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Religion going extinct? I doubt it.

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The BBC reports on a paper recently presented at the American Physical Society meeting here in Dallas which makes claims about a decreasing level of religiosity in some parts of the world.  The paper, entitled “A mathematical model of social group competition with application to the growth of religious non-affiliation,” suggests that religion will effectively be extinguished in certain parts of the world just as certain languages die out due to lack of usage.  One of the paper’s authors elaborates:

“The idea is pretty simple,” said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona. “It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility. “For example in languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru, and similarly there’s some kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not.” Dr Wiener continued: “In a large number of modern secular democracies, there’s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%.” The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the “non-religious” category.

I’m skeptical.  The most obvious distinction that jumps out when comparing languages to religion is, at least to my knowledge, that at no point in history have people stopped using language.  They have stopped using specific languages in favor of other ones, just as they have stopped adhering to certain religions and converted to others.  But they haven’t cast religion aside. The study discusses how many people would answer that they are non-religious or have no religious affiliation, but that does not answer, as psychologist Bruce Hood points out, whether they have abandoned supernatural beliefs.  As I’ve mentioned before, there is a difference between being “non-religious,” being an atheist, and being a naturalist/materialist, and I don’t consider it accurate to say that religion has become “extinct” in a population unless its members fit the latter description.  Which, quite honestly, I don’t see ever happening.

Why be such a stickler about this?  Well, because when you talk to a person who says that she doesn’t consider herself to be religious (or worse, “non-affiliated”), digging a little deeper may reveal that she actually believes that the universe is God, that prayer and willpower cause wishes to come true, that everything happens for a cosmic reason, that casting spells works, and/or that everyone will be reincarnated after they die.  Her pantheism may disqualify her from being properly labeled an atheist, but the rest of it wouldn’t.  And even if she believes in none of those things she may well believe in ghosts, alien abduction, extra-sensory perception, Tarot-reading, and/or Reiki, which you might call secular supernatural ideas.  And to me, a god has more in common with a ghost than a cross has with a Tibetan prayer flag.  The latter two may both signify religious beliefs, but the former are both supernatural agents about which humans have a stunning number of intuitive beliefs in common.  That is, we use the same mental tools to conceive of and believe in them.

And if I’m right about that, then we will probably will carry on in these beliefs for as long as we have the kinds of minds that find them appealing.  I’m also not convinced that religious violence is fundamentally different in kind from any other violence which is rooted in a notion of a transcendent force which unifies one’s own group against whatever group(s) it views as threatening.  I don’t believe that it takes religion to make good men do bad things– or, for that matter, for bad men to do good.  I don’t see the extinction of religion specifically, even on a completely voluntary basis, as some kind of goal toward which we should all be striving.  Which is a good thing, considering that it probably won’t come to pass.

Unlike Hood, however, I do think we should strive toward rationality always, identify and eliminate bias wherever it can be found, and in general try to always have our skeptic’s hats on.  I consider supernatural thinking a mistake even if it’s an adaptive one. That doesn’t mean I have to single out people who think supernaturally as sui generis irrational, because we all do it occasionally.  And it certainly doesn’t mean I have to single out people who consider themselves religious as essentially thinking differently from, and/or worse or better than, everyone else.  

Gendering the jokes

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Judy Gold: one funny lesbian

Psychologist Jesse Bering’s latest “Bering in Mind” column at Scientific American addresses lesbians in comedy– why are there so many?  Or rather, why are there so many in comparison with straight female and gay male comics?  Obviously the vast majority of comics who do stand-up, whom Bering refers to as “heavy-hitters in the world of comedy,” are straight males.  Is there something that Louis CK, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and Doug Stanhope have in common with Sandra Bernhard, Judy Gold, Wanda Sykes, and Margaret Cho that draws both groups to the clubs?

