Vancouver Sun, British Columbia (BC), Canada
Nov 22 2008

Top UBC psychologist uncovers roots of religion – and himself

"It was horrible. When I look back, it was insane."

Renowned University of B.C. social psychologist Ara Norenzayan, 37,
spent his teenage years in bomb-ravaged Lebanon thinking he could die
at any moment in a civil war largely fuelled by religion.

When Norenzayan was young, the kitchen of the Beirut apartment he
lived in with his family was blasted through with a bomb’s metal
shards. He dove for cover in the living room.

Norenzayan’s close friend, a soccer goalkeeper, was killed by one of
the many car bombs that would suddenly shatter the city’s tense quiet.

As Norenzayan and I talked at the window of a café in the Point Grey
neighbourhood of Vancouver where he lives, he pointed at a black car
parked a few metres from us on 10th Avenue near Alma.

We imagined how that car could blow up at any moment, killing hundreds
of innocent Lebanese, or Vancouverites. It elicited a hint of
just-below-the-surface terror.

It was a suggestion of the kind of pervasive fear, no doubt mixed with
courage, that became a routine aspect of the bewildering civil war
that ravaged previously cosmopolitan Lebanon from 1975 to 1990.

Why did such brutal antagonism arise between Lebanon’s Palestinian
Sunni Muslims and Catholic Maronites, not to mention members of the
Druze sect and Israeli Jews?

In the last few years, Norenzayen has earned an international
reputation for his ground-breaking research into trying to answer the
question: How does religion affect the way people behave, pro and con?

Or, as Norenzayan succinctly puts it: "What is it about religion that
can turn nice people into murderers?"

The people who were killing each other in Lebanon were generally well
intentioned, he said. "They were not psychopaths. They were nice
people doing terrible things out of ideology."

More than 100,000 people, he said, were murdered during the Middle
Eastern country’s civil war. The fighting turned Beirut, which had
often been described as "the Paris of the East," into a virtual
hellhole.

After leaving Lebanon with his family in 1990, Norenzayan finally
returned for the first time several years ago. "When I went back and
asked people what they thought happened during the war, they couldn’t
tell me — because they don’t know," he said over lunch.

"People don’t understand the relationship of religion to violence," he
said.

They don’t, for that matter, understand the relationship of religion
to human existence and psychology. His intention is to bring
scientific understanding to bear on faith.

COMPARING RELIGION TO FIRE

Norenzayan, who last year was bestowed tenure at the unusually young
age of 36, said scientific research into religion has finally become
acceptable in higher education, after being virtually shut out of
secular academia for almost half a century.

Still, Norenzayan continues to run into people, including academics,
who completely dismiss religion. Many others staunchly defend
it. "There are so many opinions about religion," he said, "but so few
facts about it."

Helpfully, Norenzayan compares religion to fire.

Fire can be very good. And fire can be very dangerous. It depends how
it’s used. Religion "unites and then it divides."

Religion can produce a terrorist Osama bin Laden and a jingoistic
demagogue like Pat Robertson. But it can also create a socially
concerned Tommy Douglas or a non-violent Dalai Lama.

"Religion can be co-opted to construct large cohesive groups, but for
that very same reason it can also be exploited to set one group
against another, often violently."

Since The Vancouver Sun published the first media article about
Norenzayan’s work in 2004, his team’s findings have been picked up by
outlets as diverse as The New York Times, The Economist and Slate
Magazine.

He and his colleagues have published articles in leading scientific
journals providing data that show, for instance, antagonism towards
outsiders is not necessarily a result of belief in God or an active
prayer life.

Rather, hatred of others is more likely to be a by-product of people
finding an identity in a group, any group. Antagonism is related to
dogmatism, whether one is blindly religious or non-religious.

Norenzayan and his colleagues have also extensively studied the
relationship between religion and healthy societies, including whether
secular societies can be as strong as religious ones.

In other words, Norenzayan, whose life has been harmed by
religion-charged conflict, is not out to either praise or bury those
who are explicitly religious.

He is open to discovering whatever the evidence suggests about
organized religion and individual spirituality — "the good, bad and
ugly."

Despite believing such open-mindedness is the essence of science, and
receiving strong support from other faculty in UBC’s psychology
department, Norenzayan continues to receive criticism from many
quarters.

"I get really nasty e-mails."

Religious people will tell him he’s dismissing religion by trying to
explain it psychologically. Atheists will object to his research
because they believe it might make it harder to eradicate
religion. And some scientists still argue religion is not a bona fide
subject of exploration.

