How Motivated Reasoning Makes People Religious

Whatever your idea of heaven, you would like to believe it is real. A painting in the Austrian National Library. Source: Wikimedia Commons

What is Motivated Reasoning?

Motivated reasoning is the tendency to reach desirable, biased conclusions without being aware that you are doing so. For example, the promise of a loving god, a meaningful existence, and eternal life in paradise with departed family members may be so desirable that you ignore the lack of evidence, and you bias your reasoning in such a way that you convince yourself that these things are true.

Some psychologists think that the desire for religion to be true is the most common path to piety. It has been called the motivational explanation for religion, the comfort theory of religion, and wishful thinking, and it has been proposed by famous scholars for centuries. Sigmund Freud famously said that religion: “derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses.”

In this context, motivated reasoning means that something is "motivating" people to accept religious ideas. The comfort they bring may be one motivation, however, a need for comfort is often the result of negative emotions and moods, such as anxiety, grief, guilt, and depression.

Indeed, David Hume noted that: “Agitated by hopes and fears […], men scrutinise, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity.”

A common criticism of motivated reasoning is that "people don’t just believe what they want to believe." However, while most reasoning includes accuracy as a goal, motivational goals are always in competition. The latter includes the desires to reinforce positive emotions and prior beliefs (i.e., confirmation bias) and avoid negative emotions and contradictory beliefs (i.e., cognitive dissonance).

Given that most information, memories, and beliefs have the capacity to evoke emotion (they are “affect laden”), these motivational goals usually influence the conclusions we draw. For example, nicotine addiction may cause someone to want to believe that smoking is not unhealthy. To maintain an illusion of objectivity, they may search their memory and environment for evidence to justify this belief and ignore evidence that conflicts.

Examples of Motivated Reasoning 

Motivated reasoning is more common than most people think. Ironically, this may be because people are motivated to believe they are rational (even scientists fall foul). To give a handful of examples, motivated reasoning may cause people to:

1. Overestimate their intelligence, creativity, fearlessness, and emotional stability (egoistic bias), as well as their agreeableness, dutifulness, and restraint (moralistic bias).
2. Overestimate the likelihood of favorable events (e.g., winning the lottery) and underestimate unfavorable events (e.g., becoming ill). This has been called the optimism bias.
3. Overestimate (PDF) their control and mastery of their environment and relationships.
4. Adopt various other beliefs, including that they perform healthy behaviors more than in reality (and unhealthy behaviors less) and are the cause of their own successes but not their failures. A more specific example might be believing that their sports team failed because of a referee rather than the team’s ability.

These biases manifest unconsciously in the (lack of) attention that someone gives to incoming information, the capacity and speed with which they recall (or forget) it, their (un)willingness to look for consistent or contradictory information, and how credible they think the information is.

The type of information is important too. Given that accuracy is always a goal, motivated reasoning can have a greater influence when there is a wealth of information that is ambiguous, unsupported, contradictory, and poorly defined, because this gives people leeway to interpret the information how they want while still believing in its accuracy. For example, a study found that people’s self-impressions were over-estimated more for ambiguous words like idealistic and sophisticated than for precisely-defined words like neat and athletic.

There may be a reason why successful religious texts include passages that contradict.
Source: Wikimedia Commons. 

Why Motivated Reasoning Might Explain Religion 

There are several reasons to think that religion is a product of motivated reasoning. First, religions employ diffuse texts and collections of fables that are regularly accused of being ambiguous and contradictory. Such narratives provide leeway for people to reach their preferred conclusion (in the same way a horoscope does). For example, ambiguity about God’s role in the world may give believers leeway to choose between free-will and determinism (i.e., God’s “mysterious ways”) when the situation fits.

Second, religion is strongly associated with emotion. The strength, longevity, and behavior generated by religious beliefs all suggest that the beliefs are “affect-laden,” while studies have shown that rules that are made “sacred” become emotionally charged and difficult to abandon. Strong beliefs must also be personally justifiable, which requires that the believer not be aware of their biases (as in motivated reasoning).

