III IINTERNATIIONAL ONLIINE CONFERENCE ON RELIIGIIOUS STUDIIES III IN TERNATIO NAL ONLIN E CONFERENCE ON RELIG IO US STUDIE S NTERNAT ONAL

ONL NE CONFERENCE ON REL G OUS STUD ES COMPARATIIVERELIIGIION:::FROMSUBJJECTTOPROBLEM COMPARATIV E R ELIG IO N F ROM S UBJE CT T O P ROBLEM COMPARAT VE REL G ON FROM SUB ECT TO PROBLEM

Prof. GREGORY D. ALLES Professor of Religious Studies, McDaniel College, USA galles @ mcdaniel.edu IS RELIGION SOMETIMES A BAD BET? OBSERVATIONS ON RELIGIOUS BELIEF, RISK SEEKING, AND LOSS AVERSION On March 10, 2002, police opened fire in the town of Panvad in eastern Gujarat. Two people were killed, six injured. The shooting was provoked when divsis (tribals) began to attack Muslim shops and homes, looting them and setting them on fire. That violence was loosely related to antiMuslim riots that broke out in much of Gujarat after a train carriagenumber S/6 of the Sabarmati Expresseither caught or was set on fire near Godhra, Gujarat, on February 27, 2002. The carriage was full of Hindu kar-sevaks, religious volunteers, returning from Ayodhya, where Hindu nationalists destroyed a mosque in 1992 and were agitating to build a temple. 59 people died in the blaze. AntiMuslim riots broke out in reprisal. After the Panvad violence, reports began to circulate about what was in the minds of the divsis that led them to attack. According to one report, they had come to believe that the police had come to believe that they, the tribals, possessed a mantra that would make the police rifles powerless; therefore, the police were afraid to use their weapons, and the tribals could loot with impunity. Another report suggested that a young bavo (shaman) was convinced that his special knowledge had made it impossible for him to be killed, and he was leading the looters (Devy 2006: 46). There were other reports, too, but these are the ones I want to mention. They remind me of seemingly reliable reports from an earlier era about people who came to believe that religion had somehow made them impregnable in the face of superior military technology, such as bullets (cf. Wilson 1973). Such practices apparently still exist today, if popular reports of Sak Yant tattooing in Cambodia and Thailand are accurate. Here I want to focus on a single example of this kind of behavior: the ghost shirt among the Lakota and Arapaho in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Beliefs such as those of the divsis in Panvad and the ghost shirt invite us to raise certain cognitive questions about religion and, less directly, about its evolution. I can make those questions clear by invoking the words of one of my undergraduate students, Aaron Dunn, very selectively and out of context: [T]hese theories have a patch of fuzziness in [the] explanatory chain[s] that [link] environmental causation to behavioral output. [According to one theory,] cognitive regularities lead to the widespread [dissemination of] minimally counterintuitive agent concepts, then something happens, then we have religions. Obviously [Pascal Boyer] is a bit more sophisticated with his wording, but his theory is almost this unsatisfying. This characterization is overly broad and dismissive, but it does point out that current cognitive models do not get us all the way to developed religion. In the students words, there is an explanatory fuzzy patch. One part of that fuzzy patch concerns what many philosophers, among them Jerry Fodor (e.g., 1981), call propositional attitudes, the relations people have to concepts. (Eliminative materialists deny the existence of propositional attitudes, but they seem to be sailing a sinking ship.) Religion does not simply result when a religious concept is transmitted. I remember lots of Hindu concepts, sometimes better than Christian concepts, but that does not make me a Hindu. Furthermore, minimally counterintuitive agents are extremely common in folktales, as a quick read through
III III :::

III IINTERNATIIONAL ONLIINE CONFERENCE ON RELIIGIIOUS STUDIIES III IN TERNATIO NAL ONLIN E CONFERENCE ON RELIG IO US STUDIE S NTERNAT ONAL ONL NE CONFERENCE ON REL G OUS STUD ES COMPARATIIVERELIIGIION:::FROMSUBJJECTTOPROBLEM COMPARATIV E R ELIG IO N F ROM S UBJE CT T O P ROBLEM COMPARAT VE REL G ON FROM SUB ECT TO PROBLEM

