Stated and Revealed Beliefs: What the Dow Jones Index Tells Us About The End of the World
Published by Hanno Kaiser October 28th, 2006 in CultureIn “Letter to a Christian Nation,” Sam Harris refers to a Gallup poll according to which
[f]orty four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. (p. xi)
That’s 132 million out of 300 million people. Now let’s discount those older than 65, for whom “sometime in the next fifty years” effectively means “in all likelihood after I’m dead,” and those younger than 15, because their opinion is likely to reflect the beliefs of their parents, not their own. That leaves us with a 67.2% slice of the total population, or 88.7 million of 132 million. What would happen if 88.7 million people were truly convinced that the world would come to an end within the next fifty years? Presumably, they would forego future consumption in exchange for present consumption. Consequently, they would trade future dollars for present dollars, which is a recipe for inflation. Similarly, we would expect a serious drop in demand for long-term investments. The macro-economic fingerprint of 88 million people living (almost) “as if there was no tomorrow” should be unmistakable. I seriously doubt that we’re seeing that fingerprint in the real world. In short, it seems to me that a record Dow Jones Industrial Average Index North of 12,000 points is irreconcilable with 88 million people truly believing that the world will end within their lifetimes. The upshot is, not surprisingly, that actions speak louder than words. The stated beliefs of those who profess to expect the world to end differ from their revealed beliefs in the future utility of a well-funded 401(k) plan.
That, of course, is an eminently positive result! It suggests that people indulge in delusional beliefs only as long as there are no real consequences attached to holding such beliefs (e.g., in the context of answering a bunch of survey questions), which, of course, implies that they have an inkling that such beliefs are, in fact, delusional. Or maybe they are just hedging their bets, in case their beliefs are wrong — the inverse, in a sense, of Pascal’s wager.
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Hanno-
An original and interesting take on what I believe Daniel Dennett has called “meta-atheism”. But I wonder if there are other explanations for the absence of a macro-economic fingerprint than just “actual” disbelief of a stated belief. Two proposals:
1. The first is economic. We should expect to find a greater Rapture-ready allocation signal in the economic data (1) the more firm and widespread the belief in a second coming is, (2) the more imminent that second coming is believed to be, and (3) the less risk-averse the social actors are. Consistent with your economic analysis, let’s assume the Second Comers are (at least with regards to their economic interests) rational actors. So while believing that yes, Jesus is returning sometime soon, they may acknowledge that the actual arrival date is highly speculative and probabilistic. [The second coming can be roughly analogized - at least in terms of economic planning - to an early-death scenario.] The apparent inconsistency between the poll results and the economic data could then be an artifact of (1) the polling questions not admitting of probabilistic responses, or (2) Second Comers being highly risk-averse (your “inverse Pascal’s wager” I think).
2. Secondly - and I think much more plausibly - the Second Comer may simply harbor two inconsistent beliefs without experiencing any kind of cognitive pressure to “choose”. Indeed, the Second Comer may not even consciously realize the inconsistency. But we need to introduce a model of human cognition that allows for the existence of simultaneously-held, equally-earnest, but factually inconsistent beliefs. While I’m not a neuroscientist by any stretch, I think at least a glimmer of an answer can be found in the neurological structure of the brain. As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, the “organization of neurons in the brain [form] a network, which self-organizes by strengthening the synaptic connections between its (distributed) memory of simultaneously experienced phenomenon. After these connections are formed, and especially to the degree they have been strengthened, the neural network is capable of activating interconnected domains of stored experience through the presence of only part of the original stimuli set.”
But only a finite area of this neural network can be activated - and hence enter into the reasoning process - at any given moment. […a phenomenon perhaps related to the concept of “channel capacity” in psychology.] This makes intuitive sense: When I reason about which flavor of ice cream to buy at the grocery store - or even make a judgment about the future performance of a particular stock - I simply don’t have conscious, simultaneous access to every bit of information encoded in the neural network of my brain. We reason in discrete chunks.
A further complication is the path-dependent nature of recall. So, for example, how a question is phrased is a strong determinant of cognitive access. If a friend asks you “What did you have for breakfast last Sunday?”, you’ll probably have a much harder time accessing the *exact same* piece of information than if your spouse asks you, “Remember waking up early and making a fire last Sunday morning?” The reason seems to be recall’s reliance on spreading activation patterns within the neural networks of the brain. The latter question simply “gets you closer” to the information than the former. It’s easier to remember a song’s lyrics if somebody hums you the tune than if you’re only given the song’s name. Access is context-sensitive.
So, connecting these cog-sci principles in the context of your original post, we can fashion an (albeit crude) cognitive model of viably inconsistent belief. My guess is that the neural networks encoding for (conditioned) religious belief - especially those that anticipate an imminent second coming - are primarily activated in a church or worship context. They simply don’t get activated when, say, driving to the neighborhood 7-11. Similarly, I’d bet a relatively segregated set of neurons is activated when making financial decisions, even long-range ones. As the Second Comer grows up, experience rarely activates both domains at roughly the same time, so we’d expect relatively thin interconnectivity - and hence cognitive access - between them. It simply may not be the case that a single area of the brain is responsible for reasoning about “the future”; indeed, the images one fashions in imagining that future is probably context-sensitive.
