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Invisible Forces and Powerful Beliefs:
Gravity, Gods, and Minds
By the
Chicago Social Brain Network
FT Press
Upper Saddle River, NJ
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Invisible Forces and Unseen Powers:
Gravity, Gods, and Minds
Preface
1. Invisible Forces Operating on Human
Bodies
Gravity is an invisible force that holds us
to the surface of the earth, and the fact
that gravity is invisible does not place it
beyond scientific scrutiny. Similarly,
humans are a quintessentially social
species whose need for social connection
produces invisible forces on our brain,
behavior, and biology that are subject to
scientific investigation. Among these are
forces that compel us to seek trusting and
meaningful connections with others and
to seek meaning and connection with
something bigger than ourselves. The
story of these invisible forces speaks to
who we are as a species.
From Selfish Genes to Social Brains
2. The Social Nature of Humankind
The human brain has evolved under the
guidance of selfish genes to produce
more than a brain that is capable of
powerful, isolated information
processing operations. The human brain
also evolved with inherent capacities for
social cognition, compassion, empathy,
bonding, coordination, cooperation,
values, mortality and a need for social
connection that extends beyond kin and
even other individuals.
From Inclusive Fitness to Spiritual
Striving

3. Science, Religion, and a Revised
Religious Humanism
The dialogue between science and
religion, if properly pursued, can usher in
a new era of religious humanism in the
leading world religions. Their central
beliefs and practices largely would
remain intact, but their views of nature
and their concerns with health and wellbeing
would be refined through their
conversations with the sciences. How
this model would work is discussed in
terms of the relation between love and
health in Christian theology – especially
the tension between the agape, caritas,
and eros models of Christian love.

The Status of the Body Politic and the
Status of the Body Itself

4. Health by Connection: From Social
Brains to Resilient Bodies
Most people feel socially connected most
of the time. Felt connectedness is
typically taken for granted, but the
effects of its absence, as experienced in
feelings of isolation, demonstrate that
our evolutionary heritage as a social
species has potent implications for health
and well-being.

From Relationships to People and
Groups to Relationships with God

5. Psychosomatic Relations: From
Superstition to Mortality
It has long been recognized that mental
states can impact health and well being,
but the causal pathways have only
recently begun to be understood.
Thoughts, beliefs and attitudes can have
powerful effects on physiological
functions, health and disease. Examples
range from superstitious beliefs
associated with voodoo, bone pointing,
or other black rituals to the more positive
states associated with spirituality. The
present essay considers these disparate
psychological states and how they might
translate into physiological effects
having real health implications.

The Mind and Body Are One

6. The Suspension of Individual
Consciousness and the Dissolution of
Self and Other Boundaries
A special case of social interaction
concerns two or more individuals
engaging in temporally coordinated
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actions that imply particular timing
patterns such as synchrony or rhythmic
turn taking such as applauding in unison
or the ‘wave’ that is produced by
thousands of individual sports fans in a
stadium. A model to explain such
synchronized behavior is proposed in
terms of the neural processes that are
jointly recruited. One of the main
implications suggested by this model is
that taking part in or being part of a
synchronized social interaction gives rise
to a qualitative shift in subjective
experience due to the difficulty of
applying an individual centered
explanation to collectively produced
spontaneous co-action.
You and I as One
7. Action at a Distance: The Invisible
Force of Language
Language forms the fabric of our social
institutions and makes tangible the nature
of our relationships. Although the
function of language is typically viewed
in terms of the information content that it
provides, some of the social function of
language may depend on the way it
affects us. The idea of language impact
– how language directly affects our
emotions and social connections – may
be fundamental to the way the social
brain functions to connect people.

Systems and Signals for Social
Coordination
8. Hidden Forces in Understanding
Others: Mirror Neurons and
Neurobiological Underpinnings
Specific brain regions in the monkey
contain individual brain cells, or neurons,
that respond to both observation and
execution of identical hand and mouth
actions. Brain imaging in humans has
demonstrated that our brains have
similarly localized regions with similar
properties. These areas respond to
execution of goal-directed actions of the
hand and mouth and during observation
of the same or similar actions.
Interestingly, these brain regions in the
human are also responsive to observation
and imitation of facial movements, and
appear to be sensitive to their emotional
content.

Connecting and Binding Social Brains
and Minds

9. Empathy and Interpersonal Sensitivity
Empathy is thought to play a key role in
motivating prosocial behavior, guiding
our preferences and behavioral
responses, and providing the affective
and motivational base for moral
development. While folk conceptions of
empathy view it as the capacity to share,
understand and respond with care to the
affective states of others, neuroscience
research demonstrates that these
components can be dissociated. Empathy
is not a unique characteristic of human
consciousness, but it is an important
adaptive behavior that evolved with the
mammalian brain. However, humans are
special in the sense that high-level
cognitive abilities (language, theory of
mind, executive functions) are layered on
top of phylogenetically older social and
emotional capacities. These higher level
cognitive and social capacities expand
the range of behaviors that can be driven
by empathy.

Seeing into My Mind and Other Minds

10. Seeing Invisible Minds
Other minds are inherently invisible.
Being able to "see" them requires
learning about other minds, attending to
other minds, and projecting one's own
mind onto others, and seeing minds in
other agents can mean the difference
between treating others as humans versus
as objects.

Inferring Minds When None Can be
Seen

11. Anthropomorphism: Human
Connection to a Universal Society
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The human motivation for social
connection extends beyond the boundary
of the human in the (often
misunderstood) religious language of
anthropomorphism. In this chapter, an
infamous sermon from colonial
America—“Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry God”—is used to illustrate the
way anthropomorphic language works to
incorporate human society in a web of
ethical obligations that connect to the
natural environment and, by imaginative
extension, to the universe as a whole.

Personifications of God

12. How Does God Become Real
Becoming a person of faith is not so
much about acquiring certain beliefs
but about learning to use one’s mind
in particular ways; the often intensely
private experience of God is built
through a profoundly social learning
process.

Belief and Connection

13. Theological Perspectives on God as
an Invisible Force
The beliefs that religious individuals
hold about the way God operates in
human life are potential factors affecting
perceived social isolation. My paper
discusses a specific type of such belief
that is common in the history of
Christian thought: the belief that God is
an invisible force of a rather impersonal
sort working for the good in everything
that happens. The paper argues that this
sort of belief has as great or greater
potential than belief in God as a personal
friend to give one the sense that one is
never alone, but the conception of God
as pervasive can also lead to inattention
and disconnection.

The Elusiveness of Meaningful
Connection

14. Visible Efforts to Change Invisible
Connections
Despite the human need for social
connection, many individuals are lonely
because they are unable to create
meaningful social bonds. Interventions
designed to reduce loneliness have not
been successful, suggesting that a better
understanding of loneliness, social
connection, and the obstacles to forming
meaningful connections with others is
needed.

Reflections on Invisible Connections

15. Social Brain, Spiritual Medicine?
Science and religion are inextricably
intertwined in the practice of medicine.
Science has provided modern medicine
with extraordinary diagnostic and
therapeutic capacities that can be
employed to care for patients. Religions
provide a fuller vision for the worthiness
of caring for the sick, a framework to
guide the application of medical science
in that endeavor, and practices that
strengthen the human capacity for
treating patients as the mindful persons
they are.
Invisible Forces
16. Epilogue
Invisible forces that connect individuals
to society, or to each other, have effects
at both ends of the connection. As
humans we are fundamentally individual
and fundamentally social. We
encompass both the pursuit of rational
self interest of Homo economicus and the
pursuit of approval, belonging, and
intimacy of Homo socialis, the former
grounded in eros, the latter in agape.
These forces acting together represent a
signature feature of Homo sapiens (the
wise ones) and have contributed a record
of influence and impact– both positive
and negative –that is unmatched in
biology.
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Preface
We view our past through a
reverse telescope, making it seem like
contemporary events are a much larger
part of our history than they are.
Hominids have been estimated to have
evolved about 7 million years ago, with
our species having evolved only within
approximately the last 1% of that period.
The human brain was sculpted by
evolutionary forces over tens of
thousands of years, whereas the human
achievements we take for granted, such
as civilizations, law, and art, have
emerged only during the past few
thousands of years. A mere 300 years
ago, theology and philosophy were the
principal disciplinary lenses through
which the world was viewed, and from
which explanations and instruction were
sought. Advances in science over the
past 300 years have transformed how we
think, act, and live. Nearly every aspect
of human existence, ranging from
agriculture, commerce, and
transportation to technology,
communication, and medicine, has been
transformed by contemporary science.
We have no hesitation to accept
scientific explanations of physical
entities being influenced by invisible
forces such as gravity, magnetism, and
genes. But when human mentation and
behavior are the objects to be explained,
deterministic scientific accounts seem to
many to be less satisfying.
For some, science and modernity
are akin to the apple in the Garden of
Eden, responsible for our fall from
Grace. For others, theology and religion
represent little more than the stuff of
superstition with no place in an educated
society.
About six years ago, we had the
opportunity to create a most unusual
group of scholars to examine questions
about the invisible forces acting on,
within, and between human bodies.
Superb scholars who individually had
made major contributions to their own
disciplinary field – fields as divergent as
neuroscience and medicine to
philosophy and theology – were invited
to form an interdisciplinary network of
scholars to consider such questions. The
development of these discussions even
over the first few meetings truly
astonished us all. We decided to share
what we learned through the present
book, which represents a different
perspective, one in which our
understanding of human nature is
enriched by serious insights and scrutiny
that each perspective has to offer.
Theology and religion have always
relied on unseen forces as the basis for
explanations of human behavior and
experience. Science has been able to
explicate those forces even if along
different lines than originally conceived.
As we start to consider some of the more
complex aspects of human nature,
science and theology may be able to
work together to shed light on some of
these complexities.
We begin this preface and each
chapter with a word cloud produced
using Wordle at http://www.wordle.net.
In the case of this preface, it illustrates
key concepts that are found in this book.
In the case of the chapters, the word
cloud in each provides a visualization of
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the key terms and ideas expressed in that
chapter. Each chapter, in turn,
represents a contribution led by a
particular member to the network but
broadened to reflect the interactions of
the network on that topic. Perusal of the
word clouds across chapters makes the
flow of ideas more visible. Together,
the chapters speak to who we are as a
species and the nature of the invisible
forces that make us such a unique
species. For instance, humans seem to
strive for social connections in a variety
of ways from friendships to
identification with groups to religious
affiliations. A major thesis of this book
is that we are fundamentally a social
species, and that this journey is less a
march toward isolation and autonomy
than it is a march to competence,
interdependence, coordination,
cooperation, and social resilience.
Guiding us through this journey are our
social brains, which have evolved to
create anything but a blank slate at birth.
We owe a debt of thanks to many
for their contributions and support over
the years, but we owe special thanks to
Barnaby Marsh for approaching us with
the idea of forming such a network and
for his many contributions to the
network, and to the John Templeton
Foundation for their support and for their
encouragement to pursue questions,
ideas, and conclusions of our science
regardless of where they led.
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Chapter 1 1
Invisible Forces Operating on Human
Bodies
We may believe we know why
we think, feel, and act as we do, but
various forces influence us in ways that
are largely invisible to our senses.
Gravity is an invisible force that holds us
to the surface of the earth, and
magnetism is an invisible force that we
use in everyday life. The fact that
gravity and magnetism are invisible to us
does not place them beyond scientific
scrutiny. Similarly, there are a host of
forces that, over the course of human
evolution, have emerged to influence our
thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
Because many of these forces are
1 The Chicago Social Brain Network is a group
of more than a dozen scholars from the
neurosciences, behavioral sciences, social
sciences, and humanities who share an interest in
who we are as a species and the role of
biological and social factors in the shaping of
individuals, institutions, and societies across
human history.
The scientists and scholars in the
Network differ in background, epistemologies,
beliefs, and methods. After five years of
working together, we found a common set of
themes to have emerged in our work despite the
differences among us. These themes, which
provide a different perspective on how we might
think about human history, experience, and
spirituality, are examined here and explored in
more detail in subsequent chapters.
elemental, we will be dealing with an
area of human behavior that has also
been addressed for centuries by various
religions. Among these are forces that
compel us to seek trusting and
meaningful connections with others and
to seek meaning and connection with
something larger than ourselves. The
story of these invisible forces speaks to
who we are and what our potential might
be as a species. In short, it is the story
of the human mind.
The mind can be thought of as
the structure and processes responsible
for cognition, emotion, and behavior. It
is now widely recognized that many
structures and processes of the mind
operate outside of awareness, with only
the end products reaching awareness,
and then only sometimes. But clearly we
know a great deal about the mind from
what we experience through our senses.
It is just commonsense that we know the
shape or color of an object from simply
seeing it.
Or do we? It is obvious that the
tops of the tables depicted in the top
panel of Figure 1 differ in size and
shape. You may be surprised to learn
that your mind is fooling you, that the
tops of the table are precisely the same
size and shape. If you don’t believe it,
trace and cut a piece of paper the size of
one table
top and
then place
it over the
other.
Selfevident
truths can sometimes be absolutely false.

