The cardigan demonstration was meant to illustrate to an educated, intelligent, rational audience (albeit one that included journalists, who are always looking for a ‘hook’) that sometimes our beliefs can be truly supernatural but have nothing to do with religious indoctrination. Even atheists tend to show revulsion at the idea of touching Fred West’s cardigan. If it’s true that our beliefs can be supernatural but unconnected to religion, then it must also be true that humans will not necessarily evolve into a rational species, because a mind designed for generating natural explanations also generates supernatural ones.
News of the cardigan stunt and my comments spread like a virus across the world’s digital networks. I gave interview after interview, and the event generated web postings on both religious and secular sites with a mixture of ridicule and praise. Some colleagues didn’t like the showmanship, but I had made a point that got people talking. People were infuriated. I had touched a raw nerve. It was a sacrilegious stunt, even though no particular religion had been offended. But what had I demonstrated that upset the public so much? What did wearing a killer’s cardigan really show? Was it a demonstration of irrationality? How did this prove that humans will not evolve a rational mind?
I think the killer’s cardigan illustrates our common supersense. It says something about the sacred values of the group. It also says something about us as both individuals and group members. Their revulsion to the cardigan could reflect a common supernatural belief that invisible essences can contaminate the world and connect us together, almost like some form of human glue. Or at least it feels as if there is something tangible that joins us together. In academic social psychology, ‘social glue’ is the term to describe the mechanisms for the social connectedness of a group.2 Any behaviour that causes members of a group to feel more connected can operate as social glue. This is conspicuous at sporting events where many different fans from all walks of life come together as one. Hundreds of complete strangers who would normally not interact with each other suddenly become a highly organized and unified collective. In 1896 the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon described this phenomenon of crowds: ‘Sentiments, emotions, and ideas possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes.’ It is indeed as though something physical infects such groups. Unfortunately for English soccer, very often the power of this mass mentality can overwhelm normally law-abiding individuals who find themselves caught up in hooliganism and brawling with rival teams. Le Bon argued over one hundred years ago that social glue explains why supporters do not feel individually responsible for their actions and claim that they simply went with the crowd.3
I see this glue also operating at the individual level. Each of us can feel a special, intimate connectedness to another individual. I believe this mechanism can work at the level of a perceived inner essence. An essence is an underlying, invisible property that defines the true nature of something. It doesn’t really exist, but we think and behave as if there were some inner stuff inside people that makes them who they are. I examine this notion more thoroughly throughout the book because it explains a lot of our peculiar behaviour toward others and their possessions. I examine the recent research on essentialist thinking in children and show that this type of thinking can lead us not only to perceive an invisible property that inhabits individuals but also to transfer that property to their objects. It might be natural to believe there is an essential connection or glue that can bind us to others or repel us from them, even though such a connection would be supernatural. That’s why I think the cardigan stunt revealed that some people believed that the essence of Fred West had contaminated his clothing.
This essential glue could provide a useful heuristic for interacting with others. Heuristics are simple shortcuts in reasoning that lend support for more complex decision-making processes. We use them all the time when judging other people. Have you ever taken an instant dislike to someone? What was the reason? Often you couldn’t say – it was just a feeling you got. When we meet someone for the first time, there’s a great deal of unconscious decision-making going on. Who is this person? What do I know about him? What do I feel about him? We may be able to reflect on some or all of these questions, but often we answer without being aware of doing so. We are relying on unconscious inferences and heuristics. Social psychologists have shown that, with the barest information, people can make judgements about others rapidly and effortlessly. And yet such fleeting impressions, or thin slicing, as it is known, can have a profound effect on our decisions. For example, students can accurately predict teaching evaluation scores for a lecturer based on as little as two seconds of silent video taken from one of the lecturer’s classes. They can even predict which surgeons will be sued for malpractice based on a couple of seconds of muffled speech. Something in the quality of the movements and sounds reveals surprisingly rich information about their social skills.4 Humans are exquisitely sensitive to judging others, even though we are often unable to say exactly what it is about them we are noticing.
INTUITIVE REASONING
Such unconscious thinking forms part of what I call intuitive reasoning, which to most educated ears sounds like an oxymoron. How can reasoning be intuitive? By intuitive, I mean unlearned. As we shall see later in the book, there is good evidence that children naturally and spontaneously think about the unseen properties that govern the world. They infer forces to explain events they cannot directly see, understand that living things have a life force, and reason in terms of essence when thinking about the true nature of animals. And, of course, they begin to understand that other people have minds. These processes are not taught to children. They are reasoning, though it is not clear that they can necessarily reflect on why or how they are coming up with their decisions. That’s why their reasoning is intuitive.
Intuition is often called a ‘gut feeling’. Sometimes we get a ‘vibe’ when we sense a physical feeling of knowing – like the 1960s’ hippies, whose talk of getting good or bad vibes was a shorthand for gut feelings. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls this the somatic marker: it indicates the way emotions affect reasoning in a rapid and often unconscious way. ‘Somatic’ is derived from the Greek word for ‘of the body.’ . In his remarkable research, Damasio and his wife Hanna have shown that reasoning works by combining information from past experience and encounters and feeding that into decision-making related to the current situation. Past learning is stored as a response deep in the emotional centres of the brain known as the limbic system. Sometimes referred to as the ‘reptilian’ part of brain because of our shared evolutionary history with reptiles, these centres relay signals into the frontal lobe areas that are concerned with decision-making. If part of this circuit is disrupted through injury, reasoning can be impaired. In one study, patients with damage to their frontal lobes took part in a gambling experiment in which they had to select cards from one of four different decks. Two of the decks paid out low amounts, and the other two paid out greater sums. However, unbeknownst to the players, there were more penalty cards in the high-reward decks compared to the low-reward decks. The frontal lobe-damaged patients were much poorer at learning to avoid the risky decks compared to normal players. Normally when faced with risk, we sweat. It’s a telltale sign of emotion. To understand the role of the emotions in the learning involved in the gambling experiment, the Damasios measured how much sweat each player produced by placing electrodes on their skin. This measure, known as the galvanic skin response, detects changes in skin conductance as a measure of underlying arousal. It’s the same principle used in lie detectors. What they found was astonishing. Both normal and frontal lobe-damaged patients showed the same skin conductance before each card was turned over at the beginning of the game. However, as the game progressed and normal players began to learn that some decks were more risky, they became more aroused just before they chose a card from these piles. They were starting to sense the patterns. Bells and lights were going off in their emotional systems to warn them that their decision was wrong. This happened before they were even consciously aware that the odds were stacked against them. Intuition was telling them to be careful. More remarkably, frontal lobe-damaged patients showed no anticipatory arousal whatsoever! Past experience and learning may be vague and unconscious, but they provide a ‘feels right’ marker that enables individuals to be sure about their decisions. In the Damasios’ study, the frontal lobe-damaged patients, who didn’t have these markers, were either paralyzed with indecision when having to make a choice or completely careless and unconcerned about the consequences of their actions. This was because they had no somatic marker to help them decide or to warn them to be more careful. They could not feel the answer.5