t necessarily have to – you know, that pathway becomes open towards nonbelief. But you can disaffiliate without any, like, strong ramifications or negative ramifications.

But if you aren’t as wealthy, aren’t as well-off, and you really need these affiliative networks to hold you up and to support you, then you know that, if you’re an analytical thinker or an intuitive thinker, you’re going to maintain that affiliation.

And that’s not to say that, you know,  the more wealthy someone becomes, this becomes a necessary association – I think it’s still sort of dependent on this broader context of secularity, where, like, religious worldviews are put in opposition to scientific worldviews, so that you get to choose one or the other, and the middle ground is sort of eroded between them.

Geoff Mitelman:  It sounds like some of the research that you’ve been doing as well is what’s called often the WEIRD morality of Western, Educated, Intellectual, Rich and Democratic – that a lot of the research is done by and for people in part of that community, and that’s a sort of an assumption of “that’s how the world is,” versus in different places – I’m thinking, you know, you mentioned Turkey, but I’m also thinking about – I think, was it the research of Iceland, or Denmark, one of the Scandinavian countries, of having a lot of happiness and connection there. They’re atheistic, they tend to be more atheistic, but they also tend to be very similar culturally. So it’s not the religion there, but it’s a different culture, and again there are very dense social networks there, versus, I think, in America and a lot of Western Europe, there’s a lot more of an individuality that’s there. I’m just curious if that’s–  if that is something that you’ve noticed, or if that’s an accurate statement?

Connor Wood: Yeah, I think we’re definitely looking at that WEIRD phenomenon –that’s Western, Educated, Industrialized, Democratic. That phrase comes from Joseph Henrich and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia. It’s this idea that this small segment of the world, Western Europe and North America, tends to be much more individualistic and more analytically-minded than the rest of the world.

And you know, one of the things that I think that’s attributable to – which I don’t know if the other researchers who really do the WEIRD studies, like Joe Henrich and these other guys, I don’t know if they’ve published anything on this – Jonathan might know – but really it’s a legacy of Protestantism. I mean, the areas that are super WEIRD in that acronym – they’re all Protestant, historically. Western Europe, right, like Northwestern Europe, where the trading cultures have sort of a different cultural context and a need than Southern Europe – that sort of helped exacerbate the splits between Catholic Europe and Protestant Europe. And then North America, which was colonized by France and England, but eventually was sort of taken over by England in this post-Protestant era.

It’s an individualistic version of Christianity, it’s a less ritualistic version – that’s one of the main points of Protestantism, is famously, especially in the reformed tradition, the thinkers who instituted Protestantism downplayed the importance of sacraments like communion, like weddings and marriages, like last rites. So in the Catholic version of Christianity and the Orthodox version, there are seven sacraments. And in Protestantism, even in Lutheranism, which did the least tweaking, there’s only two. There’s only baptism and communion.

And that deritualization of Christianity – if you think back to our talk about institutional thinking and the acceptance of authority and affiliation, the less ritual you have in your religious and social environment, the less reinforcement you’re going to get for the worldview, for the set of norms, the expectations, and for the close social density, right. Like the Catholic countries of Southern Europe are known as being more collectivistic – not in a Marxist sense, but in a specific psychological sense, which means that they’re very closely, densely knit together.

Think about, like, an Italian immigrant neighborhood in New York City in the 1920’s. Everybody knows everybody, and everybody shoulders each other’s burdens, and gossips about one another, and goes to the same church, right. Protestantism sort of loosened that knot, and – didn’t get rid of it, because we humans need that knot – but it loosened it, and I think that that WEIRD phenomenon that we’re looking at now is, in part, a sort of historical legacy of that change to the ritual landscape of the West.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, and how we often don’t think about how immersed we are in a particular culture until we look at it from the outside of “this is a different God,”  like “what we do is the right way, the right thing, and the way everyone else does it is weird” – that’s the lower case “weird” there.

I want to give you a chance for any last thoughts or other pieces that you want to share about this really fascinating work that you’re doing.

Jonathan Morgan: You know, this chapter was an effort of summarizing a lot of the theory and trying to bring different pieces of research that were sort of tangential, but bring them directly to bear on this relationship between intuitive thinking and religious belief. But it was still pretty theoretical.

So right now, Connor and I are in the midst of collecting and beginning to analyze it, and so actually trying to bring some empirical work to bear on this, because I think, so far, the empirical studies that have been done sort of point to this important role of social cognition and social relationships within the broader relationship between cognitive style and religiosity. So we’re trying to bring some new evidence to bear on that and directly test how it is that this embeddedness within socially dense communities impacts that association.