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The science of the mind is not
unique in this regard. As the historian
Daniel Boorstin (1983, 1) noted:
Nothing could be more obvious
than that the earth is stable and
unmoving, and that we are the
center of the universe. Modern
Western science takes its
beginning from the denial of this
commonsense axiom . . .
Common sense, the foundation
of everyday life, could no longer
serve for the governance of the
world. When “scientific”
knowledge, the sophisticated
product of complicated
instruments and subtle
calculations, provided
unimpeachable truths, things
were no longer as they seemed.”
(p. 294)
And just as the observation that we roam
on stable ground led to the incorrect
inference that we are the center of the
universe, so too is the modern notion
that the human brain is a solitary,
autonomous instrument whose
connections with other brains is a matter
of deliberate choice and of no real
import.
The human brain, the organ of
the mind, is housed deep within the
cranial vault, where it is protected and
isolated from others, so it may seem
obvious that the brain is a solitary
information processing device that has
no special means of connecting with
other brains. But we are fundamentally
a social species. Faces, expressive
displays, and human speech receive
preferential processing in neonate as
well as adult brains. When a person
feels rejected by others, their brain
shows the same pattern of activation as
when they are exposed to a physically
painful stimulus. Permit a person to
cooperate with others, and their brain
shows the same pattern of activation as
when they are given a rich reward such
as delicious food or drink. We may not
be aware of it, but human evolution has
sculpted a human need for social
connection, along with neural circuits
and hormonal processes that enable and
promote communication and connection
across brains. As we shall see in the
chapters to follow, our sociality is an
important part of who we are as a
species and it plays an important though
often invisible role in the operations of
our brain and our biology. Among the
questions we examine is whether our
social brain also contributes to the
ubiquitous human quest for spirituality.
The Chicago Social Brain Network
For hundreds of years, theology
and philosophy were the hub disciplines
of scholarship, and other fields of
inquiry orbited around this dyad and
were tightly constrained by it. Over the
past three centuries, the sciences have
come into their own, displacing theology
and philosophy at the center of the
academic universe. In so doing, they
have produced extraordinary advances in
everyday life. People may reminisce
about the good old days, but thanks to
science and technology the amount of
total income spent on the necessities of
food, clothing, and shelter dropped from
80% in 1901 to 50% in 2002/2003. Yet
there remains an inchoate sense that
something is missing in our lives,
something intangible and elusive.
Science has improved our material lives,
but improvements in material life may
not be enough to optimize human well
being.
Can these two very different
ways of seeing the world be used
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synergistically to shed new light on the
human mind? In the Fall of 2004, we
established an ongoing network of more
than a dozen scholars unbounded by
disciplinary precincts, geographical
borders, or methodological perspectives
to set aside antagonisms that had grown
up between science and humanities in
order to explore this question. These
Network scholars hail from disciplines
as disparate as psychology, neurology,
theology, statistics, philosophy, internal
medicine, anthropology, and sociology.
Each of these scholars was well known
in their own field and were busy with
other obligations, but it was the
opportunity to achieve a deeper, more
comprehensive discussion of the human
mind that made it worth the time and
effort it required to be part of the
Network.
Although various members of the
Network interact on a daily or weekly
basis, the entire Network convenes twice
annually for a four-day retreat to discuss
each other’s research, to critique each
other and to learn from one other.
Scientific analyses characterized by
rigorous experimental designs and data
analytic strategies are interlaced with
rich philosophical, theological, and
historical analyses of the same questions
about invisible forces that act on us all.
The dialogue between the Network
scientists and the scholars from the
humanities and theology is bidirectional.
For instance, the beliefs and behavior
described in the humanities and theology
are rich in hypotheses that can now be
tested empirically, and the measures and
methods of the behavioral sciences and
neurosciences now permit rigorous
investigation of some of these
hypotheses. Each of the Network
members brings a unique perspective to
the study of the human mind, and the
provocative story of the mind that is
emerging from the collective efforts of
the Network is the subject of this book.
The Network is unconventional
in other ways, as well. Traditionally,
scientists and scholars work together to
achieve a common understanding and a
consensus position. We quickly learned
that we did not need to come to a
consensus to benefit tremendously from
the dialogue on the capacity and
motivation for the ubiquitous human
quest for sociality and spirituality. For
instance, there is no consensus within
the Network on whether there is a God,
and we do not seek here to provide the
final word on what science and the
humanities each have to say to the other
about the human mind. Instead, our
purpose is to illustrate the possibility and
importance of engaging others whose
views we may not share in a serious
dialogue on such topics. Among the
lessons we as a Network have learned
are:
1. that some questions about human
nature and our social and
spiritual aspirations have been
asked by humankind for
thousands of years. Accordingly,
there may be more to be gained
from engaging in a collaborative
process of thinking about these
questions than from demanding
simple and immediate answers.
We discuss what we see as
possible answers to questions
about our nature and strivings,
but the value in stating these
positions is to have clear
positions from which to move
thinking and research forward.
Thus, our purpose in writing this
book is to articulate ideas to be
shaped and refined, not to
provide the final word.
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2. that one need not agree with a
position to perform a deep and
thorough analysis of the
arguments for and against the
position. Objectivity in thought
and analysis are keys to reaching
a deep understanding of a topic.
By taking a position, developing
arguments for and against the
position, then taking the opposite
position and doing likewise, we
develop the capacity to be more
dispassionate and powerful
thinkers – and gain deeper
insight into a topic.
3. that one need not reach
agreement with someone to learn
a great deal from discussions
with them or to make significant
advances in addressing a
complex question. The salve of
affirmation can lead us to seek
like-minded others and to
denigrate and avoid those who
disagree with us. Although this
may provide temporary comfort,
it does little to help address deep
divisions or solve problems with
which we must deal in an
increasingly complex and diverse
world. There are inherent
tensions between the sciences
and the humanities, and these
tensions have led to a
polarization of views, an “it’s my
way or the highway” approach
toward those holding divergent
points of view. The contents of
this book illustrate an alternative
possibility. The Network is a
very interdisciplinary group, and
the perspectives captured in the
subsequent chapters reflect some
of the same tensions with which
other books dealing with science
and religion have dealt – and
from which they have not
benefitted. The tensions reflect
deep and enduring differences in
the way in which scholars in the
humanities, the social sciences,
and the sciences think about
theory, methods, and evidence.
These differences can test one’s
mettle but if acknowledged,
respected, embraced, and
pursued, they result in a richer,
more innovative and synergistic
collaborative effort. In the case
of our Network, this was neither
easy nor quick, but it was
achieved through a mutual
respect and exchange of ideas
and a shared conviction
regarding the importance of the
Network’s combination of
approaches from the humanities
and the sciences. In a sense, our
Network is a microcosm of the
structure that exists in our
society. If these tensions are
embraced and used to their full
catapultic effect, one can make
progress on serious problems,
transforming not only how we
think about the problem, but also
how we think about those who
hold different or opposing views.
4. that the insights or advances we
can achieve need not be our or
our opponent’s position, or a
less-than optimal compromise
between the two, but rather they
can be truly innovative, building
on and transcending both initial
positions. The specific forms of
such creative and transcendent
solutions are difficult to
articulate in advance but there is
a thought process – characterized
by clarity, openness, constructive
criticism, and synthesis – that
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Background
increases the likelihood one will
reach such solutions. All of the
perspectives discussed in this
book have been transformed
through this process.
In pursuing the tandem lines of
inquiry of science and the humanities,
the Network itself serves as an example
of the human capacities and emergent
processes that can derive from collective
social structures and actions. In the
chapters to follow, the Network
examines the nature and power of
unseen forces ranging from human coregulation
to physiological effects of
spiritual beliefs. The exchanges across
disciplinary perspectives suggest that the
“dominion of the solitary individual” is
insufficient to understand the human
mind or to optimize human health and
well being. To understand human nature
and the human mind, one may need to
appreciate human needs and capabilities
that have not been given due attention.
Homo sapiens are a social
species, which means there are emergent
organizations beyond individuals that
contribute to the ability of our species to
survive, reproduce, and care for our
offspring sufficiently long that they too
survive to reproduce. As a consequence,
evolutionary forces have sculpted neural,
hormonal, and genetic mechanisms that
support these social structures. Among
the possible consequences explored in
this book are that: 1) people are not the
entirely self-interested, short-term
thinking, rational decision makers
assumed by the mythical creature, Homo
economicus, and 2) some of the
amorphous dissatisfaction and chronic
diseases that characterize contemporary
society may be, in part, the consequence
of the denial of the differences between
the nature of these two beings. Existing
scientific studies of religion have
established the pervasiveness of
religious beliefs and practices and an
association between these beliefs or
practices and physical as well as mental
health. Religious beliefs and practices
have also contributed to failures to heed
life-saving medical advice and to the
horrendous treatment of others. It will
be through the serious investigation of
such beliefs and practices, not through
their denial, that we may ultimately be
able to identify which aspects of these
beliefs and practices are beneficial, for
what individuals and in what contexts,
and through what specific mechanisms.
Recent research has made it
patently clear that William James (1890,
p. 442, 2) underestimated the faculties of
human infants when he suggested that
their first sensory experiences were a
“blooming, buzzing confusion.” But
what James’ sentiment did capture is the
overwhelming complexity and
uncertainty that exists in the child’s
environment, and the inherent difficulty
in making sense of that complexity from
scratch. Our drive to make meaning is
irrepressible---and when we do not
understand the forces that drive our
actions, we invent narratives that make
these invisible forces feel more
predictable and understandable even if
only in hindsight. But we do not do it
alone.
Adults as well as children must
explain the uncertainty and ambiguity of
natural phenomena (calamities of
weather, death and reproduction) as well
as social phenomena (human agents) in
order to operate effectively. But not all
actions are perceived as being
equivalent. Forces operating on objects
to compel action, as when gravity causes
rocks to slide down a mountain, are
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viewed as external causes. Forces
operating on human bodies to produce
action, in contrast, are viewed as
reflective of purpose, driven not only by
external causes but, more importantly,
by abstract reasons such as goals,
aspirations, and destiny. The meaningmaking
proclivities of humans are so
irrepressible that when external forces
operate on human bodies to produce a
significant impact on humankind, even
the causes of the actions of these human
bodies tend to be regarded in terms of
more abstract purposes and reasons. The
anthropomorphic description of
hurricanes is a case in point.
Actions of objects have causes,
whereas actions of humans have reasons.
Invisible forces that operate on humans
but that appear to operate independent of
human agency have been the subject of
religious speculations for centuries.
These invisible forces include: internal
neural and biological forces (e.g.,
homeostatic processes, autonomic
activity) that exert regulatory forces
which are largely hidden from conscious
experience or control; strong emotions
that seem to arise apart from conscious
human intention (e.g., rage, fear,
empathy); phenomena such as dreams or
hallucinations that seemingly operate
independent from the human will;
motivations, biases, inclinations,
predilections (such as
anthropomorphism, ambiguity
avoidance, preference for simple
explanations, etc.) whose presence is so
universal that, like language, the
capacities for their development or
expression may have an evolutionary
basis; individual beliefs (such as the
belief that there is a reality outside our
head/we are not dreaming; the belief in
human freedom; in values such as
equality, etc), attitudes, preferences,
goals, or intentions; aggregated beliefs
that result in social norms, values,
religion, culture, and social movements;
and codified forces such as decrees,
rules, alliances, and laws.
Before the enlightenment of the
18th century, many scholars believed
that thought was instantaneous and that
action was governed by an indivisible
mind separate from the body. If a
palpable cause for a person’s behavior
could not be identified, the Divine or
some counterpart constituted a more
agreeable explanatory construct than
invisible forces acting through
scientifically specifiable mechanisms.
Unparalleled advances in the sciences
have occurred since the dawn of the
Enlightenment, including the
development of scientific theories about
magnetism, gravity, quantum mechanics,
and dark matter that depict invisible
forces operating with measurable effects
on physical bodies. During this same
period, serious scientific research on
invisible forces acting within, on and
across human bodies was slowed and
underfunded in part because the study of
the human mind and behavior was
regarded by many in the public and in
politics as soft and of dubious validity.
The result is that many still regard the
mind and behavior as best understood in
terms of the actions of non-scientific
agents, such as a god or gods, and the
manifestations of mental illness as the
result of a failure of individual will – a
denial of the possibility that invisible
forces (that is, forces that are tractable
scientifically but of which a person is
not normally aware) can affect mind and
behavior.
One could try to explain away
the gap in scientific knowledge about
invisible forces by referring to the
conception of science and religion as
Page | 13
systems of knowledge that are in
opposition. This approach is common
and evident in a spate of contemporary
books that take the position that science
and religion represent competing ways
of understanding the world and that
science (or religion) is the one and only
valid way of understanding human
behavior and the world around us (3-8).
For instance, in The God Delusion,
Richard Dawkins places specific Judeo-
Christian theological doctrines under the
scrutiny of science only to find that none
passes scientific muster.
The vast majority of people from
all educational backgrounds continue to
harbor strong religious beliefs that affect
their daily decisions and behavior, with
both good and ill effects. These
religious belief systems most commonly
bump into scientific claims around
invisible forces. When science opens up
opportunities to improve the human
condition by providing a more complete
understanding of the causes of events,
their measurable effects, and possible
interventions– ranging from valid
science education to medical
advancements based on stem cell
research – these opportunities are often
threatened by the application of specific
religious beliefs to these endeavors.
Scientific research to understand religion
and religious belief systems may be a
more productive response than broad
denouncements by scientists of any who
hold such beliefs.
Conversely, when religion opens
up opportunities for improving the
human condition by questioning the
emphasis on short-term self-interests at
the expense of the collective, providing a
more complete understanding of the
human need to attribute meaning to
events and their effects, and identifying
possible interventions– ranging from the
provision of tangible support to
individuals in need, to the promotion of
healthy lifestyles and ethical behavior–
scientific research to understand these
influences may again be a more
productive response than broad
denouncements by scientists that such
beliefs are irrational. Indeed, the
question of whether God exists is of
much less scientific interest, and of
much more questionable scientific merit
(how would one scientifically falsify
such a claim?), than the question of the
causes, consequences, and underlying
mechanisms for the observable human
behaviors affected by invisible forces---
whether they be physical (gravity),
social (groups), or perceived spiritual
(gods).
Contemporary science explains
many of these phenomena but also
points to the human capacities and
emergent processes that derive from
collective social structures and actions
and, underlying the emergence of these
structures, the human need for meaningmaking
and connecting to something
beyond oneself. The dominant metaphor
for the scientific study of the human
mind during the latter half of the 20 th
century has been the computer – a
solitary device with massive information
processing capacities. Computers today
are massively interconnected devices
with capacities that extend far beyond
the resident hardware and software of a
solitary computer. The extended
capacities made possible by the internet
can be said to be emergent because they
represent a whole that is greater than the
simple sum of the actions that are
possible by the sum of the individual
(disconnected) computers that constitute
the internet. The telereceptors (e.g.,
eyes, ears) of the human brain have
provided wireless broadband
Page | 14
interconnectivity to humans for
millennia. Just as computers have
capacities and processes that are
transduced through but extend far
beyond the hardware of a single
computer, the human brain has evolved
to promote social and cultural capacities
and processes that are transduced
through but that extend far beyond a
solitary brain. To understand the full
capacity of humans, one needs to
appreciate not only the memory and
computational power of the brain but its
capacity for representing, understanding,
and connecting with other individuals.
That is, one needs to recognize that we
have evolved a powerful, meaning
making social brain.
Social species, by definition,
create structures beyond the individual–
structures ranging from dyads and
families to institutions and cultures.
These emergent structures have evolved
hand in hand with neural and hormonal
mechanisms to support them because the
consequent social behaviors (e.g.,
cooperation, empathy, altruism, etc.)
helped these organisms survive,
reproduce, and care for offspring
sufficiently long that they too
reproduced. From an evolutionary
perspective then, the social context is
fundamental in the evolution and
development of the human brain.
The observable consequences of
these higher organizations have long
been apparent, but we are only now
beginning to understand their genetic,
neural, and biochemical basis and
consequences. To fully delve into these
complex behaviors, science needs to deal
with the invisible forces that shape
human life, whether it is in the form of
physical, biological, or psychological
forces. For instance, anthropomorphism,
the irrepressible proclivity to attribute
human characteristics onto nonhuman
objects to achieve meaning,
predictability, and human connection, is
beginning to be subjected to productive
multi-level scientific analysis.
Experimental studies have shown that
manipulations which increase feelings of
social isolation without the possibility of
resolving these feelings through human
interaction have the compensatory effect
of increasing people’s tendency to
anthropomorphize, including heightened
beliefs in God. This scientific work has
implications for understanding claims
regarding the success of religious
practices such as solitude as paths to
feeling closer God. Research on
anthropomorphism has now identified
developmental, situational, dispositional,
and cultural factors that modulate
people’s tendency to anthropomorphize
nonhuman agents ranging from
technological gadgets to animals to gods,
and the neural mechanisms underlying
this transconfiguration of nonhuman
objects into human-like agents are
beginning to be revealed.
Guided by the insights from
these new scientific theories of
anthropomorphism, historical analyses
may be worthwhile to determine whether
concepts of god have changed across
time and cultures such that god was
created in the image of the believer
rather than vice versa. Xenophanes (6th
century B.C., cited in 9), for instance,
was apparently the first to use the term
“anthropomorphism” when describing
the similarities between religious agents
and their believers, noting that Greek
gods were invariably fair skinned and
blue-eyed whereas African gods were
invariably dark skinned and dark-eyed
(joking that cows would surely worship
gods that looked strikingly cow-like).
Brain imaging research has confirmed
Page | 15
that anthropomorphism is associated
with the activation of the same prefrontal
areas that are active when people think
about themselves or project themselves
onto others.
Conclusion
Just as critically, the study of
invisible forces requires a discussion of
the method that successful teams use to
work together as they cross disciplinary
boundaries. Over the past few decades,
there has been a demonstrable shift from