Ramanujans (1991) collection makes apparent, but that does not make all folktales religious, either. Religion requires in addition that people adopt certain propositional attitudes toward religious concepts. (It may require other things as well, but they do not interest me at the moment.) Some of the propositional attitudes most commonly associated with what we call religion cluster around the term belief. Let us, then, reformulate my students observation this way: one pressing task for the cognitive science of religion is to identify the mechanisms that result in people adopting propositional attitudes like belief toward certain concepts, including concepts that are often called minimally counterintuitive. I make no pretense of being able to identify all of the mechanisms responsible for these propositional attitudes, but I think I may be able to identify one. In what follows, I try. The Ghost Shirt and Its Classification The ghost shirt emerged in the context of the ghost dance. (The major source is a classic ethnographic text: Mooney 1991 [1896].) The dance centered on the figure of a northern Paiute named Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson, who had a vision in the late 1880s, probably January 1, 1889. It promised a return to a past that was better than the present: the ancestors would be raised from the dead, traditional means of livelihood would once again be viable, and the white man would disappear. In many ways, the ghost dance resembled enthusiastic, millenarian, 19th-century U.S. American Christianity, a kind of pre-Pentecostalism among indigenous peoples. The central ritual seems to have been prolonged round dances, leading to ecstatic religious phenomena. But it is difficult to judge the exact extent of Christian influence. Noting the interest that Mormons took in the movement (they expected a Messiah in 1890), James Mooney (1991: 790) suggested that a Mormon ritual shirt may have inspired Lakota practitioners to add to the dance the innovation known as the ghost shirt. The ghost shirt was not an invariable part of the ghost dance. Wovoka himself is said to have explicitly rejected it, as did most people who participated in the dance (Mooney, 1991: 791). But among the Lakota the ghost shirt became common. Mooney reproduces a report from George Sword, an Oglala Lakota police officer and, later, a judge. All the men and women made holy shirts and dresses they wear in dance. The persons dropped in dance would all lie in great dust the dancing make. They paint the white muslins they made holy shirts and dresses out of with blue across the back, and alongside of this is a line of yellow paint. They also paint in the front part of the shirts and dresses. A picture of an eagle is made on the back of all the shirts and dresses. On the shoulders and on the sleeves they tied eagle feathers. They said that the bullets will not go through these shirts and dresses, so they all have these dresses for war. Their enemies weapons will not go through these dresses. (Mooney 1991: 798, English sic) There can be no question that indigenous people were familiar with guns and bullets. They would never have expected regular clothing to provide protection against being shot. Nevertheless, reports suggest that some people did take the claims about the ghost shirts seriously. Unfortunately, as at Wounded Knee, they did not work.

III III :::

III IINTERNATIIONAL ONLIINE CONFERENCE ON RELIIGIIOUS STUDIIES III IN TERNATIO NAL ONLIN E CONFERENCE ON RELIG IO US STUDIE S NTERNAT ONAL ONL NE CONFERENCE ON REL G OUS STUD ES COMPARATIIVERELIIGIION:::FROMSUBJJECTTOPROBLEM COMPARATIV E R ELIG IO N F ROM S UBJE CT T O P ROBLEM COMPARAT VE REL G ON FROM SUB ECT TO PROBLEM

I am not sure quite how to classify the ghost shirt. Some might classify it as magical, not religious. For the time being I want simply to ignore that distinction. Perhaps religion and magic really do result from the operation of different cognitive mechanisms. That would be a point well worth making (e.g., Srensen 2007). In the present context, however, the first order of business is to identify the mechanisms that produce beliefs and behavior, and then determine whether it makes sense to distinguish religion from magic. I am also not sure whether the ghost shirt is minimally counterintuitive in the technical sense of the term. There can be no question that the ghost shirt was unusual. We may be familiar with flak jackets and other kinds of shirts that stop bullets, but they do so as a result of the kinds of material that they contain. Ghost shirts are different. They were supposed to stop bullets because they were ritually consecrated and decorated with religious symbols. Does that make them counterintuitive? To be counterintuitive in the technical sense, the shirt needs to violate expectations associated with the highest-order cognitive domain to which it belongs, either by transfering expectations from another domain or by violating the expectations of its own domain (Slone 2006: ???). Does a ghost shirt do either? If a solid object passes through another solid, that is usually taken as a violation of folk physics, as when we talk about spirits. I take it, then, that solid object is a highest-order domain. The ghost shirt, however, is more subtle. It involves a solid object not penetrating another solid object. Is it, then, an expectation for some highest-order domain that a rapidly moving solid object, such as a bullet, will be able to pentrate and tear a thin sheet of flexible solid material, such as a piece of cloth? I suspect that all human beings share this expectation. It requires no more experience of the world than a stick penetrating a leaf. But at what age does this awareness develop, and how? Does it really matter? Are highest-order domain expectations so very much different from other expectations that it is justifiable to invoke violations of those, and only those, expectations in defining counterintuitivity, or do they simply represent the earliest expectations that the human mind formulates, being gradually refined by the repeated operation of the same learning processes until people come to realize that leaves, cloth, paper, and other flexible, sheet-like solids are penetrable? I will not worry about such questions here. I will continue to work with the ghost shirt and propose a possible mechanism to explain how the mind comes to associate propositional attitudes such as belief with unusual concepts such as ghost shirt. I will leave for future consideration the question of the extent over which the mechanism operates. That question is logically secondary to the question of whether it operates at all. The Ghost Shirt as a Cognitive Puzzle The ghost shirt and related phenomena seem always to have posed cognitive puzzles. About the belief that bullets would not pierce human skin James McLaughlin, an agent at Standing Rock reservation wrote: It would seem impossible that any person, no matter how ignorant, could be brought to believe such absurd nonsense, but as a matter of fact a great many Indians of this agency actually believe it, it now includes some of the Indians who were formerly numbered with the progressive and more intelligent. And many of our very best Indians [sic] appear dazed and undecided when talking of it, their inherent superstition having been thoroughly aroused (Mooney 1991: 787). Some ethnologists concluded long ago that it is useless to speculate on the mental condition of men who could seriously report or believe such things (Mooney 1991: 819, commenting on Shoshone and
III III :::