CHURCH MEMBERS TARGETED IN CIVIL WAR

Norenzayan conveyed a sense of calm as we spoke.

But he hasn’t always been this way.

He readily admits he lived in embattled Beirut as if any minute might
be his last on Earth.

Norenzayan’s own family’s religious origins are in the Armenian
Orthodox church, whose members were targeted during Lebanon’s civil
war for trying to remain neutral.

In an effort to feel normal amid the chaos, he and others continued to
go to school, work at jobs and play sports, not to mention take part
in religious practices. To quell ever-present anxiety, many also went
"with a vengeance" to nightclubs, dances and parties.

After 15 years of the fluctuating uncertainty and mayhem of Lebanon’s
war, Norenzayan’s family finally left Beirut in 1990. It turned out to
be six months before the war ended.

They travelled to the United States, where Norenzayan, who was
breaking out of his family’s small-business tradition by showing a
predilection for academia, studied at California State University in
Fresno and then did graduate studies at the University of Michigan.

Like many PhD students he lived an intense life, jacked up on six cups
of coffee a day. He excelled at learning, but his nerves were jangled.

Memories of Lebanon simmered below the surface. "I wouldn’t have been
surprised if I had symptoms of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]."

He was, for instance, set off by loud noises, which reminded him of
shellings and car bombs.

To find a way to cope, he began mindfulness meditation, and a bit of
yoga.

He continues both to this day, along with sailing and jogging through
the streets and parks of Point Grey.

Nestled behind a small oriental-style screen divider in his study is a
one-metre-by-one-metre space that contains a meditation pillow and
candle. It’s where he practises.

Asked to describe his own religious views, Norenzayan said he’s
"agnostic."

Even though he finds a sense of cultural and group identity in the
Armenian Orthodox Church, he attends less and less.

"I see value in religion. I can understand why people want
spirituality. At the same time I can’t bring myself to believe in
God."

He doesn’t do meditation and yoga for explicitly religious reasons. He
engages it in more of the "secular but spiritual" way that so many
people of the Pacific Northwest get in touch with their inner selves.

{For an in-depth look at how people practise spirituality in B.C.,
Washington and Oregon, see the new book I have edited, Cascadia: The
Elusive Utopia – Exploring the Spirit of the Pacific Northwest. }.

"I wished I could be religious, but I couldn’t do it," Norenzayan
said.

"But I still want to live a rich, meaningful life. Meditation was a
way to explore my spiritual questions and longings. It’s a way to
cultivate presence and peace of mind."

The fact Norenzayan’s early life was filled with unpredictably savage
violence and death may partly explain his continuing fascination with
organized religion and personal spirituality.

His own research suggests one reason why that could be the case. One
of his groundbreaking studies found that subjects who are reminded of
death are far more likely than others to be open to religion, to
consider belief in supernatural agents.

His experiments were among the first to provide "solid empirical
evidence" to back up theories by philosophers Soren Kierkegaard and
Simon Fraser University’s Ernest Becker that humans become religious
because they’re capable of recognizing they will die.

When it comes to death and violence, another innovative research
project Norenzayan’s team worked on involved Palestinian Muslims and
Israeli Jewish settlers.

Against conventional wisdom, Norenzayen and co-researchers Jeremy
Ginges and Ian Hansen discovered no correlation between how much
Palestinian Muslims and Israeli settlers prayed and how much they were
inclined to support violence.

However, the study did show a link between how often Palestinian
Muslims and Israeli settlers worshipped at their religious
institutions and how much they would support attacks on their rivals.

In other words, violence was linked to group behaviour, not spiritual
practice.

A ‘LEAP OF FAITH’ CAN BE BENEFICIAL

In many ways, Norenzayan follows one of the founders of modern
psychology, the great American thinker William James, who taught that
"the truth value of religion is not its only value."

Whether certain metaphysical beliefs are provable or not, James taught
they can be valuable simply because they can positively affect human
behaviour.

Like falling in love, Norenzayan said a "leap of faith" can be
beneficial. "Neither is inherently bad."

Personally, he said he is not comfortable with being a hard-core
atheist. It doesn’t feel accurate to conclude that humans are just
"pieces of self-replicating meat."

Since atheism can easily slip into philosophical nihilism, the belief
that life is meaningless, Norenzayan said there is a debate arising in
psychology about whether atheists actually exist at a deep
psychological level.

"At the end of the day, even the most die-hard atheist wants to live a
meaningful life," said Norenzayan, who adds he often collaborates with
researchers who are atheist.