the individual genius as the source of
scientific and scholarly breakthroughs to
interdisciplinary teams. This shift in the
production of cutting-edge knowledge
has been documented in all fields of
scholarly activity, ranging from
mathematics and theoretical physics to
the humanities. This shift has both made
possible and been necessitated by a need
to understand complex behaviors.
Although this project is primarily about
the ways that scientists seek to study the
impact of invisible forces, it will also
reflect the methodologies that these
researchers use so that their work is not
constrained by common knowledge.
The philosophy of science also
looks different when dealing with simple
causality (one-to-one relations) than with
complex causality. Affirmation of the
consequent, a logical error in which a
given cause for an effect is inferred
based on the observation of the effect,
does not lead to a scientific error when
there is but a single cause for the
observed effect. However, as scientific
inquiry addresses increasingly complex
phenomena, and increasingly complexly
determined phenomena, the philosophy
of science needs to become more
nuanced.
A core challenge is to develop a
“science” of identification and
aggregation of these invisible forces at
different levels. Related research
questions include why they exist, and
measures of robustness. One of our
central goals is to demonstrate not only
that considerations of these forces
matter, but that that they can matter a
lot.
There also are questions of value
and ethics that could be implicated:
descriptive knowledge, models,
awareness of causal relationships, and so
on, might not be enough to answer some
kinds of questions, especially those
related to value and purpose, which are
the very energies that animate and
invigorate real human systems.
Economics comes close with its proxy
measure of value based on the
distribution of scarce resources and
people’s varying need for these
resources. But this theory comes up
short in many instances where other
values are at play that are beyond
markets, such as in assessing the value
of a human life, or whether all lives are
of equal value. It is an especially poor
model for helping us understand
something as simple as the value of
articles of sentimental value, such as
family photographs, which may have
little or no market value at all. Thus,
how do we best understand the
“sentiments” that are important in the
real world?
The members of the Network
have worked beyond the boundaries of
disciplinary borders, geographical
precincts, and epistemological comfort
zones to develop a rigorous but
innovative approach to the study of the
human mind, sociality, spirituality,
health, and well being. The Network
members represented in this book are
Gary Berntson from Ohio State
University, Don Browning from the
Page | 16
University of Chicago, John Cacioppo
(Network Director) from the University
of Chicago, Farr Curlin from the
University of Chicago Medical Center,
Jean Decety from the University of
Chicago, Nick Epley from the University
of Chicago Booth School, Clark Gilpin
from the University of Chicago, Louise
Hawkley from the University of
Chicago, Tanya Luhrmann from
Stanford University, Chris Masi from the
University of Chicago Medical Center,
Howard Nusbaum from the University
of Chicago, Gün Semin from the
University of Utrecht, Steve Small from
the University of Chicago Medical
Center, Kathryn Tanner from the
University of Chicago, and Ron Thisted
from the University of Chicago Medical
Center. The biography of each along
with an explanation for the essay each
presents is provided at the beginning of
each of their essays on invisible forces.
References
1. D. J. Boorstin, The Discoverers.
(Random House., New York,
1983).
2. W. James, The principles of
psychology. (Holt, New York,
1890).
3. R. Dawkins, The God delusion.
(Bantam, London, 2006).
4. D. C. Dennett, Breaking the
spell: Religion as a natural
phenomenon. (Penguin, New
York, 2006).
5. S. Harris, The end of faith:
Religion, terror, and the future of
reason. (W. W. Norton, New
York, 2004).
6. S. Harris, Letter to a Christian
nation. (Vintage Books, New
York, 2006).
7. C. Hitchens, God is not great:
How religion poisons everything.
(Hachette Book Group, New
York, 2007).
8. D. Mills, Atheist universe: The
thinking person’s answer to
Christian fundamentalism.
(Ulysses Press, Berkeley, CA,
2004).
9. J. H. Lesher, Xenophanes:
Fragments. (University of
Toronto Press, Toronto, 1992).
Page | 17
From Selfish Genes to Social Brains
The Chicago Social Brain
Network was established to examine
how science might inform us about our
fundamental human nature, including the
apparently irrepressible quest for
connection with a higher understanding
and organization. Science can describe
what religion does in rigorous ways that
benefit religion, and religion can serve a
meaning-making function that science
itself disclaims. This is not to say that
science can address the existence of
God. Our Network instead focuses on
the consequences of believing in such a
mind and of seeing into that mind.
In the next chapter, John
Cacioppo, a social neuroscientist, draws
on work on evolutionary theory,
sociobiology, and evolutionary
psychology to examine the implications
of the selfish gene hypothesis for Homo
sapiens. He shows how the notion of the
selfish gene has been joined with
political theory, consumerism, and
economics to produce a dominant
modern image of humans summarized
by the phrase “what is best for me is best
for the society.” Without rejecting the
selfish gene view, Cacioppo shows how
it evolves in humans into what he calls
the “social brain”– a large cerebral
cortex and an interconnected limbic
lobule that together are sensitive to the
complexities of physical and social
environments. Central to this
complexity is the long period of
dependency of the human infant and the
interdependencies of adult humans for
survival especially in hostile
environments (e.g., warfare). For the
selfish gene to contribute its DNA to the
ongoing gene pool, the individual must
not only reproduce but also cooperate
with others to assure that his or her
offspring also grow to maturity and
reproduce. This leads to natural
selection choosing those genes and
capacities that contribute to cooperation,
reciprocity, attachments, and generosity.
Over the millennia of human evolution,
this process has created the social brain
and made humans a unique social
animal.
Page | 18
Chapter 2 2
2 The lead author is John T. Cacioppo, Ph.D., the
Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished
Service Professor in the Departments of
Psychology and Psychiatry and the Director of
the Center for Cognitive and Social
Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. He
is a co-founder (with Gary Berntson) of the field
of social neuroscience, a past president of the
Association for Psychological Science and a
recipient of numerous awards including the
National Academy of Sciences Troland Research
Award and the American Psychological
Association Distinguished Scientific
Contribution Award. Cacioppo’s research
concerns the neural, hormonal, genetic, and
behavioral mechanisms underlying the operation
and maintenance of the emergent structures that
characterize social species generally and humans
in particular. He has published more than 400
scientific articles and 16 books, including
Loneliness: Human nature and the need for
social connection (2008, Norton Books) and
Handbook of neuroscience for the behavioral
sciences (2009, John Wiley & Sons). Cacioppo
is also the Director of the Chicago Social Brain
Network.
Cacioppo has been interested both in
the similarities and the differences between
humans and other species. Human social
cognition, emotion, behavior, and executive
functioning – that is, our social brain – are
especially sophisticated compared to those found
in other species. Research in the neurosciences
sometimes focuses so much on mechanisms
divorced from the social settings and functions
they may have evolved to serve in social species
such as our own that the generalizations to
humans are inaccurate. Animal models permit
experimental control and interventions that
cannot be carried out in humans, but
understanding the implications of this work for
the human brain and biology depends on explicit
The Social Nature of Humankind
Social species, by definition, are
characterized by the formation of structures
(e.g., dyads, families, tribes, cultures) that
extend beyond an individual. Although we
may revere the rugged individualist, we are
fundamentally a social species. I begin by
discussing some of the invisible evolutionary
forces that led members of our species to band
together to form such structures. I then
consider how selfish genes (e.g., through
anthropomorphism, 1) might have led to social
brains and why the social connections and
structures created by humans are especially
powerful and flexible. Finally, I describe a
nonintuitive way of thinking about the
absence of satisfactory social connections
(i.e., loneliness), mention how and why
chronic loneliness can be so harmful, and
discuss how our need for social connection
motivates us to search for meaning and
connections beyond ourselves and other
individuals. One implication that is explored
here, and in more detail in the essays to
follow, is that genetic and cultural adaptations,
not human ignorance, may be fueling the
search for meaning and connection with a
transcendent entity or being.
Mythic Individualism
For at least the past century, we
have celebrated the power and
intellectual might of the solitary genius.
This includes individuals such as
Thomas Edison who brought electrical
power to individual households,
transforming night into day; Henry Ford
who introduced the mass production of
comparison to and knowledge of the rich
benefits of human social interaction and feelings
of connection. This essay addresses this gap in
our thinking about the genetic, neural, and
hormonal processes that constitute our brain and
body and in doing so provides a different
perspective on who we are as a unique biological
species.
Page | 19
automobiles, changing how we
transported and consequently how and
where we worked and lived; Charles
Darwin who argued that the difference in
mind between humans and other species,
great as it is, is one of degree and not of
kind; and Albert Einstein who surmised
a relationship between energy and
matter, opening a universe of
possibilities that previously was virtually
unimaginable. As a result, the cultural
focus moved from a focus on the social
group – the family, neighborhood, or
society – toward the autonomous
individual.
Forty years ago, the dominant
metaphor for the human mind was the
digital computer, complete with inputs,
filing and memory systems, limited
processing resources, and outputs.
Evolutionary theory focused on the
selfish gene and, by extension, on the
individual whose purpose for living was
to survive long enough to reproduce.
Milton Friedman influenced economic
theory and government policies for
decades by positing that people, being
fundamentally rational, are motivated
first and foremost by self interests, and
the adage of “united we stand, divided
we fall” was supplanted by the notion
that what is best for the me is best for the
society. Moving from an economy
based on manufacturing for the masses
to one based on catering to idiosyncratic
consumer interests further fueled a focus
on the preferences of the autonomous
individual.
One can certainly find evidence
in humans and other species for the view
of life being best understood in terms of
self-interest. Sardines, for example,
swim in what appears to be synchronized
schools until approached by a predator,
at which time they dart about so
chaotically that they create what appears
to be a large, tumultuous ball with a
mind of its own. The rule governing the
behavior of this dynamic and adaptive
collective action can be explained
entirely in terms of self-interests. Each
fish is driven to swim to the middle,
where it is less likely to be eaten by the
hungry predator. Sardines are born with
the capacity to swim, find food, and
avoid predators. If they survive long
enough to reproduce, their genes will be
part of the gene pool for future
generations. That is, if those who are
genetically predisposed to swim to the
middle are more likely to survive
predation, then the genetic
predisposition to swim to the middle will
become a characteristic of a larger
percentage of sardines in future
generations.
The sardine ball is an example of
a more general phenomenon, in which
the choices made by members of a group
endow the collective with properties that
are consistent, predictable, and
purposive enough that we can speak of
them as “behaviors” of the group, even
though the collective actions of the
group are not directed by any of the
individual members. This phenomenon
can be called “emergent,” because the
properties or behavior of the group are
not determined by any individual but
arises from the collective behaviors of
the individuals who constitute the group.
Social structures like the sardine ball
have evolved because the sardines
whose genes compelled them to swim to
the middle in the presence of predators
were more likely to survive to
reproduce, thereby contributing these
genes to this species’ gene pool.
According to the National
Science Foundation’s Tree of Life
project, there are anywhere between 5
million and 100 million species on
Page | 20
Earth, only 2 million of which have been
identified thus far. Most of the species
identified are either born with the
capacity to find sustenance and avoid
predation sufficiently well that some
survive long enough to reproduce, or
they are born in such large numbers that
some survive long enough to reproduce.
It is the ability of such organisms to
reproduce that determines what genes
constitute the gene pool for the future
generations of that species. These genes,
in turn, shape the structure and function
of the organisms that constitute a
species. This reasoning led George
Williams (2) to suggest a half century
ago that traits (i.e., behavioral
tendencies) which benefit the group at
the expense of the individual would
evolve only if the process of groupselection
was great enough to overcome
selection within groups. He further
suggested that group selection is nearly
always weak, so that group-related
adaptations do not exist (3). Richard
Dawkins (1) popularized the notion that
traits which evolve are adaptive at the
gene level through his use of the
metaphor of the selfish gene. Genes
serve their own selfish interests in the
sense that whatever the contributions
made by a gene, or set of genes, to an
organism’s structure and function would
be passed on to the next generation if
and only if the gene made its way to the
gene pool. Survival of the fittest now
had a biological basis.
United We Stand, Divided We Fall
Charles Darwin did not know
that genes were the mechanism through
which structures and behaviors evolved,
but an important component of his
original theory was the notion of
survival of the fittest. Darwin was also
puzzled by the observation that many
individual organisms made themselves
less fit so that the group might survive.
Subsequent generations of evolutionary
biologists realized that even though
genes might act as if selfish, the vehicle
responsible for the transport of these
genes to the gene pool occasionally
extended beyond the individual or parent
to kin and even to unrelated members of
groups. More specifically, in some cases
the superorganismal structures formed
by social organisms represent naturally
selected levels of organization above
individual organisms (4).
Consider the example of the
Emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri).
Emperor penguins typically reside near
their food source of squid, shoaling fish,
and small crustaceans but in early winter
they gather into breeding colonies
(rookeries) up to 60 miles inland in April
and May during the Antarctic winter.
They search for their mate from the
previous year, and go through a
courtship ritual before mating. The
female lays only one egg in May or
June, which coincides with the start of
the bitter Antarctica winter. The
Emperor penguins are thought to have
developed this unusual winter breeding
behavior to permit the chick to grow to
independence the following summer,
when food is plentiful. Ensuring the
chick survives that long is a collective
enterprise, with the vehicle responsible
for the chick surviving long enough such
that it too can reproduce not being solely
the mother or the father but also the
huddle.
The birthing of the egg leaves the
mother depleted, so she must return to
the seaside to feed while the father
assumes responsibility for the incubation
of the egg during the winter. An egg
from an Emperor penguin will quickly
freeze if left exposed to harsh winter
conditions of the Antarctica, so the
Page | 21
transition of the egg from beneath the
warmth and safety of the mother to atop
the feet and under a fold of feathered
abdominal skin of the father requires a
bit of coordination on the part of the
two. Even this is not sufficient for the
genes of this pair to find their way into
the gene pool. The conditions of the
Antarctic winters are among the least
hospitable on earth, with winter
temperatures dipping below -60 degrees
Celsius and winds reaching 120 mph.
To protect themselves from the wind and
cold, the male penguins huddle together,
spending much of their time sleeping to
conserve energy. In this harsh
environment, survival of the chicks
depends on the shared warmth and
protection of the huddle, not the
individual. The group as a whole is
more likely to survive if each penguin
and chick shares in the warmth and
protection of the collective structure,
which means selective pressures exist to
promote cooperation to maintain the
integrity of the huddle. More generally,
for species born to a period of utter
dependency, the genes that find their
way into the gene pool are not defined
solely or even mostly by likelihood that
an organism will reproduce but by the
likelihood that the offspring of the parent
will live long enough to reproduce. As
in the case of the Emperor penguins, one
consequence is that selfish genes
evolved through individual-level
selection processes to promote social
preferences and group processes,
including reciprocal social behaviors,
that can extend beyond kin relationships
(e.g., 5). Examples of such selection
processes in humans exist, as well (e.g.,
6, 7).
The environmental challenges
facing Emperor penguins, as daunting as
they are, pale by comparison to the
complexities facing the human species.
Indeed, the social brain hypothesis posits
that the social complexities and demands
of primate species contributed to the
rapid increase in neocortical (i.e., the
outer layer of the brain) connectivity and
intelligence (8). Warfare among
ancestral hunter-gatherers appears to
have contributed to group selection for
human social behaviors, especially
altruistic behaviors (5). As Darwin
(1871) noted:
A tribe including many members
who, from possessing a high
degree of the spirit of patriotism,
fidelity, obedience, courage, and
sympathy, were always ready to
aid one another, and to sacrifice
themselves for the common good
would be victorious over most
other tribes; and this would be
natural selection. (p. 166)
Moreover, deducing better ways
to find food, avoid perils, and navigate
territories has adaptive value for large
mammals, but the complexities of these
ecological demands are no match for the
complexities of social living (especially
in hostile between-group social
environments), which include:
recognizing ingroup and outgroup
members; learning by social observation;
recognizing the shifting status of friends
and foes; anticipating and coordinating
efforts between two or more individuals;
using language to communicate, reason,
teach, and deceive others; orchestrating
relationships, ranging from pair bonds
and families to friends, bands, and
coalitions; navigating complex social
hierarchies, social norms and cultural
developments; subjugating self-interests
to the interests of the pair bond or social
group in exchange for the possibility of
long term benefits for oneself or one’s
group; recruiting support to sanction
Page | 22
individuals who violate group norms;
and doing all this across time frames that
stretch from the distant past to multiple
possible futures (9). Consistent with
this hypothesis, measures of sociality in
troops of baboons have been found to be
highly correlated with infant survival,
and cross-species comparisons have
shown that the evolution of large and
metabolically expensive brains is more
closely associated with social than
ecological complexity (9).
Our survival depends on our
connection with others. Born to the
most prolonged period of utter
dependency of any animal, human
infants must instantly engage their
parents in protective behavior, and the
parents must care enough about their
offspring to nurture and protect them. If
infants do not elicit nurturance and
protection from caregivers, or if
caregivers are not motivated to provide
such care over an extended period of
time, then the infants will perish along
with the genetic legacy of the parents
(10). Our developmental dependency
mirrors our evolutionary heritage.
Hunter/gatherers did not have the benefit
of natural weaponry, armor, strength,
flight, stealth, or speed relative to many
other species. Human survival depended
on collective abilities, not on individual
might.
Selfish Genes, Social Brains
It is the gene that is obligatorily
selfish, not the human brain. Genes that
promote behaviors that increase the odds
of the genes surviving are perpetuated.
One implication of this simple insight is
that evolution can be viewed as the
competition between genes using
individuals and social structures as their
temporary vehicles. The genetic
constitution of Homo Sapiens in the long
run derives not solely from the
reproductive success of individuals, but
also from the success of their children to
reproduce. Hunter/gatherers who did not
form social connections and who did not
feel a compulsion to return to share their
food or defense with their offspring may
have been more likely to survive to
procreate again, but given the long
period of dependency of human infants
their offspring may have been less likely
to survive to procreate. The result is
selection that strongly favors the ability
to process information that could
contribute to the formation and
maintenance of social capacities and
connections – that is, a social brain.
These social capacities evolved hand in
hand with genetic, neural, and hormonal
mechanisms to support them because the
resulting social behaviors helped humans
survive, reproduce, and care for
offspring sufficiently long that they too
survived to reproduce (11-13). Relative
to other animals, the striking
development of and increased
connectivity within the human cerebral
cortex, especially the frontal and
temporal regions, are among the key
evolutionary developments in this
regard. The cerebral cortex is a mantle
of between 2.6 to 16 billion neurons with
each neuron receiving 10,000 to 100,000
synapses in their dendritic trees (e.g.,
14). The expansion of the frontal
regions in the human brain contributes to