III IINTERNATIIONAL ONLIINE CONFERENCE ON RELIIGIIOUS STUDIIES III IN TERNATIO NAL ONLIN E CONFERENCE ON RELIG IO US STUDIE S NTERNAT ONAL ONL NE CONFERENCE ON REL G OUS STUD ES COMPARATIIVERELIIGIION:::FROMSUBJJECTTOPROBLEM COMPARATIV E R ELIG IO N F ROM S UBJE CT T O P ROBLEM COMPARAT VE REL G ON FROM SUB ECT TO PROBLEM

Arapaho claims to have seen people resurrected after being dead for 30 to 40 years). This attitude is, however, simply tantamount to giving up on the project of explanation. In attempting to explain the ghost dance more generally, anthropologists have utilized at least two theories: the deprivation theory and the revitalization theory (cf. Kehoe 2006). According to deprivation theory, indigenous people who engaged in the ghost dance did so because they were seeking redress from the relative deprivation that they were suffering. According to the revitalization theory, the ghost dance instantiated a stage through which all cultures go in pursuing cultural revitalization. Neither theory, whatever other merits it might have, is of much help in explaining the ghost shirt. No one denies the wretched conditions in which the Lakota were living in 1890. Within a matter of years the bison herds had disappeared, their land holdings had been significantly reduced, it had become apparent that they were being expected to farm lands that were not suitable for agriculture, and the U.S. government failed to live up to its treaty obligation and provide meat in exchange for land. Hungersevere hungerwas rampant. Unfortunately for the theory, but fortunately for the people, not all of the participants in the ghost dance were doing so poorly. The theory was formulated then not in terms of deprivation but in terms of relative deprivation. It is difficult to make the idea of relative deprivation work. There is probably a sense in which everyone can claim to be relatively deprived. U.S. Americans would certainly seem to be relatively deprived when it comes to understanding the consequences of their governments actions on the international stage. Nor does practice really seem to follow variation in relative deprivation. Compared to the Navajo, who showed no interest in the ghost dance, the Lakota in the 1890s were relatively deprived economically, but it is difficult to say the same of the Paiute, among whom the ghost dance originated. So what exactly is the deprivation that is supposed to be doing the explaining? I am hardly an expert in revitalization theory, but it, too, would seem not to be of much help in the present context. As introduced by Anthony F. C. Wallace in 1956, the theory analyzed revitalization movements as sudden transformations of entire cultural wholes in response to stresses that make what Wallace calls mazeways untenable (Wallace 1956: 264267; adopting language from Clifford Geertz we might describe a mazeway as an integrated worldview and ethos). Wallace attributes the sudden transformation most often to a vision that a member of the society experienced. Neither characterization, however, fits the ghost shirt. Extreme stresses were certainly present, but the ghost shirt was a piecemeal innovation, and although its exact provenance is unknown, there are no indications that it derived from a vision, as the ghost dance did. So let us have another go at explaining the ghost shirt. One possible way to explain why the mind maintains concepts is to invoke systematic fit: a concept that is enchained with other concepts is more likely to be adopted. One presumes that the concept ghost shirt did in fact mesh with many others in the ghost dance in a way that made it cognitively attractive. This explanation is latent in McLaughlins comments about inherent superstition quoted above. By itself, however, systematic fit seems to provide an insufficient explanation for belief in the ghost shirt. Most ghost dance participants associated not the propositional attitude belief but propositional attitudes like disbelief with the concept ghost shirt.