Bering challenges us to name a single gay male stand-up comic without consulting Google.  I came up with Andy Dick, but stopped there.  I know there are more, but on the spot couldn’t seem to muster any other names.  Eddie Izzard definitely bends gender expectations with his transvestitism, but gay he is not.  Bering suggests a reason for the disparity:

Still, one of the hottest findings to emerge from contemporary humor research is the fact that while both men and women say that they value a “good sense of humor” in potential partners, the two sexes mean vastly different things by this. Men prefer women who find them funny (“humor receptivity”), not funny women per se (“humor production”). Women display the opposite trend in their dating preferences. These were the basic findings reported in a 2006 issue of Evolution and Human Behavior by psychologist Eric Bressler and his colleagues. The authors interpret these data, and similar data, by drawing from psychologist  Geoffrey Miller’s ideas about the evolution of humor. Miller has argued that ancestral males’ ability to produce entertaining humor demanded a set of heritable cognitive skills, including intelligence and creativity, and thus was a hard-to-fake signal of genetic quality. Due to the sexes’ differential investment in reproduction (just at a coital level alone, about 90 seconds versus 9 months), women would have evolved to be more receptive to signs of genetic quality than males. Men, meanwhile, would have been on the lookout for women who responded positively to their humor. 

I’d heard of this theory before, and find it entirely plausible but also a bit depressing.  Anecdotal evidence from my personal life shows that plenty of straight men are willing to at least claim that they are attracted to funny women– not just women “with a good sense of humor”– but it’s entirely possible that they did so just thinking that that’s what I wanted to hear.  I definitely find myself attracted to men who are funny, and like to think that they feel the same sort of attraction.  But maybe not.  Or at least, maybe not to the same degree.  Straight women certainly aren’t immune to feeling a rush of pleasure when someone appreciates their displays of intelligence and creativity in the form of humor; we just don’t seem to be nearly as keen to step up onto a stage in front of strangers to experience it.  Julia Sweeney is a notable exception– when talking about her research into how the mind works in Letting Go of God, she says to the audience “I found that all of our brains are on drugs all of the time. We give ourselves hits: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and vasopressin. The next time all of you laugh, I’ll get a hit of adrenaline through my veins, and if you don’t when I expect you to, I’ll get cortisol instead and I’ll feel anxious. I always thought I was a person in my family who escaped addictions, but now I realize that I am up here on this stage right now partly because I am an addict.”

Why does Sweeney seem to be often in the company of lesbians in that regard?  Bering suggests that it has to do with hormones:

Researchers who study homosexuality have discovered that the brains of many lesbians were over-exposed to male hormones during prenatal development, influencing not only their adult sexual orientation, but also masculinizing other behavioral and cognitive traits in which there exist innate sex differences. This is not true of all lesbians, but it is especially true for those who exhibit male-typed profiles. So it is not implausible that some lesbians’ courtship strategies would largely mimic opposite-sex-typed patterns, including a differentiated capacity for humor production that attracts female attention. This would not be a conscious strategy, it must be emphasized, and indeed this is what many critics of evolutionary psychology repeatedly fail to realize. So, for heaven’s sake, don’t mistake this as me saying that lesbian comics go on stage just to score chicks. Gene replication is simply a mechanistic means to an end; if it works, it works. Many evolutionary psychologists, including Miller, believe that our minds are often just epiphenomenal interpreters.

The confusion Bering is addressing here has to do with proximate versus ultimate concerns, and it’s a common one for both the incredulous people who hear EP theories and don’t find them to line up with their own introspective reasons for doing what they do, and often evolutionary psychologists themselves.  A proximate reason is what’s going on in your head– “I do comedy because I enjoy it.  I love making people laugh.”  An ultimate reason is what your genes want you to do– “I do comedy because it’ll get me laid, enabling me to further my lineage.”  These reasons are not mutually exclusive, though that doesn’t mean that the explanation of ultimate concern is necessarily true. Our genes and hormones might not give a damn about whether we get up on stage to make people laugh or not, regardless of who we are.  But it’s possible that they do, and that idea doesn’t need to be threatening.  The conflict comes in when people differ as to what extent our minds are epiphenomenal interpreters– the means by which we manufacture after-the-fact motivations for our actions– as opposed to being directly causal.

For (a possible) example, an early comment on Bering’s article:

This seems so obviously cultural to me. It’s not considered ‘feminine’ or ‘lady-like’ to talk bluntly and sometimes vulgarly the way comedians must to elicit laughs. Lesbians have already been questioning and contradicting social norms of femininity, making it FAR easier for them to fit into the comedy domain.

