Psychology Fails To Get It

When last this blog mentioned psychology it was to look at just a few of the huge problems with studying the human mind as a topic of science as laid out by one of it's pioneers, the brilliant American philosopher, William James.  The time before that it was the mention of the article on Nature  online which said that a rigorous review of published psychological studies were done so badly that as many as two-thirds of them were unreliable even granted the extremely indulgent standards that psychology sets for itself.  I don't believe I mentioned the other study discussed in the article, that of John Ioannidis which used more rigorous criteria and said that the number of invalid published, reviewed psychological studies is probably more than 80%.   The article in Nature, I will repeat, noted that was a problem for ALL psychological studies because you don't know without rigorously looking at the methodology, the performance, and analysis of the claims made in it if the study fell into the small minority of psychological studies that could be considered scientifically valid or not.

Last night I read an interview with an author of one of the myriad of psychological studies that purports to discover the psychological nature of religion.   The short version of the study is given as:

Enter psychologist Steven Reiss’ new book: The 16 Strivings for God: The New Psychology of Religious Experiences. There isn’t just one fundamental desire behind religion, Reiss argues, there are sixteen of them. According to Reiss, all humans have the following innate desires:

– Acceptance: the desire for positive self-regard
– Curiosity: the desire for understanding
– Eating: the desire for food
– Family: the desire to raise children and spend time with siblings
– Honor: the desire for upright character
– Idealism: the desire for social justice
– Independence: the desire for self-reliance
– Order: the desire for structure
– Physical Activity: the desire for muscle exercise
– Power: the desire for influence or leadership
– Romance: the desire for beauty and sex
– Saving: the desire to collect
– Social Contact: the desire to have fun with peers
– Status: the desire for respect based on social standing
– Tranquility: the desire for safety
– Vengeance: the desire to confront provocations

Religion, he argues, is successful when it serves all of these needs.

The methodology and, though not called that, the assumptions of those conducting the study are given in the interview.

How does your theory differ from those of past authors that posit just one or two motivations for religion?

Ours is based on scientific research, so we ask people what motivates them. At this point, we’ve assessed the motives of 100,000 people throughout the world, from many cultures in Europe, Asia, and North America. We asked them about every possible thing that could motivate them, and then we take their answers and analyze them statistically. The results show that there are 16 psychological forces that motivate people. All human motives are a combination of these 16 psychological forces. Nothing important is left out. It’s a comprehensive list.

The others, like Freud—he didn’t do any research, and neither did most of the others. They just did armchair speculation and philosophically suggested the fundamental forces. Then they would take one or two and say that was the most important. There was no scientific basis.

Could you walk me through your methodology?

We started off with every goal I could think of [with help from my students]. And then we asked other people to add to the list and think of additional ones. We went through books and the index of psychology to come up with more. The first list had 550+ goals. Then we looked at it, and we thought how many of these are really the same? We wanted to eliminate duplicates. That cut it down to around 300 different goals.

We would show these goals to somebody and ask, “How important is each one in motivating you?” We would get data from a couple hundred people and put that into a computer [to] determine which [goals] were very similar. We would reduce the list further, and then start over with the reduced list, repeating the process until we came up with the 16 desires. From that 16, we can generate almost any goal.

Your model offers some new conceptual resources, particularly for thinking about how people’s “strong” and “weak” strivings inform how they participate in religion.

The 16 desires are shared by everybody. We all want the same things from life. We would all rather understand than be confused. We would all rather be praised than criticized. We would all rather have safety than feel anxious. While we all want the same things, we don’t value them to the same degree. Some people value safety above all else, and they’re going to be looking for God to protect them. That’s going to be the most important thing to them, the most meaningful thing. Somebody else might value understanding even more than their safety, and [for them] the most meaningful thing in religion [might be] understanding where we come from and who we are. For others, religious fellowship may be the most important thing because they place an unusually high value on social contact.

It becomes possible to gain insight into your desires, your values, and how that is expressed in your religion. For most psychologists, the motivations and forces that drive people, they call them “energy.” I’m talking about values. As a species, we’re motivated to assert our values. When we come to understand how we value the 16 desires, you gain insight into why some aspects of religion resonate more with you than others.

The first thing that jumped out at me was that they left something about religious belief out of their study and that is the obvious question of whether people who have religious beliefs have them BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE THEY ARE TRUE.

There are many aspects of religion that certainly fall outside of their list of desires, for example, in the three major monotheistic religions, you are required to do justice to even your enemies, those who give you every reason to hate, those who have harmed and still have the potential to harm you.  You have an obligation to give to people who you don't know and who you certainly have no emotional attachment to, even those you never will see or know about.  There are all kinds of requirements in religions that are not only not covered by any of those "desires" there are huge swaths of religious requirements that we forego our desires, things which we desire very much.

This study reveals nothing so much as that the authors of the study not only have not got the first clue as to what religion is all about, they don't seem to imagine that it can be more than a series of egotistically emotional choices and desires fed.  It certainly doesn't seem to get that you can believe in a religion on the basis of your believing it is the truth, never mind the way to getting beyond self-centered desires for yourself and those attached to you, that religion can be a means of escaping the narrow confines imagined by psychologists into a wider and even an ultimate expansion of consideration that is universal.   In Buddhism, the real thing, not the Western boutique, Brit logical positivist and Hollywood schools of Buddhism, one of the practices is to expand the range of loving concern, not only to all people but to all sentient creatures on Earth and those speculated to be in the entire universe.  Christianity contains similar prayers and, arguably, scripture passages that assert that every creature's ultimate welfare is an active concern of God and, so, us.

I won't go so far as to make the accusation that the people who conducted this study did so as an attack on religion, though it could certainly be used that way.   I do think they know that anything that diminishes or calls into question religious belief is going to get media attention, attacking religion is definitely an active program of the media, perhaps even that highest of all priorities, a fashion statement.  I do think that they demonstrate that they don't really respect that religion can be believed in at a higher intellectual level than mere satisfaction of desires, which is definitely to diminish it.  While there are those who certainly seem to operate at that level, even they will encounter aspects of the religion they may follow which encourages consideration of the negative aspect of some of their desires and even the command to abandon the pursuit of their satisfaction.

I will say that I doubt the thing could stand up to any kind of rigorous analysis.  As I commented at Religion Dispatches, since they don't seem to consider that people believe in a religion because they believe its true, they don't have very much respect for the thinking of the people whose self-reports of their mental states are the basis of their study.  If they can't be trusted to believe something because they believe it's true, how could anyone trust their self-reporting of their desires?