The types of people who become religious also implicate motivated reasoning. For example, compared to atheists, religious people are prone to alexithymia (a deficit in identifying and distinguishing emotional states) and report more intense emotions. They are also prone to regulating and repressing their emotions.

Together, these findings suggest that religious people may be more motivated by their emotions to engage in motivated reasoning and more likely to find religion the perfect platform to reach their desired conclusions.

Evidence Supporting a Motivational Explanation for Religion

There is support for the idea that negative emotions make people religious. For example, religious belief can increase when people experience an elevated fear of death (also see this study (PDF)), a loss of personal control, a traumatic event, and other negative life episodes. Greater religious belief is also associated with poverty and financial insecurity.

It is likely that motivated reasoning is the process (or one of the processes) that takes someone from a negative emotion to a religious belief. Negative emotions motivate people to eliminate them, and religiosity is associated with greater life satisfaction, reduced anxiety, reduced fear of death (see the book "The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach"), reduced thoughts about death, and reduced distress signals in the brain.

Is it Actually Motivated Reasoning?

There is a lot that can happen in the brain between feeling distressed and becoming religious. For example, how is information about the cause of the distress evaluated, remembered, and accessed? How is religion identified as the solution? What biases appear in a person's reasoning? Without answering these questions, it is difficult to confirm whether motivated reasoning is the cause of the experimental results cited above.

There are only a few studies in which motivated reasoning is directly implicated, and even these lack detail. In one experiment, people who were asked to write about death subsequently reported more religious belief than people who wrote about other things. They also reported greater belief in heaven than in hell (i.e., the more comforting belief). The authors attributed the effects to motivated reasoning but only because a competing explanation (terror management theory) looked less likely.

Other studies have provided clues about the effect of motivated reasoning on attention, memory, and the communication of religious ideas. For example, when people are presented with evidence that disconfirms their paranormal or religious beliefs, they experience negative emotions, are less able to recall the information, and they employ selective learning that reduces its emotional impact. Furthermore, a historical analysis of the Abrahamic faiths suggested that comforting religious ideas are especially likely to survive as religions evolve, and thus may be communicated and accepted more readily.

In my own experiments, I explored motivated reasoning more directly by testing whether positive impressions of supernatural beings are associated with belief in them. By examining “repressors” (people who repress negative views of things) or by manipulating other people to think positively, I found that the positive views of supernatural beings that resulted could explain the greater belief that these people had for them.

If religion is comforting, why is there a hell? Source: Jeremyboar via Wikimedia Commons.

Criticism of Motivational Explanations of Religion

My study, which supported the notion that “comforting gods are more believable,” still lacked detail about how motivated reasoning actually works, and this paucity of detail isn’t the only criticism leveled at motivational explanations of religion.

For example, if religion is supposed to be comforting, why is there a hell? Why a devil? Why do so many religions have threatening gods? These discomforting ideas may be a consequence of accuracy goals. If paradise is all there is after death, this looks implausible. However, accuracy and desire may both be satisfied if there is a hell, but it's a hell that the believer is definitely not going to. We also have to consider the comfort and reassurance that comes from knowing that bad people who escape justice on Earth will ultimately be punished in hell. 

Alternatively, scary gods and threatening ideas may serve to attract people’s attention so that a religion’s more benevolent ideas can work their magic (supported by my study, cited above). They may also serve a social or evolutionary function, such as to keep people in line (e.g., with the threat of hell) or to keep them away from danger (e.g., “an evil spirit lives in those woods!”).

Another criticism is that deluding oneself to quell negative emotions should not facilitate survival (i.e., we have emotions for a reason!), which means that evolution should have eliminated motivated reasoning and other forms of emotion regulation by now. However, the above research suggests otherwise. Indeed, there are many forms of emotion regulation that have been empirically measured and that could have useful functions. For example, negative emotions can become excessive (e.g., anxiety disorders), while self-delusion may provide a competitive advantage in some situations (e.g., in war).

In other words, despite the protests of some cognitive and evolutionary scientists, there is substantial support for motivational explanations of religion, and motivated reasoning appears to be an important piece of the religious puzzle.