I don’t want to claim that this person thinks that by appealing to social constructivism, he/she can reclaim a degree of agency stolen by evolutionary (read: genetic/hormonal) explanations.  That might not be the case.  But if he/she is, he/she is barking up the wrong tree– cultural forces don’t rescue free will any more than biological ones do.  “My culture made me do it” is as much an abdication of responsibility as “My genes made me do it.”  Aside from that, though, it seems like this explanation is begging the question– why is it not considered “feminine” or “lady-like” to speak in the vulgar ways often used by comics?   Where does that come from?  The goal posts have just been moved back a few yards.  Eventually, we still have to answer the question of where these apparently very influential gender norms originated.

The psychology of comedy is endlessly fascinating to me.  I know the common understanding is that analysis ruins a joke, but I’m prepared to murder a few jokes mercilessly in order to reach a better understanding of what makes people laugh, why it does, and– most interestingly to me– why the things that make people laugh so often become a moral issue.  More on that later, hopefully.  In the meantime, have a good weekend, and listen to whatever makes you laugh.

It’s…nice to have a diagnosis?

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Some of these people are really annoyed at you

Apparently I might have Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome.  According to the Wall Street Journal,

Researchers say the concept of “sidewalk rage” is real. One scientist has even developed a Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome Scale to map out how people express their fury. At its most extreme, sidewalk rage can signal a psychiatric condition known as “intermittent explosive disorder,” researchers say. On Facebook, there’s a group called “I Secretly Want to Punch Slow Walking People in the Back of the Head” that boasts nearly 15,000 members. . .  Some researchers are even studying the dynamics that trigger such rage and why some people remain calm in hopes of improving anger-management treatments and gaining insights into how emotions influence decision making, attention and self control.”We’re trying to understand what makes people angry, what that experience is like,” says Jerry Deffenbacher, a professor at Colorado State University who studies anger and road rage. “For those for whom anger is a personal problem, we’re trying to develop and evaluate ways of helping them.” Signs of a sidewalk rager include muttering or bumping into others; uncaringly hogging a walking lane; and acting in a hostile manner by staring, giving a “mean face” or approaching others too closely, says Leon James, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii who studies pedestrian and driver aggression.

I’m guilty on the muttering and staring thing.   Maybe even the “mean face” thing occasionally, though it’s hard to tell, being always behind the face.  But let me explain, please– for me, it’s not simply about people being slow.  There are good reasons to be slow on a sidewalk, and if you get angry at someone for being old or disabled then you’re…not a pleasant person.

My problem is with those who exhibit the kind of lack of awareness as to think that stopping suddenly in a crowded entrance to a store, train station, etc. to root around in one’s purse is a good idea.  People who play the “I’m not moving” game when confronted with someone moving in the opposite direction while carrying something obviously heavy.  People who fail to comprehend that before they can board a bus, train, tram, or elevator, they’re going to need to step back and let others disembark.  In general, people who either don’t appear to have the first notion of how to conduct themselves considerately in a situation where masses of people are trying to get from one place to another, or who just don’t care.  Airports are a big one– yes, maybe you still have two hours left on your layover, but that’s no reason to make life difficult for someone who was given thirty minutes to traverse an entire airport in order to reach their next connection (not an exaggeration– this has happened to me multiple times).  Try browsing the shops by doing the leisurely “I’ve got half a day to kill” saunter directly in front of them, instead of smack in the middle of the hall where sweaty people are frantically trying to break the space-time continuum to get to their flights.

Any narrow lane of passage through which people other than you are trying to travel?  Not the best place to stop and check if someone has texted you.  A crowded sidewalk?  Might not be optimal to decide with your friends that you should walk five-abreast at approximately one mile an hour.  I realize that children are walking random opportunities for catastrophe, but do you really need to halt everything to scream at the young’un at the top of an escalator or the end of a moving walkway?

No, I do not bump people or step on toes.  I don’t intentionally try to impede them in retaliation– what good would that do?  I just sigh and, if my patience has been completely depleted, occasionally say things under my breath that I’m both unable to resist saying and simultaneously hope that no one hears.  Most of the time.

I’m not a bad person…am I?  If so, blame the syndrome.