Norenzayan expects there are inherent psychological roots to religion
and spirituality, whether people recognize them or not.

He suspects deep down that even atheists believe they are more than
random bits of physical matter.

"Atheists are going to find sources of meaning that are not derived
from rationality, not derived from science. They come from inside,
from internal experience."

Even though atheists might deny the existence of a "soul," or psyche,
Norenzayan and colleague Will Gervais are researching whether all of
us might subconsciously believe we have "souls" that are independent
of our physical bodies.

Somewhat like Yale psychologist Paul Bloom and many process
philosophers, Norenzayan said most of us feel the mental aspects of
our selves are not reducible to the physical.

"When we say, ‘My body is shaking right now,’ we’re saying there is an
immaterial self that inhabits our body."

Curious about how widespread atheism among a population might affect a
society, Norenzayan has become intrigued by Denmark.

In that small Nordic country, he said, only 25 per cent of the
population believes in God, compared to more than 90 per cent in the
U.S., 80 per cent in Canada and 70 per cent in B.C.

Since religion throughout history has been effective at creating
cohesive societies among people who are not biologically related, he
wants to explore how it is that Denmark has developed into a generous,
communitarian state.

In studies of altruism, Norenzayen and co-researcher Azim Shariff have
found there is more cooperation among religious societies than
non-religious ones, especially when group survival is under
threat. Religion through history has encouraged cohesion among
genetically unrelated people.

In their fall article in the prestigious journal Science, which
reviewed the literature on the scientific study of religion,
Norenzayan and Shariff found many things, including that belief in God
reduces cheating and selfish behaviour.

In one psychological experiment out of dozens surveyed by Norenzayan
and Shariff, children were explicitly instructed not to look in a box
and then left alone with it.

"Those who were previously told that a fictional supernatural agent —
Princess Alice — was watching were significantly less likely to peek
inside the forbidden box."

Norenzayan and Shariff also found that religious people tend to be
more helpful and generous than non-religious people — on two
conditions. Those conditions are that they believe their helpful
behaviour will enhance their reputation among their peers, and that
they have been freshly reminded of their belief in supernatural
agents.

But if researchers remove those two conditions, Norenzayan said, "all
of a sudden you don’t find any differences" between the behaviour of
the religious and non-religious.

Norenzayen theorizes that people who believe in God assume the
existence of an all-knowing "supernatural watcher" who monitors their
behaviour, which makes them act more generously.

Nevertheless, Norenzayan said the five-page Science article does not
necessarily contradict those who argue religion exacerbates conflict
between cultures.

That’s because the UBC researchers also discovered that religious
people are often more generous and helpful (or "pro-social") to
members of their own religion, not necessarily to outsiders.

The Science article, titled The Origin and Evolution of Religious
Prosociality, said even though religion has been useful in creating
more helpful behaviour, it has no monopoly on it.

The beneficial role that an all-knowing, morally concerned God has
played in history, Norenzayan said, is in some cases being replaced by
non-religious mechanisms.

"Today, religions are not necessary to have large moral
communities. Just take a look at a society like Denmark (photo left),
a very cooperative society that is one of the least religious."

BLACK-AND-WHITE VIEWS ESCHEWED

Norenzayan is intrigued when I suggest the possibility most residents
of Denmark may have subconsciously embraced the communal Christian
ethics of their state-supported Lutheran church, but turfed the
religious teachings in part because of inadequate metaphysics.

He agrees: "The large moral communities of today may not have come
into existence without religion."

This way of thinking also dovetails with his research suggesting that
a cohesive society — with a value-laden school system, generous
welfare, policing, courts and social surveillance — can be as
effective as religion at creating cooperative people.

While Norenzayan has found some people behave more "pro-socially" when
researchers have reminded them of their belief in God, he said many of
us behave more ethically when we’re simply reminded of words such as
"civil," or because a police cruiser drives by.

In his important work, Norenzayan is creating as many questions —
psychological, social and metaphysical — as he is answering.

But he is justifiably proud to say that it is time to move the study
of religion away from strong, divisive opinion to the gathering of
empirical evidence.

Norenzayan eschews dogma, religious or scientific. "I don’t have much
tolerance for a black-and-white view of religion, or of anything for
that matter."

As he pursues his laboratory experiments and philosophical inquiries
and strives to makes personal sense of his tumultuous early years in
religion-torn Beirut, he says he has learned to live with ambiguity.

"I think it’s the only honest way."