III III :::

III IINTERNATIIONAL ONLIINE CONFERENCE ON RELIIGIIOUS STUDIIES III IN TERNATIO NAL ONLIN E CONFERENCE ON RELIG IO US STUDIE S NTERNAT ONAL ONL NE CONFERENCE ON REL G OUS STUD ES COMPARATIIVERELIIGIION:::FROMSUBJJECTTOPROBLEM COMPARATIV E R ELIG IO N F ROM S UBJE CT T O P ROBLEM COMPARAT VE REL G ON FROM SUB ECT TO PROBLEM

I want to suggest another possible explanation for belief in the ghost shirt by taking a different cognitive route. That route makes use of a computational model of mental processing. While I am skeptical of the ability of a computational model to account for all of mental processing, I think in the present case it is quite serviceable. Betting on a Shirt, Jumping from a Tower Blaise Pascal is famous for formulating one computational mechanism to account for propositional attitudes like belief being associated with at least one counterintuitive concept. Let us weigh up the gain and the loss by calling heads that God is. Let us assess the two cases: if you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager that he exists then, without hesitating! (Pascal 1995: 154). One encounters variations of this wager in many places, such as the following quote from a letter to the editor of the New York Times: I remember the words of my mother two days before she died of brain cancer: It couldnt hurt to pray, but it might hurt not to (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/opinion/l30atheist.html?_r=1&oref=slogin). Obviously, Pascals wager is not a strong argument for theism. One doubts, too, whether people really believe in God as a result of such bald calculation, despite the letter in the New York Times. I see no reason, however, why a computational model could not be adopted as a non-conscious mechanism by which the mind chooses which concepts it employs. Consider, for example, John Andersons ACTR model. Even banished from the field of conscious deliberation, however, Pascals wager seems incapable of explaining the association of a propositional attitude like belief with a concept like the ghost shirt. If one believes that the shirt can stop bullets and is wrong, one is liable to lose a great dealcertainly more than just blood. If one believes that the shirt can stop bullets and is right, one gains relatively little that is certain, or even probable. Nevertheless, some people did associate the propositional attitude belief with this concept in a way that we do not, for example, associate it with Harry Potters invisibility cloakpresumably a concept just as easily spread. They did so in a context in which they knew full well that bullets pierced shirts and killed people. Dan Sperber suggests somewhere, I believe, that the mind/brain shifts from natural processing to symbolic processing when natural processing breaks down, but that is of no help here. Natural processing did not break down. Bullets always penetrated shirts, and people always died. Such disconfirmation eventually led (most) people to abandon special claims for the ghost shirt. In their Theory of Religion (1987), Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge suggest that religious goods function as compensators. People practice religion as a way to acquire from the gods goods that are otherwise unattainable, such as immortality. The problem with using this strategy to explain the ghost shirt is that it is not entirely clear that a person interested in gain will put ones faith in such a shirt, because the potential for loss so heavily outweighs the potential for gain. So what is going on? My suggestion is a very simple one: faced with a highly probable loss, the mind takes cognitive risks. We know that this is the way the mind worksmore often than notin the economic realm. Given a choice between a certain gain of $ 3000 and a 75% chance of winning $ 4000, most people choose the $ 3000. Given a choice between a certain loss of $ 3000 or a 75% risk of losing $ 4000, most people choose the 75% possibility of losing $ 4000. Statistically, both sets of risks are equivalent,
III III :::

III IINTERNATIIONAL ONLIINE CONFERENCE ON RELIIGIIOUS STUDIIES III IN TERNATIO NAL ONLIN E CONFERENCE ON RELIG IO US STUDIE S NTERNAT ONAL ONL NE CONFERENCE ON REL G OUS STUD ES COMPARATIIVERELIIGIION:::FROMSUBJJECTTOPROBLEM COMPARATIV E R ELIG IO N F ROM S UBJE CT T O P ROBLEM COMPARAT VE REL G ON FROM SUB ECT TO PROBLEM