This state of affairs is not inevitable. We can imagine pastors commanding their flock to liquidate their life savings (perhaps to be re-invested in the church), or financial advisors at major banks advising account-holders about hedging options in case of Rapture. If the environment forced both notions into a believer’s conscious awareness at the same time, we’d expect cognitive dissonance to take over and a choice to be made: spend like there’s no tomorrow, or doubt - and probably eventually disbelieve altogether. Until the environment so stimulates however - and there’s probably good incentive-based reasons why it hasn’t - the believer is essentially “of two minds” about the future. When he contemplates saving for a child’s college tuition, he can be hard-nosed about CD rates. But when he feels hopeless or insignificant, he can be buoyed by the remembrance of the imminent Rapture.
Unfortunately, there’s a latent danger in this analysis, one that forces me not to share your optimism, Hanno. I like to believe that, at least at this point in history, the vast majority of people “of two minds” about the future would, if *forced* by environmental prompts - and the induced cognitive dissonance - to choose pragmatic self-interest or a desperate (and destitute) hope, they would elect for the former. But these Second Comers have a habit of looking to prophecy (see the website Rapture Ready) which is sufficiently ambiguous that, when coupled with the dangerous times we inhabit, could at some point lead to persuasive rhetoric, at least in the minds of the two-minded. The peril is that the link between knowledge domains might one day be forged against the backdrop of such convincing rhetoric. At that point, the incentive structures that’ve held back fanatacism (by delimiting viable communication) might give way to a new order, one in which a frightening reality creates the conditions for economy-of-scale demagoguery. Or experience itself might induce, spontaneously, a cognitive link between the fantasies of prophecy and world events. In either case (or both), we might then begin to see some kind of macro-economic fingerprint.
Very interesting comment, Matt. I agree that real answers as to how incompatible systems of belief co-exist, under what circumstances they clash, and which type of belief is likely to trump others will not come from armchair philosophy but from neuro- and computer science. And I readily concede the point that people do, in fact, hold inconsistent beliefs without being particularly bothered by the apparent contradictions. Religion, here of the Christian variety, is probably just among the most dramatic examples of this grown-up version of make believe, because it makes such a staggering number of patently false claims about the real world (Noah’s Ark, immaculate conception, young earth, second coming, etc.) That said, if certain beliefs are consistently disregarded as a basis for goal-oriented action in the real world, then we may safely assume that these beliefs enjoy a lesser cognitive status with respect to claims about the real world even for the most vocal “believers.” In that sense, actions speak quite loudly about which beliefs someone chooses to take seriously if push comes to shove. I am not denying that people seek out and create communities in which alternate realities are mutually affirmed and in that sense feel real. Every World of Warcraft or EVE Online addict knows that all too well. (Cough, cough.) But that doesn’t mean that I am not aware of the ontologically inferior status of this alternate reality.
Hanno- A few comments:
1. You wrote that “people do, in fact, hold inconsistent beliefs without being particularly bothered by the apparent contradictions.” The point I was trying to make is that the Second Comers aren’t bothered by the contradiction - not because of some infirmity in their conviction - but because they’re not even aware the contradiction exists! It isn’t “apparent” *to them*. [To paraphrase the American social writer Eric Hoffer: “True belief doesn’t consist in the ability to move mountains, but rather a failure to see mountains that need moving.”] You, being philosophically-minded (and trained?), strive for consistency of belief, and so, having developed certain habits of mind, are more likely to compare disparate beliefs as a conscious intellectual endeavor. But that doesn’t seem to be a universally-shared habit of mind.
2. In a church worship service, while stimulated by the idea of Jesus’s return, Second Comers likely engage in a limited amount of goal-oriented activity: conversing with fellow congregation members, making donations, even committing to teaching a Bible study class for, say, the coming year. When you use the phrase “goal-oriented activity”, you may be giving privileged status to long-range financial goal-oriented activity. I don’t think it’s true that belief in the second coming is “consistently disregarded as a basis for goal-oriented action in the real world”, as you say, but that such beliefs can be the basis for goal-oriented action in one context and not another.
3. If point (2) above is right, then what follows is not that beliefs in the Second Coming “enjoy a lesser status with respect to claims about the real world”, but that status is unavoidably tied to context and may fluctuate depending on the operative context at any given moment. It seems that multiple conceptions of the “real world” can be unproblematically housed in a single brain, so long as the contexts are kept distinct enough in time, space, and language to remain so neurally. Perhaps it’s erroroneous to believe that these people possess a unitary conception of the “real world”. Maybe none of us do. This may even be a highly adaptive evolutionary response to a variable world, in which multiple action pathways are possible (each rooted in a different stimulated conception of the near future) depending upon present environmental stimuli. Such a phenomenon seems to be underlie all human behavior: Our assessments of future contingencies is in constant low-level flux, depending on what’s happening in our immediate environments.
Perhaps there is some adaptive loss then in demanding a unitary “truth claim” from Second Comers, and thereby forcing cognitive dissonance and truth-election onto them. But I tend to think not, only because I deem the Rapture-ready frame of reference, when activated, to be a destructive form of group-think that sharply defines social boundaries and ignores useful domains of human knowledge. In short, it might have been adaptive in response to food supply pressures or tribal hostilities during the paleolithic (or even the waning days of the Roman Empire), but the problems humanity faces today seem to require the primacy of science and strong, open currents of “communicative action” within the population.
Or, it could be, Mr. Kaiser, that just as Christians think differently than you do about many important things, they also have a different idea of how to prepare for the end of the world.
If one works solely for immediate worldly gains, then the end of the world calls for an end of one’s efforts. But if one works in all things for eternal things, laboring in this world not for its own sake but because of a sense of calling and duty, then the end of the world is irrelevant to maintaining one’s duties of stewardship in the world.
In this vein, Luther was once asked what he would do if he knew that the world would end tomorrow. He replied that he would plant a tree.