the human capacities for reasoning,
planning, performing mental
simulations, theory of mind, and
thinking about self and others. The
temporal regions of the brain, in turn, are
involved with aspects of social
perception, memory, and
communication. The means for guiding
behavior through the environment
emerged prior to neocortical expansion.
Page | 23
The evolutionarily older systems also
play a role in human information
processing and behavior, albeit in a more
rigid and stereotyped fashion. The
intricately interconnected neocortical
regions of the frontal lobes are involved
in self control, which permits the
modulation of these older systems and
the overriding of organismal hedonistic
impulses for the benefit of others (15).
Evidence across human history
provides overwhelming support for the
supposition that humans are
fundamentally social creatures (13).
Even in contemporary times in which
autonomy is revered, the average person
has been estimated to spend nearly 80%
of waking hours in the company of
others, most of which is spent in small
talk with known individuals (16). These
estimates have been supported in more
detailed assessment using the dayreconstruction
method to determine how
people spend their time and how they
experienced events in their lives on a
daily basis (17). The results of these
daily assessments indicate people spend
only 3.4 hrs alone, or approximately
20% of their waking hours. The time
spent with friends, relatives, spouse,
children, clients, and coworkers is rated
on average as more inherently rewarding
than the time spent alone (17).
Respondents indicate that their
most enjoyable activities are intimate
relations and socializing – activities that
promote bonding and high quality
relationships, whereas their least
enjoyable activities are commuting and
working. These results are consistent
with survey data. When asked “what is
necessary for happiness?” the majority
of respondents rate “relationships with
family and friends” as most important
(18), although we certainly do not
always act like this is most important. It
is surprisingly easy to overlook the
evident.
Noticing the Unusual, Overlooking the
Obvious
On January 15, 2009, US
Airways Flight 1549 departed from New
York’s LaGuardia Airport for Charlotte,
North Carolina when it struck a flock of
geese during takeoff. Both engines were
disabled, and the heavy aircraft quickly
lost the power it needed to stay aloft, but
Capt. Chesley Sullenberger somehow
managed a controlled descent into the
Hudson River. The media dubbed the
ditching of the plane and the survival of
all 155 passengers and crew the miracle
on the Hudson, and Sullenberger was
duly heralded as a hero. The ability to
control the descent of an 84-ton plane
without engine thrust is not something
with which humans are naturally
endowed. Sullenberger was not a
novice, of course. He is a U.S. Air
Force Academy graduate who flew F-4
fighter planes while in the Air Force, has
40 years of flight experience, and holds a
commercial glider license and glider
instructor rating. As remarkable as was
his achievement relative to what one
might normally expect in this situation,
however, Sullenberger’s efforts were not
sufficient for the miracle on the Hudson
to be achieved.
When Flight 1549 came to a stop
in the frigid Hudson River, the
passengers and crew scrambled to the
wings and inflatable slides of their
slowly sinking aircraft. Local
commercial vessels from the New York
Waterway and Circle Line fleets
responded almost immediately, with the
first of the vessels reaching the plane
within four minutes. The crews of the
various vessels worked together to
rescue the passengers and crew of Flight
Page | 24
1549, and various volunteers and
agencies offered medical assistance.
These rescue efforts were not motivated
by personal or commercial self-interests,
and none of the commercial vessel
captains was lauded as a hero. Their
efforts received less attention because
their actions were precisely what we
expect of one another.
It is the unusual, not the
commonplace, that is noticed. On
March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese parked
near her home in Kew Gardens, New
York, and proceeded to her residence in
a small apartment complex. Winston
Moseley, a business machine operator
who later confessed that his motive was
simply to kill a woman, overtook
Genovese and stabbed her twice in the
back. Genovese screamed, “Oh my
God, he stabbed me! Help me!”, a call
that was heard by neighbors. When one
neighbor shouted at the attacker, “Leave
that girl alone,” Moseley ran away.
Genovese, who was wounded and
bleeding, moved toward the apartment
building slowly and alone. Moseley
returned approximately 10 minutes later
and searched for Genovese. Finding her
nearly unconscious in a hallway of the
building, he continued his knife attack
on her and sexually assaulted her. The
entire attack unfolded over about half an
hour, and yet no one responded. The
first clear call for help to the police did
not occur until minutes following the
final attack, and Genovese died in an
ambulance en route to the hospital. The
number of people who were aware of
some aspect of the attack was estimated
to be from a dozen to more than three
dozen. One unidentified neighbor who
saw part of the attack was quoted in a
New York Times article as saying “I
didn’t want to get involved.” (19). The
notion that people might not go to the
aid of another, even a stranger, in dire
need led to public outrage. Decades of
research led to the conclusion that the
ambiguity of the situation and the
diffusion of responsibility were
contributing factors.
These two news stories illustrate,
in very different ways, how invisible
forces sculpted by evolution and
cultivated by the environment act on our
species. When commercial boat captains
act against their own financial interests
to rescue others on a sinking aircraft, we
think nothing of it because we believe it
is what any individual in the same
situation would naturally do. When
observers of a brutal attack do nothing to
aid the victim, we are horrified because
we believe it goes against who we are as
a species. Humans are not motivated
solely by self interests but rather we
work together and help one another
when in need. We survive and prosper
in the long term through collective
concerns and actions, not by solely
selfish pursuits (20).
Danger Signals
The stories of the sardine ball
and the penguin huddle suggest that it is
dangerous to be on the social perimeter.
Living on the perimeter threatens the
lives and genetic legacy of humans, as
well. Epidemiological studies have
found that social isolation is not only
associated with lower levels of
happiness and well being but with broad
based morbidity and mortality (21).
Moreover, humans are such meaningmaking
creatures that perceived social
isolation is at least as important a
predictor of adverse outcomes on human
health and well being as is objective
social isolation (22). Writers may spend
long periods by themselves, but the
envisioned readers make this time feel
Page | 25
anything but isolated. High school
graduates who leave family and friends
for the first time to attend college, on the
other hand, typically experience intense
feelings of social isolation even though
they are physically around more people
than before they left home. Caspi and
colleagues (23) found that perceived
social isolation in adolescence and
young adulthood predicted how many
cardiovascular risk factors (e.g., body
mass index, waist circumference, blood
pressure, cholesterol) were elevated in
young adulthood, and that the number of
developmental occasions (i.e.,
childhood, adolescence, young
adulthood) at which participants felt
socially isolated predicted the number of
elevated risk factors in young adulthood.
Perceived social isolation is
known more colloquially as loneliness,
which in early scientific investigations
was depicted as “a chronic distress
without redeeming features” (24, p. 15).
Loneliness may feel like a painfully
miserable, hopeless, and worthless state,
but we have found it has a specific
structure and a valuable adaptive
function.
Research on the ways in which
people describe themselves when asked
the question, “Who are you?”, reveals
three basic dimensions (25): (1) a
personal, or intimate, self, the “you” of
your individual characteristics; (2) a
social or relational self, which is who
you are in relation to the people closest
to you—your spouse, kids, friends, and
neighbors; and (3) a collective self, the
you that is the member of a certain
ethnic group, has a certain national
identity, belongs to certain professional
or other associations, and a member of
the fan club for certain sports teams.
Similar to the relational self, this part of
the self is social but what makes this self
distinct is that these are broader social
identities, linked to larger social groups
rather than individual members of the
groups. When we examined the
dimensions underlying loneliness/social
connectedness, we found the same three
basic dimensions (26): (1) intimate
connection/isolation refers to the
perceived presence/absence of anyone in
your life who affirms you as a valued
person; (2) relational
connection/isolation refers to the
perceived presence/absence of quality
friendships or family connections; and
(3) collective connection/isolation refers
to the perceived presence/absence of a
meaningful connection with a group or
social stimulus (e.g., school, team)
beyond other individuals. When you
perceive you are part of a valued group
(collective connection), for instance, you
may be more inclined to agree with other
group members, even on beliefs that
may seem irrational, than when you are
thinking of yourself as a unique
individual.
Given that human survival and
prosperity depends on inclusion in and
participation with a social group,
especially in evolutionary time when
food was scarce and dangers were
common, there is an adaptive benefit to
having the strong and aversive response
of loneliness when an individual feels
his or her social connections might be
weakening or broken, just as there is a
benefit to having aversive signals for
other conditions critical for survival.
Hunger, thirst, and pain have evolved as
aversive signals to prompt an organism
to change their behavior in a way that
protects the individual and promotes the
likelihood their genes will make their
way into the gene pool. The social pain
of loneliness has evolved similarly – to
serve as a signal that one’s connections
Page | 26
to others are weakening and to motivate
the repair and maintenance of the
connections to others that are needed for
our health and well being as for the
survival of our genes (27). Physical pain
is an aversive signal that evolved to
motivate one to take action that
minimizes damage to one’s body.
Loneliness is an aversive signal that
evolved to motivate one to take action
that minimizes damage to one’s social
body.
People differ dispositionally in
their sensitivity to the pain of social
disconnection (i.e., feelings of
loneliness; 28) just as people differ in
sensitivity to physical pain. Ostracism
or objective isolation in most species is
associated with an early death (29). In
humans, the chronic feeling of social
isolation, even when the person remains
among the protective embrace of others,
is associated with significant mental and
physical disorders (30). Chronic hunger,
thirst, and pain can also have deleterious
effects for, like loneliness, their adaptive
value lies in their effects as acute
signals, not as chronic conditions. The
opposite of feeling hunger, thirst, pain,
or loneliness is feeling normal, and this
is the state in which most people exist
most of the time.
The social connections formed
by humans need not be based on genetic
similarities. The human species has
evolved the capacity for and motivation
to form relationships not only with other
individuals but also with groups (e.g., a
Chicago Cubs or Boston Red Sox fan)
and nonhuman entities (e.g., through
anthropomorphism, 31). Team spirit and
school spirit are familiar notions, and
although team or school spirit refers to
an invisible influence, it is an invisible
influence that is no less open to rigorous
scientific inquiry than are the invisible
influences of gravity or magnetic flux.
In the cases of team and school spirit,
this influence represents a specific form
of social connection between an
individual and an emergent structure.
Perceived social connections are
abstractions that can transcend time and
space. People may feel a connection
with their ancestors or family heritage
even if they are the only remaining
descendant, just as people can perceive
personal connections with pets, cars,
television characters, celebrities, and
unseen spiritual entities with whom they
do not actually interact. A potent
component of spirituality (that does not
depend on a specific religion) is the
feeling of connection and purpose that
come from forming a relationship with a
higher being. A simple byproduct of our
selfish genes and social brains may be
our search for meaning in and
connection with broader organizations or
beings.
Conclusion
In 1939, the astrophysicist Sir Arthur
Eddington published a book entitled The
philosophy of physical science (32). In it he
describes a hypothetical scientist who sought
to determine the size of the various fish in the
sea. The scientist began by weaving a 2-inch
mesh net and setting sail across the seas,
repeatedly sampling catches and carefully
measuring, recording, and analyzing the
results of each catch. After extensive
sampling, the scientist concluded that there
were no fish smaller than two inches in the
sea. The moral of Sir Eddington's analogy is
twofold. First, scientific instruments are
shaped by people’s intuitive theories of the
phenomena to be investigated. Second, once
developed, scientific expectations and
instruments shape data and theory in ways
more powerfully and fundamentally than are
often appreciated.
Page | 27
What is the relevance of this to the
story of the social nature of humankind? Our
research findings have led me to believe that
we all have made Eddington’s error in the way
we have thought about, studied, and tried to
deal with an invisible force that motivates us
to seek and maintain our connection with
others – including the loneliness one feels
when we feel important social connections are
threatened or absent. Historically, the
scientific perspective on loneliness was not
only that it was a painful and miserable state,
but that it was an aversive state with no
redeeming features. All one needs to do is to
reflect on the last time one felt terribly lonely,
and one can appreciate the seemingly selfevident
truth of this characterization. But as
Sir Arthur Eddington’s story shows us, the
obvious and intuitive can sometimes be very
misleading. It is now widely recognized that
many structures and processes of the mind
operate outside of awareness, with only the
end products sometimes reaching awareness.
Humans have evolved to seek
connections with and validation from
other minds, and these social
connections represent an important set of
invisible forces operating on our brain
and biology. The need for social
connection extends beyond kin relations
and beyond face to face relations to
include felt connections with
superorganismal entities such as teams,
political parties, nations, and God. The
unseen forces compelling these
connections can be quantified and
investigated objectively independent of
one’s spiritual beliefs. Underlying these
aspirations are selfish genes that have
produced a social brain which activates
reward regions of the brain when we
cooperate effectively with others (33) or
punish the perpetrators of social
exploitations (34), and which activates
the pain matrix in the brain when we feel
rejected by others (35). When people
feel socially isolated (i.e., lonely)
compared to when they do not feel
lonely, they are more likely not only to
perceive nonhuman objects as humanlike
but to believe in the existence of
God (31, 36). To understand the full
capacity of and forces operating on
humans, we need to appreciate not only
the memory and computational power of
the brain but its capacity for
representing, understanding, and
connecting with other individuals and
with the emergent structures, fictional
and real, that the brain can represent.
That is, we need to recognize that we
have evolved a powerful, meaningmaking
social brain and a need for social
connection.
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Page | 30
From Inclusive Fitness to Spiritual
Striving
The notion of “selfish genes”
(and, by extension, selfish organisms)
was popularized in Richard Dawkins’
1976 book by that title. Not long
afterwards, an article appeared in
Science that presented evidence that the
most vicious members of a warlike tribe
in South America had the most wives
and children. The underlying notion was
one of (genetic) survival of the fittest:
Those warriors who were particularly
vicious were more likely to contribute
their genes to the gene pool.
Methodological objections have left this
an open question, however, and new
evidence now exists that calls this
interpretation into question (1): the most
aggressive warriors may have more
children but they have lower indices of
reproductive success than their milder
brethren in part perhaps because the
most aggressive warriors and their
offspring are also more likely to be the
targets of revenge killings. These new
data are entirely consistent with John
Cacioppo’s argument that the content of
the human gene pool has more to do
with the reproductive success of one’s
offspring than one’s own reproductive
success. Cacioppo argued further that
this genetic selection resulted in a social
brain that seeks meaning and connection
with individuals and with social entities
(e.g., groups) that extend beyond other
individuals.
In the next chapter, theologian
Don Browning also embraces the
concept of inclusive fitness and, through
the writings of Thomas Aquinas, shows
how religion serves the human need for
meaning and connection through the
ethics they advocate, the congregations
they form, the institutions they represent,
and the God they serve. In his view,
religion serves to extend love and
connection beyond kin. He further
argues that new developments in the
sciences and long-standing traditions in
theology constitute fertile ground on
which to build new and testable
hypotheses regarding our fundamental
human nature.
1. S. Beckerman et al., Proc. Natl.
Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 106, 8134
(May 19, 2009).
Page | 31
Chapter 3 3
Science, Religion, and a Revived
Religious Humanism
For over 150 years there has been
a vital, and often contentious, dialogue
between science and religion. In recent
3
The lead author is Don Browning, Ph.D., the
Alexander Campbell Professor of Religious
Ethics and the Social Sciences, Emeritus,
Divinity School, University of Chicago. He has
interests in the relation of the social sciences to
religious ethics for the purpose of addressing
various challenges facing modern life. His books
include Generative Man (1973, 1975; National
Book Award Finalist, 1974), Religious Thought
and the Modern Psychologies (1987, 2004), the
co-authored From Culture Wars to Common
Ground: Religion and the American Family
Debate (1997, 2000), Christian Ethics and the
Moral Psychologies (2006), and Equality and the
Family (2007). He co-edited Sex, Marriage, and
Family in the World Religions (2006), American
Religions and the Family (2006), Children and
Childhood in American Religions (2009), and
Children and Childhood in World Religions
(2009). He is the co-principal investigator with
Jean Bethke Elshtain of a Templeton Foundation
funded $4,000,000 New Science of Virtue
project.
In this essay, Browning acknowledges
the antagonistic relationship that can be found
between science and religion, but he proposes
that the dialogue between science and religion
can now be conducted on philosophical grounds
that promote a new religious humanism that will
honor the core ideas of the great religions, refine
their view of nature, and increase the values of
health, wealth, education, and general wellbeing.
years, new energy and fresh public
interest have been injected into this
conversation. This largely has come
about due to the new insights into
religion and ethics achieved by
collaboration between evolutionary
psychology and cognitive and social
neuroscience.
What are the likely social
consequences of this new interest in the
relation of science and religion? There
are at least three possible answers. One
might be the new atheism exemplified
by the writings of Richard Dawkins,
Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and
Christopher Hitchens. 1 In this approach,
the alleged defective thinking of the
world religions is exposed, and a
worldview and way of life based strictly
on science are offered as replacement. A
second option might be the return of a
hegemonic dominance of religion over
science. However, polarizing rhetoric
from advocates for the exclusive
interpretive priority of either science or
religion has long since ceased to be
culturally or academically productive.
Instead, through dialogue about common
issues, scientific and theological thinkers
may pose questions that lead to more
sophisticated inquiry in both fields.
Confidence in the productive
possibilities of reciprocal questioning is
a hallmark of the long tradition known
as religious humanism. Here I illustrate
the potential contribution of religious
humanism by bringing recent
psychological research into dialogue
with the religious concept of love.
What would this religious
humanism be like? The major world
religions would remain visible and
viable as religious movements. But the
contributions of science would help
these religions refine their interests in
improving the health, education, wealth,
Page | 32
and overall well-being of their adherents.
In addition, the sciences would help
them refine their grasp of the empirical
world about which they are, like humans
in general, constantly making judgments,
predictions, and characterizations. In
my vision, the attitude of scientists
toward religion would be first of all
phenomenological; they would first
attempt to describe and understand
religious beliefs, ethics, and rituals in
their full historical context. But their
interest in explaining some of the
conditions that give rise to religious
phenomena would not be inhibited by
either religion or the wider society.
There are several different approaches to
phenomenology. The perspective that I
recommend follows the “critical
hermeneutic phenomenology” of Paul
Ricoeur. Ricoeur advocates beginning
the study of religion with a
phenomenology – a careful description –
of the person’s or community’s words,
symbols, metaphors, and narratives used
to communicate the meaning of a
religious experience or practice. This
view assumes that we cannot describe
experience directly but rather that
experience is always mediated by
symbols and metaphors. But Ricoeur’s
phenomenology does not stop with a
description of these meanings. It builds
in a secondary place for science and
explanation. It seeks through science to
give explanatory accounts of the affects
and motivations that humans bring to