and people should have no preference for one or the other. But I belong to the majority in that I share distinct preferences in both situations (Kahneman and Tversky [ed.] 2000). My suggestion is that in some cases of attaching propositional attitudes such as belief to counterintuitive concepts like the ghost shirt, the mind works similarly. Given a world of relatively certain gainsa world in which the organism lives with reasonable comfortthe brain finds cognitive risks unattractive. It is mostly content with folk physics, biology, and psychology. It would be possible to believe that, if one jumped from a tower, God would protect one, but it would also be foolish to do so, and the vast majority of people refuse to take that risk. If the gospels are to be believed, even Jesus refused to take it. But trapped at the top of a tower which is burning and from which all normal means of escape are hopelessly blockedfor example, at the top of the Twin Towers on the morning of September 11, 2001the idea of leaping and trusting in God might become more attractive. This unconscious calculation is not Pascals wager, Ive got a lot to gain at very little risk. It is, rather, Im faced with an incredible loss. Ive got to find some wayany wayto avoid it. Faced with tremendous loss, the mind is more likelyand this is an increase in probability, not a certaintyto attach credibility to concepts that involve cognitive risk, including concepts that are counterintuitive. That seems to me to be what happened with the ghost shirt. Faced with tremendous losses, perhaps amounting to virtual annihilation, many Lakota took the cognitive risk that an ordinary shirt, decorated and consecrated, would act like no other shirt with which they were familiar. They took the cognitive risk that the shirt would stop bullets. Of course, most of them abandoned that belief in the face of empirical falsification, or at least, took it underground (Kehoe 2006). But some risky concepts are not quite so easy to falsify. An example might be Jesus rose from the dead, and you will, too. Ordinarily, people do not take the cognitive risk that dead organisms, including people, revivify. If they shoot a dangerous animal or an animal they want to eat, they want the animal to stay dead. But contemplating the loss posed by their own mortality and that of those about whom they care, many do take that cognitive risk. In Conclusion To what has already been written let me simply add three observations. (1) The idea that at least some religious concepts acquire propositional attitudes that cluster around belief as the mind takes risks to avoid losses makes a certain amount of intuitive sense to me. Religious concern with death, particularly ones own mortality and the mortality of people about whom one cares, strikes me as a paradigmatic case. But I am not trained in experimental work. Can this claim be tested, and if so, how? (2) Cognitive risk seeking to avoid loss does not provide a complete account of how the mind adopts propositional attitudes associated with religion. In the case of the riots at Panvad in 2002, it is difficult to see the divsis as acting to avoid a highly probable loss, even though there is some evidence that they were terrorizing money lenders and merchants to whom they owed money. I have nothing in particular to offer about the Panvad riots. That example aside, however, I suspect that it would be fruitful to examine also the relationship between religious propositional attitudes and situations of uncertainty. Consider the observation of Norris and Inglehart (2004) that there is a positive correlation worldwide between degree of religiosity and perceived existential insecurity.

III III :::

III IINTERNATIIONAL ONLIINE CONFERENCE ON RELIIGIIOUS STUDIIES III IN TERNATIO NAL ONLIN E CONFERENCE ON RELIG IO US STUDIE S NTERNAT ONAL ONL NE CONFERENCE ON REL G OUS STUD ES COMPARATIIVERELIIGIION:::FROMSUBJJECTTOPROBLEM COMPARATIV E R ELIG IO N F ROM S UBJE CT T O P ROBLEM COMPARAT VE REL G ON FROM SUB ECT TO PROBLEM

(3) I see no reason to presume a symmetry between the forces leading to the adoption of a propositional attitude such as belief and the particular content of the concept that is the object of that attitude. That is, I see no reason to presume that every instance of belief in bullet-stopping religious artefacts must result from cognitive risk-seeking in the interest of loss aversion. Rather, the relations between the role of conceptual constraints, conceptual contents, and decisional calculus in the explanation of religion are likely to be complex.

References Devy, Ganesh N. 2006, A Nomad Called Thief : Reflections on Adivasi Silence, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006. Fodor, Jerry A. 1981, Representations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky (ed.) 2000, Choices, Values, and Frames, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Kehoe, Alice Beck 2006, The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization, 2nd ed., Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland Press. Mooney, James 1991 [1896], The ghost-dance religion and the Sioux outbreak of 1890, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press; reprint, preserving original pagination, of Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Fourteenth annual report, 18921893, pt. 2, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896. pp. 6411136. Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart 2004. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pascal, Blaise 1995, Penses and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ramanujan, A. K. (ed.) 1991, Folktales from India: A Selection of Oral Tales from Twenty-Two Languages, New York: Pantheon Books. Slone, D. Jason, Religion and Cognition: A Reader, London: Equinox. Srensen, Jesper 2007, A Cognitive Theory of Magic, Lanham: AltaMira. Stark, Rodney, and William Sims Bainbridge 1987, A Theory of Religion, New York: P. Lang. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1956, Revitalization Movements, American Anthropologist, n.s. 58, no. 2 (April): 264281. Wilson, Bryan R. 1973, Magic and the Millennium; A Sociological Study of Religious Movements of Protest among Tribal and Third-World Peoples, New York, Harper & Row.

III III :::