I think – our hope is that that provides sort of the crucial factor, so that as we go, and are comparing different cultures and different social contexts, researchers can be attuned to that as an important variable that’s going to change which way this association goes, and where we should expect it to hold or not hold.

Geoff Mitelman: Connor?

Connor Wood: Yeah, so that’s one thing I wanted to mention, which is this project that Jonathan and I have going on, also with John Shaver from the University of Otago. So there is a kind of group of us who are pursuing a related number of tracks down this path together. We actually, I think, just finished collecting data. Is that right, Jonathan?

Jonathan Morgan: Yeah.

Connor Wood:  I’ve been away on my honeymoon, so I’ve been out of contact in the desert for a while, but I think – so now we have a bunch of data that we pre-registered, which is a new practice in the social sciences where you go online and you list exactly which analyses you’re going to do on the data before you even collect it.

Geoff Mitelman: Oh wow.

Connor Wood: So that when you do the analyses, you don’t get to kind of like, tweak it, or look for another connection, or do what they call “p-hacking,” which is looking for significant correlations by looking at all the connections you can. And that project is looking at the relationship between holistic and analytical thinking and religiosity, especially the social dimensions of it, to apply that social foundation’s hypothesis to real world, self-report data.

So,  I think that’s one last thing – well, actually two last things – that I wanted to mention, is from our chapter, we also draw on the work of a psychologist from Yale named David Rand and his workers – he’s actually a colleague of Gordon Pennycook, who edited the book and shepherded us through the publication process. David’s work at Rand has found some pretty interesting correlations between analytical thinking and cooperation, namely that analytical thinking seems to make people a little more transactional in the way that they deal with cooperation. So when you’re – if you’re cooperating in a little group, where you’re all going to see each other again, day in and day out, it makes a lot of sense to cooperate. Because if I don’t cooperate with you today, then tomorrow you’re not going to cooperate with me, and you know, we both hurt.

But if it’s just a one-off scenario, like I’m visiting your big city for one day, and I buy something from you at your store, and I’m never going to see you again, you’re never going to see me again, then in a purely rational format, it would make sense for me to try and cheat you, and vice versa, because we’re never going to see each other again and there’s no danger of losing a potential beneficial relationship down the road.

Well, the work that David Rand and others have done at Yale seems to show that analytical thinking makes people a little more likely to choose that defection option in the context where it makes sense. And I don’t mean that in a moral sense – I mean that in a, you know, just transactional sense. Whereas intuitive thinkers, or intuitive thinking, seems to be associated with choosing the cooperative option, regardless of whether it benefits the doer, the agent at that particular time.

So one of the conclusions we suggest in our chapter is that religious beliefs, because they are tethered to intuitive acceptance of a social norm, of the beliefs that are instituted by authorities that we accept, they also are a fairly credible signal that the person who espouses them is not going to defect on cooperative expectations opportunistically. That is, that somebody who’s very – seems very devout, and very much believes in whatever religious system, you know, you’re talking about, they’re probably also not going – they don’t, so they’re showing, by definition, that they don’t question the authority of the circle, right.

So that means that it’s pretty likely that they’re also not going to question the cooperative expectations that come with that, right, like I’m not going to, like “I’m going to pay the tithe, I’m going to offer my home to guests if that’s what’s expected – if it’s not, then I won’t.” We’re not saying that religious people are better morally, we’re saying that they’re more likely to just follow the social norms without questioning. That can be good or bad depending on what the norms are, but it’s just an important aspect of this theory that we put together, or this hypothesis.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, what’s interesting – and thank you both for taking the time to talk – what’s fascinating about a lot of the research that you’re doing is obviously using the analytic elements to understand a lot of the intuitive questions, because you’ve got to be analytic to be able to be a good scientist, but looking at questions of religion from a social perspective, because a lot of the religion and science discussion, as I know both of you know, is trying to prove why religion is useless or worthless, or why there’s no God. And the work that you’re doing, I think, is designed to be “here’s what the good science is going to say,” and religious communities can use this or not, but it’s really interesting and valuable data for us to be able to explore, anyone who identifies as a religious person or a religious leader, to be able to say “what does this data mean about the community that I’m a part of, and how do I build a sense of trust and connection and community, as we all try to balance what does it mean to be an individual who is also a part of a society – where do we draw that balance?”

And it’s not that there’s necessarily always the right/wrong conversation, but when is it going to be appropriate to be pushed in one direction or the other? And the research that you’re doing is really helping us shed a lot of light on that dynamic. So thank you both for the fascinating work you’re doing and taking some time to talk this morning.

Connor Wood: Thanks a lot, Geoff.

Jonathan Morgan: Yeah, thank you Geoff. It’s always fun.