these words, symbols, and metaphors. If
scientists followed Ricoeur’s model,
they would understand the importance of
beginning with description, be hesitant
to skip lightly over initial
phenomenological meanings, appreciate
yet grasp the limits of explanation, and
be reluctant to plunge into speculations,
such as those of the new scientific
atheism, about the ultimate truth or
falsity of religious phenomena. 2
On the other hand, the religions
themselves can contribute to the
sciences. They can do this by offering
hypotheses about how social and
religious ideas, behaviors, and rituals
can shape experience, even neural
processes, often for the good but
sometimes not. The religions can offer a
more generous epistemology and
ontology than science is inclined to find
useful for the tight explanatory interests
of the laboratory or scientific survey.
This too might generate new hypotheses
for scientific investigation. These would
be some of the ground rules for how a
dialogue between science and religion
might stimulate a revived religious
humanism.
Religious Humanisms of the Past
To speak of a revival suggests
that there have been many expressions of
religious humanism in the past when
some form of science, philosophy, and
religion creatively interacted. I will
limit myself to speaking primarily about
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A
synthesis between Greek philosophical
psychology and Christianity can be
found in the use of Stoic theories of
desire by the apostle Paul, 3 the presence
of Aristotle’s family ethic – with its
implicit psycho-biology - in the
household codes of Ephesians and I
Colossians, 4 and the gospel of John’s
identification of Jesus with the Platonic
and Stoic idea of the pre-existent
“Word.” 5 A more intentional religious
humanism can be found in Augustine’s
use of the neo-Platonic Plotinus,
especially in the philosophical
psychology of remembrance developed
in his Confessions. 6 But the most
dramatic example of a religious
Page | 33
humanism that spread simultaneously
into Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can
be found when the lost texts of Aristotle
were discovered, translated, and
appropriated by scholars from these
three religions who worked at the same
tables in Islamic libraries in Spain and
Sicily during the ninth and tenth
centuries. Richard Rubinstein in his
timely book titled Aristotle’s Children
(2003) tells the story well. 7 This gave
rise to forms of Aristotelian religious
humanism in the works of Thomas
Aquinas in Christianity, Maimonides in
Judaism, and Averroës in Islam. On the
American scene, one sees another form
of Christian humanism in the synthesis
of philosophical pragmatism, with all its
influence from Darwin, and expressions
of liberal Christianity and the social
gospel movement. 8
Religious humanisms have not
always flourished and are subject to
attacks from both fundamentalists and
scientific secularists. They need
constant updating and vigorous
intellectual development. But at their
best, they make it possible for societies
to maintain strong religious communities
as well as integrating symbolic
umbrellas that protect the productive
interaction of the scientific disciplines
with the wider cultural and religious life.
An Example: The Agape, Caritas, and
Eros Debate
Few words in the English
language have such a range of everyday
meanings and of serious philosophical
and theological consideration as the
word love. For this reason, it is an
excellent candidate for scientific
investigation that has potential benefits
for religious practice and everyday life.
Although some theologians have sought
to create a sharp division between
"Christian love" and all other forms of
love, the tradition of religious humanism
proposes that science clarifies the
workings of love in human societies and
religion extends the scope of love
beyond its most immediate domain of
kinship.
There are three major tensions in
theological discussions of Christian love.
They center around the two Greek words
agape and eros and the Latin word
caritas. A famous book titled Agape
and Eros (1953) written by the Swedish
theologian Anders Nygren traced the
debate through Christian history. 9
Nygren believed that the truly normative
and authentic understanding of Christian
love is found in the word agape, the
Greek word used for Christian love in
the New Testament. It refers to a kind of
self-giving, even self-sacrificial, love
that is only possible by the grace of God.
10 Nygren was particularly interested in
arguing that Christian love did not build
on what the Greek philosophers called
eros. He claimed eros refers to the
natural desires of humans to have and
unite with the goods of life. This
includes the goods of health, wealth,
affiliation, and pleasure but it also
includes the higher goods of beauty and
truth. Nygren’s point, however, was
that Christian love does not build on or
incorporate eros – the natural
aspirational strivings of humans. He
believed he found this view of Christian
love in the New Testament (especially
the writing of the apostle Paul) and
Martin Luther, the giant of the Protestant
Reformation.
Nygren was particularly
interested in dismantling the classical
medieval Roman Catholic view of
Christian love that was often
summarized with the English word
charity or the Latin word caritas. Why
Page | 34
did Nygren oppose the caritas view of
Christian love? The answer is that the
meaning of love as caritas did exactly
what Nygren thought Paul and Luther,
his theological heroes, did not do. In the
classic Roman Catholic view, love as
caritas builds on eros. Caritas was seen
to include natural desires for health and
affiliation. But the caritas view of love
also held that religious education and
God’s grace built on and expanded these
natural inclinations to entail a self-giving
benevolence to others, even strangers
and enemies – an idea so central to the
concept of Christian love.
All of this seemed too
naturalistic for Nygren. It seemed to
play down the importance of God’s
transforming grace. He joined other
European neo-orthodox theologians of
his day such as Karl Barth and Rudolph
Bultmann in cutting off Christian love
from eros, 11 which in effect was to cut
Christian love from nature and desire –
the very things scientists tend to study.
Beginning with Nygren’s strong view of
agape and the strong supernaturalism of
both Nygren and Barth, there was little
room in these mid-twentieth century
Protestant trends for a productive
dialogue between Christian ethics and
the new scientific advances in moral
psychology, evolutionary psychology,
and neuroscience.
At the same time, however,
breakthroughs in these very disciplines
have led to a new reassessment of the
Catholic caritas model of Christian love.
But before I review in more detail how
this model worked, especially in the
thought of the great medieval Roman
Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas, let
me turn to review some of the moral
implications of insights into kin altruism
and inclusive fitness emerging today
from evolutionary psychology and social
neuroscience.
Moral Implications of Kin Altruism
and Inclusive Fitness
As is well known, the idea of
inclusive fitness was first put forth in
1964 by William Hamilton. 12
Hamilton’s view of inclusive fitness
holds that living beings not only struggle
for their individual survival but for the
survival of offspring and kin who also
carry their genes. Their altruism is
likely to be proportional to the
percentage of their genes that others
carry. This insight was further
developed by the concept of parental
investment. Ronald Fisher and Robert
Trivers (1972) defined it as “any
investment by the parent in an individual
offspring that increases the offspring’s
chance of surviving…at the cost of the
parent’s ability to invest in other
offspring.” 13 These insights were at the
core of the emerging field of
sociobiology and were first brought to
the wider public attention by E.O.
Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New
Synthesis (1975). 14
But the moral implications of the
concept of inclusive fitness, parental
investment, and kin altruism have
received competing interpretations.
Richard Dawkins in his The Selfish Gene
(1976) turned these ideas into a defense
of philosophical ethical egoism and
argued that all altruistic acts are
disguised maneuvers to perpetuate our
own genes. 15 But there are other
interpretations. Social neuroscientist
John Cacioppo interprets our motives
toward inclusive fitness and kin altruism
as the core of human intergenerational
care and the vital link between sociality
and spirituality. In cooperation with his
colleagues, his research on loneliness
Page | 35
uses evolutionary theory on inclusive
fitness to order many of his findings.
From the perspective of this model of
basic human motivations, loneliness can
be seen as a condition that “promotes
inclusive fitness by signaling ruptures in
social connections and motivates the
repair or replacement of these
connections.” 16 According to his
interpretation of inclusive fitness, our
gene continuity is not assured by simply
having our own children. Our children
also must have children as well. And
this is a challenge entailing long-term
expenditures of energy. To account for
this, Cacioppo writes something about
human infant dependency that is very
close to what both the Greek philosopher
Aristotle and the medieval Roman
Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas set
down many centuries earlier. Cacioppo
says,
For many species, the offspring need
little or no parenting to survive and
reproduce. Homo sapiens, however,
are born to the longest period of
abject dependency of any species.
Simple reproduction, therefore, is not
sufficient to ensure that one’s genes
make it into the gene pool. For an
individual’s genes to make it to the
gene pool, one’s offspring must
survive to reproduce. Moreover,
social connections and the behaviors
they engender (e.g., cooperation,
altruism, alliances) enhance the
survival and reproduction of those
involved, increasing inclusive
fitness. 17
According to this view, the
twofold interaction between inclusive
fitness and the long period of infant
dependency has shaped humans over the
long course of evolution into the social
and caring creatures we are. Sociality is
a fundamental characteristic of humans,
and, according to Cacioppo, spirituality,
in its various forms, is an extension of
sociality. Religion is generally,
although not always, good for our
mental and physical health - our heart,
our blood pressure, our self-esteem, and
our self-control - just like having good
friends and family or not being lonely
are also good for our well-being. 18
Cacioppo and colleagues do not equate
sociality and religion; they are fully
aware that religions are complex
phenomena with many different
doctrinal, ethical, ritual, organizational,
personal, and social features that require
either rigorous experimental or clinical
population studies to sort out, even from
the perspective of how they affect
health. Nonetheless, he seems to hold
that the sociality that most religions offer
is a key reason for their efficacy in
human well-being.
Does Christian Love Build on Health?
But my concern is the topic of
Christian love and not simply
Christianity’s contribution to mental and
physical health. Although Jesus is said
to have performed miracles of health,
offering health in this world has never
been at the core of Christianity or, for
that matter, the other Abrahamic
religions of Judaism and Islam.
Bringing to maturity loving and selfgiving
persons has been the primary
concern of Christianity, whether or not
this contributes to health and well-being.
But the question is, as I elaborated
above, does Christian love build on eros
- that is, our strivings for health and
other goods - or come exclusively from
some trans-natural source as Nygren
believes the normative tradition taught?
And did Christianity ever identify eros
and our deepest motivations with
Page | 36
something like inclusive fitness and kin
altruism?
Let me start with Aquinas. In the
“Supplement” to his Summa Theologica
III,
Thomas follows Aristotle and the
Roman natural-law theorist Ulpian in
asserting that humans share with all
animals an inclination to have offspring.
19 Having said this, he then introduces a
very modern sounding commentary on
the uniqueness to humans of the long
period of infant dependency. Notice the
similarity of his argument to the words
of Cacioppo above. Aquinas writes,
Yet nature does not incline thereto in
the same way in all animals; since
there are animals whose offspring
are able to seek food immediately
after birth, or are sufficiently fed by
their mother; and in these there is no
tie between male and female;
whereas in those whose offspring
needing the support of both parents,
although for a short time, there is a
certain tie, as may be seen in certain
birds. In man, however, since the
child needs the parents’ care for a
long time, there is a very great tie
between male and female, to which
tie even the generic nature inclines. 20
Although there is in this quote a
description of how family formation
emerges at the human level, there is an
implicit argument for both the fact of
human infant dependency and what we
today call inclusive fitness as well. But
these ideas are even more evident in the
next quote, although stated very much
from the male point of view, a habit
typical of his time. Aquinas says, “Since
the natural life which cannot be
preserved in the person of an undying
father is preserved, by a kind of
succession, in the person of the son, it is
naturally befitting that the son succeed in
the things belonging to the father.” 21
Aquinas’s main source for this insight
was Aristotle’s Politics. In one place
Aristotle wrote, “ In common with other
animals and with plants, mankind have a
natural desire to leave behind them an
image of themselves.” 22
However, in both Aristotle and
Aquinas, such claims were not just about
the importance of kin continuity, they
were statements about the origin and
need of long-term investments by
parents at the human level. In contrast
to his teacher Plato who, in his Republic,
had advocated removing children from
their biological parents in an effort to
overcome the civil frictions created by
nepotism, 23 Aristotle counters with an
assertion about the origins of human
care. Aristotle wrote, “That which is
common to the greatest number has the
least care bestowed upon it.” He
believed that in Plato’s state, “love will
be watery….Of the two qualities which
chiefly inspire regard and affection –
that a thing is your own and that it is
your only one – neither can exist in such
a state as this.” 24 This is an assertion
about the importance of kin altruism in
human care.
Although Aquinas saw these
natural inclinations as important for the
formation of long-term human care, he
believed that they were not sufficient for
mature parental love. Powerful social,
cultural, and indeed religious
reinforcements were also necessary for
stable parental investment to be realized.
This, once again, is due, according to
Aquinas, because of the many long years
of human childhood dependency; human
children need their parents for a very
long period of time and over the course
Page | 37
of many contingencies and challenges.
This leads Aquinas to develop his
theology of marriage as a way of
consolidating and stabilizing parental
commitment, especially paternal
commitment, to their dependent
children. 25
Although neither Aristotle nor
Aquinas presented the full
intergenerational scope of Cacioppo’s
interpretation of kin altruism and
inclusive fitness – that it must extend to
our children’s children and not just our
own – both perspectives comprehended
the interlocking nature of kin altruism
and the well-spring of care, long-term
human commitment, and hence some of
the rudimentary energies of human
morality.
Of course, Aquinas and those
who followed him supplemented these
naturalistic observations with additional
epistemological presuppositions that
may seem strange to scientists. These
included the idea that God works
through nature as well as grace, hence
God is present in the kin altruistic
inclinations of parents and grandparents.
He also assumed that in order for kin
altruism to be stable, the additional
social reinforcements of institutional
marriage and God’s strengthening grace
and forgiveness were also needed. In
addition, he held - and Christianity has
always taught - that Christian love
includes more than kin altruism and the
care of our familial offspring; it must
include the love of neighbor, stranger,
and enemy, even to the point of selfsacrifice.
For the Christian, this was
made possible by the idea that God was
the creator of all humans and hence each
person was a child of God and made in
God’s image (imago dei). For this
reason, as Kant would say on different
grounds, each individual should be
treated “always as an end and never as a
means only.” 26 In Aquinas’s view,
acting on this belief, and with the
empowering grace of God, made it
possible for Christians to build on yet
analogically generalize their kin
altruism to all children of God, even
those beyond the immediate family, their
own children, and their own kin. These
wider assumptions may be beyond the
competence of science to assess. They
entail a step toward metaphysical
speculation of the kind science would do
better to avoid. Nonetheless, in the view
of Christian love developed in Aquinas,
the seeds of a religious humanism – in
this case a Christian humanism –began
to form.
I have tried to illustrate how
insights from Aristotle and Aquinas can
join with insights from evolutionary
psychology and social neuroscience to
refine the Christian understanding of
love. In pursuing this course, I join the
work of Stephen Pope and others in
presenting this option. 27 The kind of
Christian humanism found in Aquinas
makes it possible for Christianity to be
enriched by the modern sciences of
human nature. Aquinas’s view is
strikingly different from Nygren’s
representation of Paul and Luther when
Nygren contends that Christian love does
not build on our own natural energies,
but “has come to us from heaven.” 28 Or
again, it is very different from Nygren’s
view when he writes that the Christian is
“merely the tube, the channel through
which God’s love flows.” 29 The
complete discontinuity in this statement
between the downward love of God and
the natural extension to nonkin of human
kin-altruistic impulses is stunning. And
such a view as Nygren’s precludes the
possibility of a religious humanism of
the kind I have been describing. And it
Page | 38
eliminates the possibility of the
refinements to religious views of human
nature that the conversation between
religion and science can offer.
Conclusion
My argument has been that a
revived religious humanism can come
about through the dialogue between
religion and science, particularly
between religion and the psychological
sciences. I have illustrated this with the
issue of love in Christianity. I believe
my argument could be illustrated with
other religions, especially the Abrahamic
religions of Judaism and Islam. As
Aristotle’s influence created a kind of
religious humanism in these religions in
the past, the broader dialogue between
science and religion may be able to do
this for them in the future.
But the contributions will not
simply flow from science to religion.
Even in this short essay, a question for
science to investigate has arisen. It is
this: how do religious and metaphysical
beliefs extend the impulse of natural kin
altruism, if at all? This goes beyond the
issue of the relation of religion to health.
It raises the question of the relation of
religion to expansive love for the distant
other. This is a good question that
comes from taking the claims of religion
seriously and an example of how
religion can continue to feed and
challenge scientific inquiry.
References
1 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
(Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Co.,
2006); Daniel Dennett, Breaking the
God Spell (New York, NY.: Viking,
2006); Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian
Nation (NY.; Alfred Knopf, 2006);
Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great
(NY.: Twelve, 2007).
2 For a discussion of these distinctions
between different forms of
phenomenology, see Paul Ricoeur,
Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences
(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981), pp. 63-100.
3 Will Deming, Paul on Marriage and
Celibacy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995). Troels Engbert-
Perdersen, Paul and the Stoics
(Louisville, KY,: Westminster John
Knox, 2000).
4 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (New
York: Random House, 1941), Bk. VIII,
ch. 10.
5 The Interpreter’s Bible: Luke and John,
Vol. 8 (Nashville, TN.: Abingdon Press,
1952), p. 465.
6 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo
(Berkeley, CA.: University of California,
1969), p. 178.
7 Richard Rubinstein, Aristotle’s
Children (New York: Harcourt, Inc.,
2003)
8 Edward Scribner Ames, Religion
(Chicago: Holt, 1929).
9 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros
(Philadelphia, PA.: Westminster Press,
1953).
10 Ibid., p. 57, 121-122.
11 Ibid., p. 101.
12 William Hamilton, “The Genetical
Evolution of Social Behavior, II”
Journal of Theoretical Biology 7
(1964), pp. 17-52.
13 Ronald Fisher and Robert Trivers,
“Parental Investment and Sexual
Selection,” B. Campbell (ed.), Sexual
Page | 39
Selection and the Descent of Man
(Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1972),
p. 139.
14 E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New
Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1975).
15 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1976).
16 John Cacioppo, “Loneliness:
Conceptualization,” (In press), pp. 4-5.
26 Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the
Metaphysics of Morals (New York:
Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1959), p. 49.
27 Stephen Pope, “The Order of Love in
Recent Roman Catholic Ethics, “
Theological Studies 52 (1991), pp. 255-
288.
28 Nygren, Agape and Eros, p. 734.
29
Ibid, p. 735.
17 Ibid., p. 5.
18 John Cacioppo and J. T. Brandon,
“Religious Involvement and Health,”
Psychological Inquiry 13:3 (2002), pp.
??.
19 Larry Arnhart, “Thomistic Natural
Law as Darwinian Natural Right,” Ellen
Frenkel, Fred Miller, Jeffrey Paul (eds.),
Natural Law and Modern Moral
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), pp. 1-2.
20 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III,
“Supplement,” q., 41.1.
21 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra
Gentiles (London: Burns, Oates, and
Washburn, 1928), 3, ii, p. 115.
22 Aristotle, Politics, Richard McKeon
(ed.) The Basic Works of Aristotle (New
York: Random House, 1941), I, i.
23 Plato, The Republic (New York:
Basic Books, 1968), Bk. 5, pp. 461-
465.
24 Aristotle, Politics, Bk. 2, chpt. 3.
25 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 3, ii,
p. 115.
Page | 40
The Status of the Body Politic and the
Status of the Body Itself
In the long history of
conversations between science and
religion, starting points matter. As Don
Browning demonstrates through the
example of Thomas Aquinas, when
religions start with a desire to understand
