The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [46]
Examples of agenticity abound. Subjects watching reflective dots move about in a darkened room, especially if the dots take on the shape of two legs and two arms, infer that they represent a person or intentional agent. Children believe that the sun can think and follows them around, and when asked to draw a picture of the sun they often add a smiley face to give agency to it. Genital-shaped foods such as bananas and oysters are often believed to enhance sexual potency. A third of transplant patients believe that the donor’s personality or essence is transplanted with the organ. Hood’s research team conducted a study among healthy adults in which they first asked them to rate the faces of twenty people for attractiveness, intelligence, and how willing they would be to receive a heart transplant from each person. After these ratings were recorded, Hood then told the subjects that half of the people they had just rated were convicted murderers, then asked them to rerate the pictures. Tellingly, although the ratings of the murderers’ attractiveness and intelligence decreased, the biggest drop of all was in the willingness to accept a heart from a murderer, which Hood concluded was due to the fear that some of the essence of evil might be transmitted to the recipient.4 This finding corroborates the study that reveals most people say they would never wear the sweater of a murderer, showing great disgust at the very thought, as if some of the murderer’s evil would rub off in the material of the sweater.5
By contrast, in a form of positive agenticity, most people say that they would wear the cardigan sweater of the children’s television host Mr. Rogers, believing that wearing the sweater would make them a better person.6 What is the deeper evolutionary basis of this essentialism? “If essences are thought to be transferable, we will not consider ourselves isolated individuals but rather members of a tribe potentially joined to each other through beliefs in supernatural connectedness,” Hood suggested. “We will see others in terms of the properties that make them essentially different from us. Such an idea suggests that some essential qualities are more likely to be transmitted than others. Youth, energy, beauty, temperament, strength, and even sexual preference are essential qualities that we attribute to others.”7
I caught myself in a moment of agenticity during a 2009 trip to Austin for a debate with creationists at the University of Texas. While in town I paid a visit to Lance Armstrong’s famous bike shop Mellow Johnny’s (so named because Americans butcher the pronunciation of maillot jaune, French for “yellow jersey”). In addition to numerous yellow jerseys hanging on the walls, on the showroom floor were several of Armstrong’s bikes on which he won seven Tours de France. “People think these are replica bikes,” the shop manager told me. “When I explain that these are the actual bikes on which Lance won the tour, they touch them like holy relics.” I was amused by the example, but then promptly and without thinking, I purchased an array of Lance Armstrong cycling gear and during my debate that night I donned a pair of Lance Armstrong yellow-rimmed black socks and a “Livestrong” T-shirt underneath my suit. My rational brain does not for a moment believe that the essence of Armstrong’s celebrated strength and endurance powered me through the three-hour event, yet for some odd reason I felt more confident. Perhaps, given the influence of belief-dependent realism and the power of placebo, I was a better debater that night. Who knows? There may be natural effects of such supernatural thinking.
We are natural-born supernaturalists, driven by our tendency to find meaningful patterns and impart to them intentional