On February 22, 2020, crazy Mike Hughes towed a homemade boat into the Mojave Desert and took to the skies. Your goal? Make sure Tierra was flat from space. The third attempt, unfortunately, led to death. Hughes starred shortly after his retirement and death.
hughes nickname, crazy Mike, this may seem very true. Isn’t it crazy to risk your life fighting for a theory that was disproved in ancient Greece?
But Hughes’ conviction, while surprising, is not unique. In all recorded cultures, people have maintained deeply held beliefs that appear to lack arguments in their favor, what we might call “unusual beliefs.”
For evolutionary anthropologists like you, the ubiquity of these types of beliefs is a mystery. The human mind has evolved to form accurate models of the world, and most of the time we do it quite well. So, why do people also adopt and develop beliefs that lack robust tests to support them?
In a new review published in the journal Trends in cognitive scienceI propose a simple answer: People leave to believe in flat Earths, souls and microchipped vaccines for the same reasons they come to believe in anything else. Their experiences lead them to believe that these beliefs are confirmed.
Theories of unusual beliefs
The majority of sociologists have adopted a different point of view on this topic. Some paranormal beliefs, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience have surprised researchers by being completely impervious to tests that contradict them. Therefore, experience is assumed to be irrelevant to the formation of these beliefs. However, they focused on other explanatory factors.
The first common explanation is cognitive domains. Many psychologists encourage humans to use mental skills to think about how the world works. For example, people are very prone to seeing intentions and intelligence behind random events. A lesson of this kind could explain why people seek to believe that gods control phenomena such as climate or disease.
The second factor is social dynamics: people hold certain beliefs not because they are certain of them, but because others have them or because they want to convey something about themselves to others. For example, some conspiracy theorists can hold strange beliefs because these beliefs come from a community of loyal and supportive believers.
Both approaches can partly explain how people come to have unusual beliefs. But they ignore three ways that experience, along with other factors, can shape these thoughts.
Experience as a candidate
First, I suggest that experience can serve as a filter. Identify unusual beliefs that can successfully spread throughout the population.
Let us take, for example, the theory that the Earth is flat. We know for sure that it is incorrect, but it is no less incorrect than the theory that the Earth has a conical shape. So, why is flat grounding so successful compared to other equally incorrect alternatives?
The answer is as obvious as it seems: the Earth appears flat when we stand on it, not cone-shaped. Visual evidence favors the unusual belief over others. By assumption, scientific evidence clearly shows that our planet is round, but it turns out that some people prefer to trust what they say with their eyes.
2. Test it as a spark
My second argument is that experience serves as a spark for extraordinary beliefs. Intrusive experiences, such as auditory hallucinations, are difficult to interpret and understand. Therefore, people do everything they can to explain them, even if appropriately strange-sounding beliefs occur.
For this path, sueño paralysis is a good case study. This phenomenon occurs in the period between sleep and wakefulness: we feel that we are awake but we cannot move or speak. It’s terrifying and very common. Oddly enough, this makes him feel like there is a threatening agent sitting on his chest.
As a scientist, I interpret death paralysis as the result of neurological confusion. But it is not difficult to imagine how someone without scientific training – even if it were all humans throughout history – could interpret the experiment as testing the existence of supernatural beings.
Experience as a tool
For me, the third way involves particularly unusual and interesting beliefs. In many cases, people on the ground adopt these beliefs, but develop overwhelming practices that appear to be the truth.
For example, imagine that you are a farmer living in the highlands of Lesotho, in South Africa, where you are doing ethnographic fieldwork. She has suffered a series of miscarriages and wants to know why. So he goes to a traditional healer, who says he can get the answer from his ancestors by drinking a hallucinogenic drink. We drank the drink, and soon after we began to see spirits who spoke and explained the reasons for his misfortune.
Obviously, an experience like this can strengthen your belief in the existence of spirits. These immersive practices, such as prayer, ritual dance, and religious use of psychoactive substances, create experiences that make the beliefs associated with them easier.
What comes next?
Exceptional beliefs are neither intrinsically good nor bad. In particular, religious beliefs provide meaning, security, and a sense of community to thousands of millions of people.
However, some unusual beliefs cause great concern. Specifically, misinformation about science and politics is very dangerous. By learning how these beliefs are shaped through experience, researchers can find better ways to combat their spread.
However, it is equally important that the perspective I propose can foster greater empathy and closeness among people who hold beliefs that seem very different from others. They are not “sites” and they are not dishonest. Like any other human being, they consider the tests to be on their side.
Eli Elster He is a doctoral candidate in evolutionary anthropology at UC Davis.
This article was originally published on Conversation.