human behavior, such as the long-term
human commitment between parent and
child, they recognize that science might
illuminate and refine that understanding.
And religion, in turn, might shape social
institutions that not only enhance the
human drive toward social connection
but also imaginatively extend its
influence beyond direct kinship to
influence ethical relations with neighbor
and stranger. By starting with a shared
interest in understanding what Browning
calls “the rudimentary energies of
human morality,” creative conversation
between science and religion thus
prompts a religious humanism, in which
religion partners with science to shape
models of fulfillment for human
sociality.
Like Browning, Louise Hawkley
starts with the human quest for social
connection. As humans mature,
Hawkley observes, they proceed from
childhood dependence not toward
independence but toward
interdependence. But, whereas
Browning pursued the implications of
interdependence for the body politic,
Hawkley wants to know the
consequences of interdependence for the
physical body. Her research focuses on
the interplay between psychological and
physical factors in the human sense of
social connectedness, and Hawkley finds
that “feeling wanted and accepted and
like one belongs are as vital to our
existence as the air we breathe. “ A
robust sense of social connection
reverberates throughout the human body,
and its absence—in loneliness—is likely
to have long-term adverse effects on
personal health.
Page | 41
Chapter 4 4
Health by Connection:
From Social Brains to Resilient Bodies
We enter and leave the world
alone, but at no time do we exist
disconnected from others. The
connection with the mother that begins
4 The lead author is Louise C. Hawkley, Ph.D., a
Senior Research Scientist (Assistant Professor),
member of the Center for Cognitive and Social
Neuroscience, and Associate Director of the
Social Neuroscience Laboratory at the University
of Chicago. Her research is concerned with the
interplay of psychological and physiological
factors, and includes the study of autonomic,
neuroendocrine, immune, genetic, and behavioral
processes that contribute to physical and mental
health and well-being in individuals differing in
perceived social connectedness. She has
published numerous articles and chapters on
perceived social isolation (loneliness) and its
antecedents and consequences in young and
aging adults.
Hawkley finds awe in the significance
of what it means to be a social species. Atul
Gawande wrote, “We are social not just in the
trivial sense that we like company, and not just
in the obvious sense that we each depend on
others. We are social in a more elemental way:
simply to exist as a normal human being requires
interaction with other people” (The New Yorker,
March 2009). Hawkley believes that we are
social beings to our cellular core, and even that
does not capture the full extent of our sociality.
For these reasons, she is increasingly
uncomfortable with the term “loneliness,” a term
that is laden with popular definitions and
understandings that only hint at the deeper
significance of our social nature. As she shows,
what the study of loneliness actually reveals is
that feeling wanted and accepted and like one
belongs are as vital to our existence as the air we
breathe. Nothing kills like being denied a
socially meaningful existence.
in utero does not end with the physical
severing of the umbilical cord but
continues in a lengthy dependence on the
mother or primary caregiver(s) for food
and safety. Years are needed for the
infant to reach physical and reproductive
maturation, but as Cacioppo notes, even
more importantly these years are needed
for the infant to develop the social and
emotional skills necessary for survival in
a complex social world. We graduate
from infantile dependence not to
independence but to interdependence
(cooperation, trust, reciprocity, etc.).
That we are born to and for connection
explains why feeling disconnected,
isolated, and like we don’t belong can be
so painful. We call these feelings
loneliness. Feelings of loneliness
function like physical pain or hunger or
thirst; they motivate us to alleviate the
social pain and to repair our sense of
connectedness. This is an important
adaptive function of loneliness because
people who feel connected fare much
better than those who feel disconnected.
They are not only happier but also
healthier than their more lonely
counterparts. As we will see, the power
of felt connectedness reverberates
throughout the human body. As was
aptly stated by Frederick Buechner,
“You can kiss your family and friends
good-bye and put miles between you,
but at the same time you carry them with
you in your heart, your mind, your
stomach, because you do not just live in
a world but a world lives in you.” 1 We
tend to take for granted our sense of
social connectedness, but that should not
blind us to its powerful, albeit invisible,
influence on our lives. Its impact is best
exposed when we observe the effects of
its absence (i.e., loneliness) on physical
and mental health and well-being.
Loneliness is a Health Risk, but How?
Page | 42
For research purposes, loneliness
is typically measured on a continuum
that ranges from not at all lonely (i.e.,
socially connected) to very lonely. It is
informative, however, to get a sense of
the prevalence of loneliness when
assessed as present or absent. Loneliness
is a common experience; as many as 80
percent of people under 18 years of age
and 30 percent of people over 65 years
of age report being lonely at least
sometimes. For most people, feelings of
loneliness are situational and transient
(e.g., geographic relocation). For as
many as 15-30% of the general
population, however, loneliness is a
chronic state, and it is among these
individuals that loneliness wreaks its
greatest havoc. In a study of children
followed through young adulthood,
those who were highly lonely at each of
three measurement occasions (i.e.,
childhood, adolescence, and at 26 years
of age) exhibited a significantly greater
number of standard health risks. The
chronically lonely individuals were more
likely to have higher body mass index
(BMI), elevated blood pressure, higher
levels of total cholesterol, lower levels
of “good” HDL cholesterol, greater
concentrations of glycosylated
hemoglobin (an index of impaired
glucose metabolism), and poorer
respiratory fitness than those who were
lonely at only two or one of the
measurement occasions. 2 In a study of
older adults, loneliness predicted
mortality over a 3-year period, and
increased mortality was explained by the
fact that lonely individuals had more
chronic diseases and functional
limitations. 3 Higher rates of mortality in
lonely individuals do not appear to be
attributable to inadequate healthcare
utilization: even after accounting for the
presence and severity of chronic illness,
lonely individuals are actually more
likely than nonlonely individuals to
make use of health facilities and
physicians. 4
Most chronic diseases (e.g.,
hypertension, coronary artery disease,
diabetes) are the result of the interactive
influences of genetic, environmental,
and behavioral factors on physiological
functioning. How do feelings of
loneliness penetrate to a level that affects
disease risk? Plausible pathways include
poor health behaviors, stress-related
processes, restorative “anti-stress”
processes, and even differences in
patterns of gene activity. In general,
physiological systems exhibit
redundancies and compensatory
processes that minimize the immediate
health effects of adverse heritable,
environmental, and behavioral factors.
However, subtle changes in these
predisease pathways can be detected
prior to the onset of manifest disease and
may indicate the beginnings of a steeper
downward trajectory in resilience. 5
Take health behaviors, for
instance. Major risk factors for disease
in Western society include high-calorie,
high-fat diets, and sedentary lifestyles,
each of which contribute to being
overweight or obese. Feelings of
loneliness have been associated with
greater incidence of these predominantly
lifestyle risk factors. In a large crosssectional
survey of adults 18 years and
older, the lonely group had a higher
mean BMI and a greater proportion of
overweight/obese individuals than did
the nonlonely group. Loneliness has
been associated with lower levels of
physical activity in every age group from
grade school to middle-age adults. In the
latter study, lonely individuals were also
more likely to become inactive over
time. Changes in health status also
Page | 43
predicted an increased likelihood of
becoming inactive, but the effects of
loneliness were independent of changes
in health status. Similarly, individuals
with fewer social connections (i.e., a
smaller social network) were less likely
to be physically active, but the effects of
loneliness on physical activity did not
depend on the size of the social network.
The invisible force of loneliness seems
to play a unique role in this particular
predisease pathway.
Another commonly cited risk
factor for disease is stress. In reality,
“stress” refers to a family of predisease
pathways, each of which may be
vulnerable to the influence of lonely
feelings. Loneliness is itself a source of
stress, but lonely individuals also differ
in their exposure to stressful events and
circumstances. This is less evident in
young adults than it is in older adults in
whom loneliness was associated with
having experienced a greater number of
stressful life events in the past year (e.g.,
death in the family, marital crisis,
change in employment status) and more
sources of chronic stress (e.g.,
employment stress, marital stress). 6 In
addition, lonely individuals perceive life
as more stressful and less gratifying than
their socially connected counterparts,
even when objective indications are that
lonely and nonlonely individuals do not
differ in the types of activities and
behaviors they engage in on a daily
basis. Good quality social interactions
typically ameliorate feelings of stress,
but because lonely people perceive their
interactions to be less positive than those
of nonlonely people, they fail to derive
the same benefit. Good coping strategies
can also ameliorate feelings of stress, but
lonely individuals are more likely to
respond to stress with pessimism and
avoidance than with optimism and active
engagement. And to add insult to injury,
loneliness increases sensitivity to and
surveillance for social threats. Anxiety,
low self-esteem, and fear of negative
evaluation elicit self-defensive behaviors
and effectively tax cognitive resources
that would normally be available to meet
the demands of daily life stress. Thus,
what might naively be thought of as a
circumscribed problem—the feeling of
loneliness and isolation—may be seen
by the sufferer as a world of inescapable
threat. 7 How might these cognitions and
perceptions influence physiology and
health? As Berntson shows in his
chapter, the brain regions involved in
emotional and perceptual processes are
intimately related to brain regions
involved in the regulation of
physiological systems. This is
particularly evident in alterations of the
functioning of the cardiovascular system
in lonely individuals. In young adults,
this alteration is apparent in increased
resistance to blood flow in small arteries
throughout the body. Increased vascular
resistance is a precursor and
predominant contributor to age-related
increases in systolic blood pressure
(SBP), a major risk factor for
cardiovascular disease. In middle-aged
adults, SBP is significantly higher in
lonely adults than in their nonlonely
counterparts. Moreover, loneliness
accelerates the rate of increases in SBP, 8
indicating a faster decline in
physiological resilience and a heightened
risk for chronic cardiovascular disease.
It’s as though loneliness accelerates the
aging process.
By virtue of extensive
interconnections among the brain,
peripheral nervous systems, and
endocrine glands, the feelings of
isolation and loneliness have a broad and
Page | 44
deep reach. The hypothalamus plays a
key role in enabling communication
from brain to periphery. Located in the
lower central region of the brain, the
hypothalamus receives neural input on
brain and body states (e.g., pain,
sadness, fear, hunger) and in response
signals brain regions that control the
autonomic nervous system and the
pituitary and adrenal glands. Signals to
the autonomic nervous system permit
modulation of heart rate, blood pressure,
and numerous other factors that serve to
maintain homeostasis. Signals to the
pituitary gland (located at the base of the
brain, just below the hypothalamus)
prompt the release of hormones that
ultimately permit modulation of almost
every endocrine gland in the body,
including the adrenal glands (one is
situated on top of each kidney). The
adrenal glands serve many functions,
and one is to produce and secrete
cortisol. Cortisol is frequently referred to
as a “stress hormone” because
circulating levels increase dramatically
in response to any stimulus that requires,
or might require, metabolic resources.
Thus, cortisol increases blood sugar
levels, increases blood pressure, and
reduces immune responses and
inflammation (hence the use of cortisone
cream or injections to control
inflammation of the skin after exposure
to poison ivy). This complex web of
physiological links may seem far
removed from feelings of social
isolation, but loneliness has repeatedly
been observed to be a risk factor for
elevated levels of cortisol, especially in
the morning. For instance, in middleaged
adults, the more intense the degree
of loneliness reported at day’s end over
the course of three days in everyday life,
the higher the spike in cortisol the
subsequent morning. The conundrum is
that loneliness is associated with
increased risk of chronic conditions that
are characterized by heightened
inflammation (e.g., atherosclerosis,
elevated cholesterol levels, heart disease,
diabetes, and even cognitive
impairment). If cortisol dampens
inflammation, why might elevated levels
of cortisol in lonely individuals be
associated with more rather than less
inflammation?
It turns out that communication
among the hypothalamus, pituitary
gland, and adrenal glands becomes
dysregulated when chronically
stimulated. Whereas cortisol effectively
dampens immune and inflammatory
responses on an acute basis, when
circulating cortisol levels are chronically
elevated, cells become resistant to its
immunosuppressant and antiinflammatory
effects. This alteration
happens at the level of DNA where the
actions of genes in each cell of our body
can be turned on (i.e., expressed) or off.
Recent evidence suggests that the effects
of loneliness reach down to this level.
Circulating leukocytes (white blood
cells) from a small group of chronically
lonely adults showed decreased
expression of glucocorticoid response
genes relative to expression rates in a
matched group of socially connected
adults. These genes are important
because they activate the production of
proteins that “hear” the antiinflammatory
signal sent by cortisol.
Thus, despite higher levels of circulating
cortisol in the lonely group, the cortisol
signal may still not be heard. The lonely
group also showed increased expression
of genes carrying pro-inflammatory
elements which, together with reduced
expression of glucocorticoid response
genes, provides a functional genomic
explanation for elevated risk of
Page | 45
inflammatory disease in individuals who
experience chronically high levels of
loneliness. 9
The effects of loneliness are not
limited to an increase in healththreatening
processes. Loneliness has
also been associated with a decrease in
health-restoring processes. Sleep is the
quintessential example. Much of what
feels stressful and depressing at the end
of a long day is perceived differently
following a good night’s sleep. Good
quality sleep is the clincher. Lonely and
non-lonely individuals do not differ in
the amount of sleep they get, but lonely
people have poorer sleep quality than do
non-lonely people. They experience
more micro-awakenings during the night
and they awake feeling more tired and
less capable of meeting the demands of
the day. Poor sleep has been associated
with elevated blood pressure and
cardiovascular mortality, and this may
help to explain the poorer health
outcomes of chronically lonely
individuals. In short, lonely days extend
into the nights and lessen the restorative
nature of sleep.
Loneliness and Health: It’s Not Just
Peripheral
From this sampling of the
widespread effects of loneliness on
health, lifestyle behaviors, physiological
functioning, genetic transcription, and
sleep quality, it should be clear that the
invisible power of felt isolation has long
tentacles that have the potential to
influence all of physiology. Not only
physical health, but also cognitive health
is compromised. Indeed, one of the most
sobering findings of recent years is that
loneliness places people at risk for
impaired cognition and dementia. 10 In a
4-year prospective study of initially
dementia-free older adults, the risk of
Alzheimer’s Disease was more than
twice as great in lonely than in
nonlonely individuals. In addition,
loneliness was associated with lower
cognitive ability at baseline and with a
more rapid decline in cognition during
the 4-year follow-up. Similar results
were reported for a sample of 75-85-
year-old individuals over a 10-year
follow-up.
The effects of loneliness on
cognition are evident at an even more
fundamental level. 11 Self-regulation, or
the ability to regulate one’s attention,
cognition, emotion, and/or behavior to
better meet social standards or personal
goals, is impaired in lonely individuals.
For instance, among young adults,
instructions to shift auditory attention
from the dominant right ear to the nondominant
left ear resulted in impaired
performance in lonely relative to
nonlonely individuals. Loneliness also
alters emotion regulation. In middleaged
and older adults, loneliness was
associated with a diminished tendency to
capitalize on positive emotions, and this
explained why lonely individuals were
less likely than nonlonely individuals to
engage in physical activity. Impaired
cognitive regulation is evident in
experimental studies that manipulate
feelings of isolation. Participants who
receive feedback that induces a sense
that they are doomed to a future of social
isolation perform significantly worse on
tests of reasoning, behave more
aggressively, and choose more tasty but
unhealthy foods than other participants
who receive feedback indicating a future
of social connection or bad feedback of a
non-social nature, namely that their
future will consist of general
misfortune. 12 There seems to be
something uniquely threatening about
the prospect, and the reality, of feeling
Page | 46
isolated, disconnected, and like one
doesn’t belong.
In terms of emotional health, the
prospect for lonely people is increasing
misery, at least over the short term.
Loneliness and depressed affect tend to
be thought of as synonymous, but the
two are conceptually and empirically
distinct. If loneliness and depression
were synonymous, increases in
loneliness would have no capacity to
predict increases in depressive
symptoms because increases in one
would be exactly paralleled by increases
in the other. Instead, longitudinal data
have shown that loneliness predicts an
increase in depressive symptoms but
depressive symptoms do not predict an
increase in loneliness over a one-year
interval. 13 Importantly, the influence of
loneliness on depressive symptoms was
not attributable to fewer social
connections, general negativity, stress,
or poor social support. These data
suggest that the relevant intervention
target is loneliness, and that modifying
the cognitions, perceptions, and
expectations of the lonely individual
could help improve quality of life and
overall well-being.
Social Connectedness: Invisible Forces
Made Visible
At this juncture, having become
acquainted with the burden of loneliness,
it is helpful to remember that most
people, most of the time, feel socially
connected. They derive satisfaction and
meaning from their social relationships,
and this makes them happier and more
satisfied with life. Interestingly,
happiness leads to higher levels of
relationship satisfaction, indicating that
happiness and relationship satisfaction
feed forward to foster spirals of
increasing happiness and relationship
satisfaction. The general positivity that
ensues from happiness is also apparent
in the effects of happiness on income.
Happiness predicted increases in
household income over a 2-year period
in middle-aged adults. However,
relationship satisfaction also predicted
increases in household income over this
time period and, remarkably,
relationship satisfaction helped to
explain the effect of happiness on
income. It seems that happy people
experience increases in income in part
because of the general good will that
surrounds the socially contented
individual and that elicits tangible and
intangible positivity from others.
It is perhaps precisely because
most people feel socially connected and
happy that we take for granted the
invisible force of social connectedness
and its stabilizing and nurturing
influence in all aspects of life. Only in
its absence do we begin to comprehend
its power. Western notions of the
autonomous individual notwithstanding,
human beings are “wired” for social
connections and need social bonds to
feel safe, valued, motivated, and
competent. 14 Among the lamentations
expressed by some in Western societies
is a concern that our autonomy and
independence come at the expense of
meaningful social relationships and a
sense of belonging to a larger social unit.
Family members are no longer
obligatorily part of our social
community, while Facebook friends,
some of whom we know only through
electronic media, are deemed essential to
fulfilling our need for a sense of
connectedness and belonging. 15 The
broadening of our social worlds has not
been accompanied by maintenance,
much less improvement, of the quality of
our social relationships. One national
study showed a threefold increase
Page | 47
between 1985 and 2004 in the number of
Americans who reported no one with
whom to discuss important matters. 16
We are a meaning-making species, and
relationships that offer security, comfort,
trust, and pleasure, even if interactions
are relatively infrequent, are much more
effective at fostering a sense of
connectedness and belonging than are
more friends or more frequent
interactions that fail to meet these
standards. The challenge, especially for
those of us who live in Western society,
is to recognize that the invisible force of
social connectedness has benefits for
health and well-being that we ignore at
our peril.
Conclusion
The research on loneliness
highlights the need for and benefits of
human connections, but it speaks even
more directly to the role of beliefs about
our connections. Loneliness, after all, is
not about how many social relationships
a person has, but is about a belief that
the existing social relationships fail to
satisfy a desired sense of social
connectedness. All human relationships
have a tangible existence in physical
interactions and an invisible existence in
mental representations and beliefs. This
human capacity expands the range of
possible relationships. For instance,
humans form meaningful connections
with pets, with television characters
whom they have never met, and with
deities who lack a material existence.
We have seen the health impact of the
invisible force of loneliness; do different
kinds of invisible forces have different
effects?
References
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Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy,
Comedy, and Fairy Tale (p. 3).
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Moffitt, T.E., Milne, B.J., &
Poulton, R. (2006). Socially
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3. Sugisawa, H., Liang, J., & Liu,
X. (1994). Social networks,
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Waite, L., J., Masi, C. M.,
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7. Cacioppo, J. T., & Patrick, B.
(2008). Loneliness: Human
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8. Hawkley, L. C., Thisted, R. A.,
Masi, C. M., & Cacioppo, J. T.
Page | 48
(under review). Loneliness
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9. Cole, S. W., Hawkley, L. C.,
Arevalo, J. M., Sung, C. Y.,
Rose, R. M., & Cacioppo, J. T.
(2007). Social regulation of gene
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Arnold, S. E., Schneider, J. A.,
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(2007). Loneliness and risk of
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11. Cacioppo, J. T., & Hawkley, L.
C. (2009). Perceived social
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12. Baumeister, R.F., DeWall, C. N.,
Ciarocco, N. J., & Twenge, J. M.
(2005). Social exclusion impairs
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Baumeister, R. F., Tice, D. M., &
Stucke, T. S. (2001). If you can't
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& Thisted, R. (2009). Perceived
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Page | 49
From Relationships to People and
Groups to Relationships with God
The extent and quality of our
social connections can have profound
consequences for our physical wellbeing.
In her essay, Louise Hawkley
explores in particular the consequences
that feelings of inadequate social
connection have on such physical
outcomes as sleep quality, high blood
pressure, reduced ability to respond to
inflammation, cognitive health in aging,
and cardiovascular health. While
Hawkley emphasizes the relationship
between the invisible forces of social
connection and health and the biological
mechanisms responsible for this
relationship, Gary Berntson takes things
one step further by exploring a person’s
perceived connection with God and its
effects on our basic biological systems.
Many of our basic biological processes,
such as breathing or maintaining
sufficient blood pressure to oxygenate
the brain, are reflexes that are so
automatic that they become invisible to
us. Berntson shows that thoughts and
beliefs alter not only behaviors, but also
the regulation of these reflex-like
mechanisms. And he suggests that the
root of these effects may lie in the way
that humans and other animals maintain
biological equilibrium with regulatory
mechanisms that, under ordinary
circumstances, keep each other in check.
This theory describes a biological
mechanism that could explain why
spirituality is associated with generally
better health.
Page | 50
Chapter 5 5
Psychosomatic Relations: From
Superstition to Mortality
People have many sources of
information, knowledge and
5 The lead author is Gary G. Berntson, Ph.D., a
Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry and
Pediatrics and a member of the Neurosciences
Graduate Faculty at the Ohio State University.
He is a co-founder (with John Cacioppo) of the
field of social neuroscience, is a co-editor of the
Handbook of Psychophysiology and the
Handbook of Neuroscience for the Behavioral
Sciences, and is the President of the Society for
Psychophysiological Research. Berntson’s
research focuses on the evolutionary
development of the neuraxis, with special regard
to levels of organization in neurobehavioral
systems, affective processes and autonomic
regulation. He has published over 200 articles in
scientific outlets and six books.
Berntson begins with the fact that
knowledge, thoughts and beliefs can influence
our behaviors. Behaviors, of course, are
physiological processes entailing neural
operations and muscular actions. Here we see a
clear intersection between the psychological
domain on the one hand (knowledge, thoughts
and beliefs) and the physical domain
(neuromuscular effector systems) on the other.
But mind-body relations extend beyond the
observable actions or skeletal muscles. The mind
and its organ, the brain, also impact powerfully
on internal bodily functions associated with the
autonomic nervous system, the endocrine
system, and the immune system, to name just a
few. Through these interactions, psychological
processes can be translated in outcomes that have
powerful significance for adaptation and health.
Berntson explores the processes by which
thoughts can manifest in fundamental changes in
internal physiology and health.
understanding. We consider the most
common of these to be empirically
acquired, learned facts, relations,
associations, and perceptual and motor
skills. Such learned associations serve as
powerful determinants of thought and
behavior. But other sources of
information and knowledge also affect
our interaction with the environment,
including reflex-like (constitutionally
endowed) circuits that are independent
of explicit learning. Examples include
central networks for pain withdrawal,
hunger circuits for the ingestion of
essential nutrients, social affiliation
networks, and neural systems that
promote maternal bonding. Each of
these sources of information or
knowledge can impact thoughts and
beliefs, and thoughts and beliefs can
impact behaviors and other bodily
functions.
“…a Maori woman who,
having eaten some fruit, was told that it
had been taken
from a tabooed place; she
exclaimed that the sanctity of the chief
had been profaned
and that his spirit would kill
her … the next day … she was
dead.”(1)
“I have seen a strong young
man die …. the same day he was tapued
(tabooed); the victims die
under it as though their strength ran out
as water. . . ”(1)
A superstition is a belief, based
not on reason or knowledge, but on
legend, magical thinking, or other nonrational
basis. Beliefs color the way we
perceive the world, they direct and shape
our actions, and define our personalities.
Beliefs are powerful determinants of
action. A useful illustration of the power
of beliefs comes from the parable of the
Page | 51
Sultan (who had studied psychology)
and his “lie-detecting” donkey. Lore has
it that the Sultan was missing a valuable
vase from his estate and suspected that
one of his servants had stolen the piece.
To identify the culprit, the Sultan
gathered his servants in front of a dark
room in which a donkey was tied, and
then asked each of his servants if they
had stolen the item. Each said “no”. The
Sultan explained that inside the room
was a magical donkey, specially trained
to detect liars, who would bray when
slapped by someone who had lied. The
servants were sent into the room, one by
one, and were instructed to close the
door, slap the donkey and return. “When
the donkey brays,” the Sultan
proclaimed, “I will have my culprit”.
The first servant was sent into the room
and returned shortly thereafter--
tremendously relieved as the donkey had
not brayed. One by one, the remaining
servants entered the room and returned.
The donkey had not brayed and all the
servants looked quite relaxed. The
Sultan was sanguine -- he knew this
donkey never brayed under any
circumstances. The Sultan asked the
servants to show him their hands. He
then pointed to one of them and declared
“we have our thief,” instructing the
guards to take him away. How had he
identified the culprit? Rather than
relying on a magical donkey, the Sultan,
who recall was a student of psychology,
took a more rational approach.
Understanding the impact of beliefs on
behavior, the Sultan had surreptitiously
infiltrated powdered charcoal into the
donkey’s hair. When the servants
slapped the donkey, the charcoal marked
their hands—with the exception of the
guilty servant who had not slapped the
donkey, out of a belief and associated
fear that the donkey could detect a liar!
Power of Beliefs
Beliefs may be potent
determinants of behavior, but can they
kill? And if so, how? How can these
invisible, intangible entities impact
health? In a now classic article published
in the American Anthropologist in 1942,
Walter Cannon, a leading Harvard
physiologist and expert on the
autonomic nervous system, proposed an
answer (1). Investigating phenomena
such as voodoo practices of the Haitians
and “bone-pointing” among Australian
aborigines, Cannon found a common
feature among the victims of such rituals
was a strong belief in the curse and an
associated morbid fear of the outcome.
That fear, he argued, could trigger a
“fight-or-flight reaction” (a phrase he
had earlier coined), characterized by
powerful and exaggerated activation of
the sympathetic nervous system. The
resulting vascular constriction
diminishes blood flow to critical tissues
(i.e., ischemia), with consequent hypoxia
(decreased oxygen) and disturbances in
normal metabolism and cellular
function. These reactions may be
exacerbated by the lack of food and
water as the victim “pines away.”
Cannon argued that these reactions could
become life-threatening—fulfilling the
gruesome legacy of the ritual—based on
a belief in the supernatural, the veracity
of which is largely irrelevant. More
relevant is the emotion triggered by the
belief, specious as it may be.
Beliefs and emotions have
consequences, both behavioral and
physiological. A recent example comes
from the contemporary medical
literature. There is now a welldocumented
condition, sometimes
triggered by something as innocuous as a
spousal argument or a surprise birthday
party, which entails the hallmark clinical
Page | 52
and physiological features of a heart
attack, including chest pain,
abnormalities on the electrocardiogram,
and elevated cardiac enzymes (reflecting
damaged heart muscle) (2). The
condition has variously been termed
takotsubo cardiomyopathy, leftventricular
apical ballooning,
myocardial stunning, stress
cardiomyopathy, or in the more
vernacular parlance of the New York
Times, broken heart syndrome
(prompted by a medical review that was
published just before Valentine’s Day).
In general accord with the speculation of
Cannon, broken heart syndrome appears
to be triggered by an exaggerated
autonomic nervous system response,
characterized by sympathetic activation
and high levels of the stress hormone
epinephrine (adrenalin) (3). It is
important to note in these cases that
psychological states, as mild as they may
be, are able to induce a clear and
demonstrable organ pathology.
Physiological abnormalities or
dysfunctions underlie medical
conditions, and indeed, constitute the
defining features of disease states. An
important question, however, is how
those dysfunctions come to be. There are
many ways in which disease develops –
traumatic injuries, biotic infections,
degenerative conditions – and the list
goes on. The fields of psychophysiology,
psychosomatic or behavioral medicine,
and health psychology are particularly
concerned with how psychological and
behavioral factors impact physiological
systems and thus health. Of particular
interest are those psychological
dimensions that uniquely impact
physiology.
An example comes from the
study of Herpes Simplex viral infections.
Herpes Simplex viruses are responsible
for cold sores (HSV type I) and genital
herpes (HSV type II). Once contracted,
herpes virus infections generally remain
for life, although they are characterized
by periodic eruptions and remissions.
During the latter, the immune system
effectively dampens viral activity and
the virus retreat to a more or less
dormant state. Although multiple factors
likely contribute to the reactivation of
HSV, one trigger appears to be stress—
the defacing cold sore that erupts, for
example, just before the prom or an
important date. Ohio State researchers
sought an animal model of this
reactivation, so the underlying links and
mediators could be studied. Try as they
might, however, the research group was
unable to reactivate HSV infections in
mice with standard laboratory stressors,
such as restraint-stress or shock. In a
collaborative effort, we pointed out that
the stressors that lead to HSV
reactivation in humans were often of a
social nature. Indeed, for both humans
and mice, social relations are central to
happiness, adaptation and even survival.
In light of this, a social stressor was
introduced into the project (changing the
housing groupings and thus disrupting
established social relations). The social
stress, but again not physical stressors,
resulted in significant HSV reactivation
(4). Psychological factors, and in this
case a specific social psychological
variable, uniquely impacted an important
aspect of viral immunity. This early
finding led to a series of studies that
have elucidated physiological pathways
that mediate the relationship between
social stress, immune function and HSV
reactivation. But, what is it that makes
social stress unique and distinct from
physical stressors?
We have identified a probable
general contributor to the differences
Page | 53
between lower-level physical or
homeostatic challenges and higher-level
psychological and social stressors. Basic
homeostatic reflexes, reflexes that keep
in balance various critical bodily
processes such as blood pressure, body
temperature, and blood sugar, are largely
hard-wired and organized at relatively
low levels of the nervous system, such as
the brainstem and spinal cord. An
example comes from autonomic nervous
system regulation of cardiovascular
function. The sympathetic division of the
autonomic nervous system is an
activational, energy mobilization system
that comes into play in the face of
adaptive challenges. Sympathetic
activation increases heart rate and results
in peripheral vasoconstriction, both of
which tend to increase blood pressure. In
contrast, the parasympathetic division is
an energy-conserving, deactivational
brake that generally opposes the
sympathetic system, yielding decreases
in heart rate and blood pressure. The
baroreceptor heart rate reflex is a
homeostatic reflex that functions to
maintain blood pressure within
homeostatic limits. Unique pressure
sensitive receptors in the heart and large
arteries detect changes in blood pressure,
and a decrease in blood pressure triggers
the baroreceptor heart rate reflex,
increasing sympathetic activity and
reciprocally decreasing parasympathetic
tone. Both effects serve to increase heart
rate (and thus cardiac output) and
constrict arteries throughout the body,
thereby restoring the pressure
perturbation. In basic reflexes, the two
autonomic branches are generally
regulated in this reciprocal fashion, and
thus synergistically amplify the effects
of the other. This is a useful mechanism
to adjust to severe adaptive challenges
such as a decrease in blood pressure and
compromised circulation.
Although this reciprocal mode of
regulation of the autonomic branches has
considerable utility, and is characteristic
of basic reflex organizations, it may not
always be optimal. The autonomic
nervous system provides the basic
support for action and adjustment, and
although it figures prominently in
survival related functions, it also
provides the basic visceral support for
emotional and cognitive operations as
well. It has long been recognized that
cognitively demanding tasks elicit
greater autonomic activation than is
needed to meet the metabolic demands
of the tasks. Moreover, ascending neural
signals to the brain from visceral organs
such as the heart and blood vessels serve
to modulate and regulate cognitive
activities (5). The notable early
psychologist, William James, proposed
that emotion is the experience of
somatovisceral sensory feedback. James
suggested that we do not run from the
bear because we are afraid, but rather we
are afraid because we run from the bear
(6). Although the strong form of this
theory has not been supported, it remains
the case that ascending visceral signals
can modulate learning, attention, and
cortical/cognitive processing (5). The
autonomic nervous system is not only
for lower level reflexive adjustments.
Indeed, it is increasingly recognized that
there is a highly complex, even intricate,
interaction between the autonomic
nervous system and higher level brain
structures (e.g., frontal cortex) involved
in human behavior. Importantly, these
circuits and their interactions with the
autonomic nervous system are highly
flexible and are not constrained by the
simple organization rules that govern
basal functions such as homeostasis and
Page | 54
reciprocal control of the autonomic
branches. Rather, higher level systems
engage in highly sophisticated “banter”
with the autonomic nervous system.
In contrast to the reciprocal
control characteristic of autonomic
reflexes, higher level brain circuits exert
more flexible control over the autonomic
nervous system. This can include the
classic reciprocal control pattern, but can
also include an independent control
pattern in which only the sympathetic
branch or only the parasympathetic
branch of the autonomic nervous system
is activated, and a coactive control
pattern in which both branches are
activated. This greater flexibility in
control may have behavioral and health
significance.
Beliefs about One’s Relationship with
God and Autonomic Functioning
Recently, we used a populationbased
sample of 50-68-year-old adults in
the Chicago Health, Aging and Social
Relations Study to examine risk factors
for heart attack, a health outcome known
to be influenced the autonomic nervous
system. We were particularly interested
in whether spirituality influenced risk for
heart attack. With very few exceptions,
everyone in our sample expressed a
belief in God. However, individuals
differed in how they perceived the
quality of their relationship with God,
much as individuals differ in how they
perceive the quality of their relationships
with other people. We defined
spirituality as the degree to which a
personal relationship with God was
believed to offer safety, security,
contentment, and love. One observation
that emerged from this study was that
spirituality was associated with a lower
incidence of heart attack (7). This
remained true after ruling out the effects
of demographics, health behaviors, body
mass index, blood pressure, and other
potential explanatory factors. Short of
divine intervention, was there a rational
explanation for this relationship? We
certainly know that psychological factors
can impact autonomic control, among
other aspects of physiology.
As considered above, when
extreme or prolonged, sympathetic
activation may have harmful
consequences. Heightened sympathetic
activation is known, for example, to
predict a poorer outcome after heart
attack. In contrast, parasympathetic
activity may have beneficial or
protective effects. From the perspective
of a reciprocal model of autonomic
control, high parasympathetic/low
sympathetic control would be optimal
whereas high sympathetic/low
parasympathetic control would be
considered a risk. But we also know that
higher level neurobehavioral systems
may not be constrained to reciprocal
autonomic controls. Moreover, it has
been argued that more autonomic control
is better than little control, in that if
affords greater capacity for adjustment
of visceral functions. Could high levels
of parasympathetic control, for example,
mitigate the negative effects of
sympathetic activation and perhaps yield
an even more advantageous health
outcome?
To examine these questions, we
developed two quantitative measures of
autonomic control (7). The first was a
common metric of autonomic balance
(Cardiac Autonomic Balance), which
represents the relative dominance of the
two branches along a single autonomic
continuum that ranges from purely
parasympathetic control to purely
sympathetic control. This metric is
consistent with the classical model of
Page | 55
reciprocal control, characteristic of
reflex processes, where autonomic
balance can be biased toward one or the
other of the autonomic branches. High
scores indicate sympathetic dominance
and low scores parasympathetic
dominance. Independent estimates of
sympathetic and parasympathetic control
were obtained using standard
measurement procedures, and the level
of parasympathetic control was
subtracted from sympathetic control to
derive a measure of Cardiac Autonomic
Balance. A second metric was designed
to capture an alternative mode of
autonomic control (Cardiac Autonomic
Regulation) that assesses the degree of
relative coactivation (rather than
reciprocal activation) of both branches.
This is a metric that taps into the nonreciprocal
regulatory influences of
higher neural structures. Cardiac
Autonomic Regulation scores were
derived by essentially summing
activities of the sympathetic and
parasympathetic branches to afford a
measure of total overall autonomic
cardiac control. High scores indicate
high activation and low scores indicate
low activation of both branches of the
autonomic nervous system.
In the 50-68-year-old adults in
our sample, spirituality was found to be
associated not only with a lower
incidence of heart attack, but a higher
level of Cardiac Autonomic Regulation.
That is, people who felt closer in their
relationship with God exhibited higher
overall autonomic regulation—both
sympathetic and parasympathetic. This
was associated, in part, with lesser
diminution of parasympathetic control
and a greater degree of coactivation.
Moreover, Cardiac Autonomic
Regulation (but not Cardiac Autonomic
Balance) predicted better overall health
status and was associated with a lower
incidence of heart attack. Participants
who had low Cardiac Autonomic
Regulation were more likely to have
suffered from a heart attack.
Could higher Cardiac Autonomic
Regulation scores explain why
spirituality was associated with less risk
for heart attack? That is, could a pattern
of autonomic regulation associated with
spirituality explain the link between
spirituality and heart attack? In order to
address this question, we conducted
statistical tests of these linkages. As we
already knew, both spirituality and
Cardiac Autonomic Regulation are
associated with a lower incidence of
heart attack. When the predictive effects
of spirituality were statistically
extracted, Cardiac Autonomic
Regulation continued to be a significant
predictor of a lower incidence of heart
attack. However, when the linkage test
was reversed and the effects of Cardiac
Autonomic Regulation were extracted,
spirituality was no longer a significant
predictor. This indicates that Cardiac
Autonomic Regulation is a plausible
mediator that may explain the
relationship between spirituality and
heart attack.
By capturing higher levels of
parasympathetic control and the
associated autonomic coactivation of the
sympathetic and parasympathetic
branches, Cardiac Autonomic
Regulation provided a critical metric that
permitted the study of a previously
“invisible” and mysterious link between
spirituality and health outcomes. This in
no way diminishes the relationship
between spirituality and health, but
rather offers an important hypothesis as
to how spirituality may impact
physiology and health status. Spirituality
reflects an important aspect of the
Page | 56
general domain of sociality and social
relationships, a domain heavily
influenced by our genetic constitution as
a social species. Indeed, the importance
of sociality may be more related to
beliefs and attitudes about the
meaningfulness of relationships than
their existence or number. And again,
beliefs about social relationships also
have real consequences.
Conclusion
Beliefs impact thoughts and
actions. This may be reflected in
phenomena as diverse as biasing a
behavioral disposition (such as slapping
a donkey), coloring our perception of the
environment, or determining how we
perceive the quality of our social
(including spiritual) relations.
Psychology can also impact physiology,
and physiology, in turn, can influence
our thoughts and emotions.
Psychophysiology is the study of these
relationships, and promises to illuminate
the intricacies of psychosomatic
relations and the heretofore “invisible”
mechanisms that mediate these links.
The relations between the mind and the
body, the so-called mind-body problem,
are complex and still rather obscure.
Nevertheless, the mind-body problem is
yielding to science, and the problem it
poses is progressively diminishing.
Among the components of the mindbody
problem yielding to rigorous
scientific inquiry are the effects of
spiritual beliefs including feelings of
closeness to God.
References
1. Cannon, W.B. (1942). “Voodoo”
death. American Anthropologist, 44
(new series), 169-181.
2. Wittstein, I.S. (2007). The broken
heart syndrome. Cleve Clin J Med, 74,
Suppl 1, S17-22.
3. Wittstein, I.S., Thiemann, D.R., Lima,
J.A., Baughman, K.L., Schulman, S.P.,
Gerstenblith, G., Wu, K.C., Rade, J.J.,
Bivalacqua, T.J., & Champion, H.C.
(2005). Neurohumoral features of
myocardial stunning due to sudden
emotional stress. N Engl J Med, 352,
539-48.
4. Padgett, D. A., Sheridan, J. F., Dorne,
J., Berntson, G. G., Candelora, J., &
Glaser, R. (1998). Social stress and the
reactivation of latent herpes simplex
virus-type 1. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, 95, 7231-
7235.
5. Berntson, G. G., Sarter, M. &
Cacioppo, J. T. (2003). Ascending
visceral regulation of cortical affective
information processing. European
Journal of Neuroscience, 18, 2103-2109.
6. James, W. (1884). What is an
emotion? Mind, 9, 188-205.
7. Berntson, G. G., Norman, G.,
Hawkley, L., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2008).
Spirituality and autonomic
cardiovascular control. Annals of
Behavioral Medicine, 35, 198-208.
8. Berntson, G. G., Norman, G. J.,
Hawkley, L. C. & Cacioppo, J. T.
(2008). Cardiac Autonomic Balance vs.
Cardiac Regulatory Capacity.
Psychophysiology, 45, 643-652.
Page | 57
The Mind and Body Are One
The Cartesian view of the mind
as distinct from the body persists in
twenty-first century discourse as the
mind-body problem alluded to by Gary
Berntson. Berntson provides evidence
that the mind and the body, psychology
and physiology, are not independent of
each other but represent different levels
of organization of human organisms.
Beliefs influence thoughts, behaviors,
and physiology, and peripheral
physiological processes signal central
neural networks that influence
cognitions and feelings crucial for the
generation and moderation of beliefs.
Spiritual beliefs are considered by some
to be contentious candidates for
scientific examination, yet Berntson
argues that spiritual beliefs can be
identified, measured, and subjected to
scientific investigation in the same
fashion as any other belief or invisible
force. Accordingly, Berntson examines
the effects of a specific spiritual belief –
the belief that one has a close personal
relationship with God. As documented
by Berntson, this belief is associated
with rather profound physiological and
health effects.
Whereas Berntson focuses on the
influence of the mind on the body and
vice versa, Gün Semin speaks of the
mind in the body and, more specifically,
in several bodies simultaneously. In his
social cognition model, Semin
challenges the limits of individual social
cognition and argues that regulation and
co-regulation of social behavior are
distributed across brains. When several
individuals exhibit spontaneous
synchronized behaviors (e.g., handclapping),
the human tendency is to
invoke a “supra-individual” explanation.
Semin describes a mechanism by which
the supra-individual source can be
explained as shared motor
representations and ongoing monitoring
of observed actions that, under certain
conditions, lead to dissolution of the
boundary between self and other. The
resulting shared experience of unity and
collective identity may feel
transcendental, but the mechanisms are
as real and explicable as those governing
individual behaviors and experiences.
Page | 58
Chapter 6 6
The Suspension of Individual
Consciousness and
The Dissolution of Self and Other
Boundaries
When we watch a group of
soldiers marching in formation, we see
the behavior of the group synchronized.
Although we can make out the
6 The lead author is Gün R. Semin, Ph.D., an
Academy Professor, Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences, at Utrecht
University, The Netherlands. He is the founding
Scientific Director of the Kurt Lewin Graduate
School , a past president of the European
Association of Experimental Social Psychology,
and the Chair of the International Committee of
the Association for Psychological Science.
Semin’s research is primarily driven by an
interest in communication, social cognition as
jointly recruited process, and language and the
diverse uses that language can be put to in social
interaction (ranging from the regulation of
prejudice to that of interpersonal relationships)
as well as the embodied grounding of meaning
and communication.
A puzzle that has occupied Semin much
of his career is how it is possible to understand
social behavior by explaining individual
processes. Another puzzle has been why one
should focus on stills when human behavior is a
movie: behavior is self evidently dynamic and
highly responsive to contextual variations.
Finally, Semin has been puzzled by how it is
possible to think that all there might be to
psychological processes is some symbolic
computation taking place somewhere between
the ears. As outlined in this essay, he has come
to conceptualize the social in terms of jointly
recruited processes rather than individual ones,
social behavior as situated, and psychological
processes as embodied.
individual within the group, the group
seems to be an entity of its own and the
individual soldier seems to have become
a cog in the social machine. Mob
behavior, crowds at sporting events, and
soldiers in formation all suggest that
when we are organized to act together,
the group becomes an emergent entity
that can submerge the sense of the
individual self. This apparent social
absorption stands in contrast to our
typical experience of being autonomous,
self-aware agents in the world. The
dissolution of the boundary between the
self and the group is one manifestation
of the social brain and the mechanisms
that support our ability to connect with
others.
Although not everyone has the
experience of marching in a band or
running with a mob, most people have
been part of an audience at a concert or
play. At the end of a particularly
thrilling performance, an audience can
be moved spontaneously as a group to
clap wildly. In these situations, we
know the feeling of surging to our feet as
a collective, hands clapping and faces
beaming with approval. As the clapping
blooms, individual clappers merge into a
synchronized unit. 1, 2 Similarly,
thousands of individual sports fans have
been observed to stand and raise their
hands in a synchronized fashion to
produce a collective wave that travels
around the stadium. In both cases,
individual people act as a collective unit,
a superorganismal structure, with
capacities and behaviors beyond the
reach of any single individual in the
group.
These examples are instances of
behavioral uniformity in large groups.
What is distinctive about these examples
is that the observed behavioral
synchrony can be understood in terms of
Page | 59
a shared social goal. Sometimes the goal
is spontaneous as in clapping to
demonstrate appreciation and sometimes
the goal is imposed by the situation (e.g.,
musicians following a musical score and
instructions of a conductor, soldiers
marching to the call of a drill sergeant).
However, when we behave in synchrony
with others, there is a sense of becoming
part of something larger than ourselves.
To the people engaged in
spontaneously synchronized behavior,
there is a clearly identifiable and
seemingly individual ‘cause’ for their
emergent behavior. But when a group
shares the same goal—demonstrating
approval—and engages in the same
action—clapping—the stage is set for
such behavior to become coordinated
and organized even without an external
agent (conductor or drill sergeant). How
do those moments of spontaneous social
aggregation occur? How does the social
brain work to join with others to form
the emergent group?
We have begun to understand the
underlying dynamics of how and when
such phenomena are likely to occur and
even how such phenomena can be
potentially engineered. New insights
afforded by developments in social
psychology, developmental psychology,
and social neuroscience have suggested
the way in which our brains respond to
the invisible force of social connection.
These scientific developments suggest
neural mechanisms that may be
important to the way we interact with
others. At the same time, the insights
also reveal the likely conditions under
which individual self merges into the
group. Such situations when the sense of
self is suspended contrast sharply with
the modern Western notion of the
individual standing apart from others.
Indeed, the traditional Western focus on
individual-centered reasons, motives,
intentions, and causes may be at odds
with some forms of spontaneously
synchronized behaviors and group
action.
Towards a Biology of Social
Interaction
Consider the perspective of an
engaged spectator at a singles tennis
match. Although we may be sitting
distant from competitors, if we identify
with one of the players we are not
merely passive observers. On the
contrary, our observation of the events in
the game can serve to activate some of
the same neural mechanisms that would
be active if we were playing the game
rather than just observing it. We can feel
the moves, feel the impetus to defend an
attack, and feel the urge to slam the ball
as if we ourselves are playing, albeit
without actually flailing our arms
around. We may even anticipate a move
by the opponent and imagine ourselves
making the potential response. Research
over the last 10 years or so has revealed
that our brains can map the movements
of other human beings onto our own
bodies almost as if we were making
those movements 3 . This ability to put
ourselves in another person’s shoes
makes it possible to identify with either
player.
By comparison to the audience,
consider how this ability can serve us as
one of the players. This capacity
provides an important facility for
anticipating our opponent’s moves
allowing us to plan a response even
before the opponent has completed a
groundstroke. This kind of anticipation
does not depend on explicit reasoning or
conscious reflection—it seems to operate
as an automatic mechanism 3, 4 . This
kind of mechanism may facilitate
Page | 60
understanding the behavior of others. If
your brain mirrors the neural activity in
the brain of someone you see acting, this
could provide a basis for understanding
the motivation for the action. If your
brain resonates to the observed action as
if you were acting, this could call to
mind previous experiences acting that
way providing a memory for why you
acted that way. That is, our social brain
may directly resonate to the actions of
others without reasoning explicitly about
those actions. This kind of mechanism,
through which intentions might be
inferred, could then prepare responses
quickly to facilitate the smooth flow of
social interactions whether in a game or
a dialogue. Of course, a critical aspect
of such a mechanism is to differentiate
our resonance to other people’s actions
and the control of our own. This kind
of neural system for mapping the actions
and intentions of others has been
identified with a network of regions
called the mirror neuron system 5 , and
this system may help to induce a degree
of reflexive similarity or identification
between self and other. The mirror
neuron system appears to be
continuously engaged unless it is
actively suppressed by inhibition, so that
this system may continuous monitor the
behavior of ‘others’ in our social
environment.
Of course, mapping the
movements of the opponent is useful,
but certainly not sufficient to defend our
position, score a point, or win a match.
One needs to execute countermoves.
This is the domain of the motor system
in the brain, which includes regions
involved in the preparation and
execution of motor action. The motor
system is responsible for the
implementation of one’s goals and
intentions to perform an action 6 . Thus,
the social brain includes monitoring and
motor systems that function in parallel.
The mirror system puts the player in the
opponent’s shoes and monitors the
opponent’s actions in an anticipatory
manner. Other parts of the social brain
maintain the distinction between player
and opponent by shaping the
implementation of one’s actions, namely
by engaging a counteraction.
In sum, a tennis game or any
social interaction depends on a complex
network of brain regions that mediate
perception and action, and the
relationship between observed action
and one’s own behavior. The overlap in
brain regions responsible for these two
important social functions suggests how
tightly coupled and coordinated social
interactions can be. However, these two
systems cannot operate in isolation from
our knowledge of the context in which
behavior occurs. We, therefore, turn to
this topic next.
The Social Context
In a tennis game or any social
interaction (e.g., dancing, conversation),
the behavior of one individual
constitutes a stimulus for others. If a
behavior is meaningful, then neural
mechanisms responsible for social
perception and social interaction are
likely to be activated to engage in
complementary action. In a competitive
context, such as the tennis game, the
motor system is engaged in the
preparation and execution of
complementary actions to those
observed and anticipated based on the
inferred goals and intentions of the
competitor. However, if everyone shares
the same goal, for example, as in an
audience clapping, the neural systems
for monitoring the actions of others and
executing one’s own actions can be
Page | 61
mutually reinforcing leading to
synchrony.
In any dynamic social situation
observing one person’s action can
initiate neural activity in another. Parts
of the observer’s motor system become
activated, making it possible to respond
in synchrony. In fact, the specific actions
that are observed are not as important as
the perceived goals or intentions of the
observed person. One consequence of
this is that a person is sensitive to new
actions in the social environment. A
second is that significant actions by
another person can quickly produce
complementary motor responses. Thus,
adaptive social behavior is a product of
perceptual monitoring and motor
processes. The complexity of the social
environment necessitates selective
responding to socially significant
features of any social interaction. Such
selective responding depends on the
observer having particular goals for
action. The identification of significant
stimuli (e.g., a threatening backhand
smash) activates in the competitor’s
brain goal-driven decision processes that
operate in parallel with continuous social
monitoring and lead to a counteraction
(e.g., a defensive lob) produced by the
motor system. However, a linesman
collecting a ball during a tennis match
does not constitute a significant action
for the competition and, even if
observed, does not initiate any
counteraction.
Let us now return to the
perspective of a spectator at the tennis
match. While the specific movements
driving the tennis match have significant
implications for the players’ actions,
these movements have a different
implication for the spectator from whom
no overt responses are warranted. If an
observed action produced by someone
else does not have personal significance
for an observer, the motor system does
not respond in the same way at all 7 . The
goal-dependent aspect of observing the
actions of others allows us to understand
and respond quickly and effectively
without confusing what we do with what
we see. However, in some special cases,
when a group of individuals all respond
together, the same motor system may
operate differently. It is in these
situations when we are neither observer
nor respondent but part of a flock or
chorus that our sense of individuated self
may begin to dissolve into the larger
social group.
The Social Parameters for Suspended
Self-Consciousness
The dissolution of self-other
boundaries is likely to be manifest under
a specific set of conditions, which
includes a strong feeling of identification
with (i.e., connection between) oneself
and a group of others, the absence of
constraints to action by oneself or the
observed others, a common goal shared
by the group, and the absence of a
recognized external synchronizing signal
to which one can attribute any
synchronized behavior. Clapping in
unison following a rousing performance
is a more common example. This
remarkable phenomenon is evidenced
despite considerable individual
differences in clapping tempos. The
transition to entrained clapping, whereby
each clapper affects the surrounding
other clappers both locally and globally,
enhances the noise intensity at the
moment of the clapping even though it
leads to a decrease in the overall average
noise intensity in the room.
Synchronized behavior occurs
rhythmically and one way of capturing
its regularities is to model its cycles,
periods, frequencies, and amplitudes 1,2 .
Page | 62
Depending on the particular behavior
and interaction in question, behavioral
cycles of interpersonal entrainment can
range from milliseconds to hours.
Indeed, this kind of interpersonal
entrainment is a pervasive phenomenon
not specific to human social behavior
alone 8 .
When does synchronized
clapping occur? The distinctive feature
of such an event is a convergence
between the neural mechanisms
underlying the monitoring of the
movement of others and the execution of
one’s own movements. The specific
factors responsible for the tipping point
from asynchronous to synchronous
clapping are not yet known, but
descriptively each individual shifts the
timing of his or her subsequent clap to
the perceived timing of claps by the
whole collective. Thus, a continuous
adjustment process emerges in the form
of a collective behavior (synchronized
clapping) to which each individual
contributes and no single individual
controls. Such continuous monitoring of
the collective rather than individuals
within the collective and the adjustment
of one’s own movements to synchronize
one’s behavior with that of the collective
result in a continuous loop of performing
the very same action leading to
dissolution between self and other and
the emergence of an entrained unit. The
resulting effect is the materialization of a
supra-individual behavioral
phenomenon, namely extended
behavioral cycles that are locked
together in time. Although the
emergence of clapping in unison can be
regarded as a phenomenon worthy of
more detailed understanding, it does not
induce in its performers the necessity of
searching for an explanation since the
readily available account is that the
performance somehow produces
synchronous clapping.
There is preliminary evidence
that even with no externally imposed
demands prolonged synchronization
emerges within pairs of people
interacting or dyads 9 . What one finds is
that despite individual differences in
movements, participants entrain (tap
together in time) rapidly when
participants can perceive the behavior of
others 9 . Extensive research in
coordination dynamics has demonstrated
that such entrainment does not depend
on the intention to coordinate behavior
10, 11 . Studies have repeatedly shown that
there is a spontaneous propensity to
mimic other people (generally observed
in dyads). One implication this kind of
behavioral synchrony is the emergence
of affective bonding – such as a feeling
of rapport – both in the case of mimicry 12
and between the synchronized partners 13 .
One might conjecture that positive
feelings are even stronger when more
people are synchronized.
The conditions that lead to
behavioral synchrony can vary. It is
interesting that people may be more
likely to experience the dissolution of
self-other boundaries when
synchronization is produced without any
obvious external director and is
continuous. Prolonged spontaneous and
unintended entrainment among three or
more people may introduce this feeling,
because the emergence of synchrony
cannot be attributed to a single external
cause.
Conclusions
Social interaction involving
extended periods of synchronized
behavior are not part of our daily
experience, particularly when they
involve more than two people. How do
Page | 63
we understand this kind of synchrony
when it occurs? In the Western
intellectual tradition, we have a strong
tendency to search and explain events in
terms of individual agency and
causation.
Social events are generally
understood in terms of contributions of
the individual and the situation itself.
The degree to which the person or the
situational constraints shape the nature
of the event will vary greatly. However,
spontaneous and prolonged entrainment
among three or more people introduces
an experience that is difficult to explain
by these more traditional accounts.
These experiences cannot be easily
reduced the actions of a single person, so
an account has to be found in some
source that goes beyond the individual.
The powerful sense of unity and
belonging that emerges from this kind of
experience almost demands a different
kind of explanation than we generally
consider. Indeed, such feelings
emerging from the synchrony of
behavior may provide some of the
foundation for the cultural interpretation
of a transcendental experience.
References
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Vicsek, T., & Barabasi, A. L. (2000a).
The sound of many hands
clapping*Tumultuous applause can
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2 Ne´da, Z., Ravasz, E., Vicsek, T.,
Brechet, Y., & Barabasi, A. L. (2000b).
Physics of the rhythmic applause.
Physical Review E, 61, 6987_6992.
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7 Baldissera, F., Cavallari, P., Craighero,
L., & Fadiga, L (2001). Modulation of
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hand actions in humans, European
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8 Strogatz, S. (2003). Rhythms of nature,
rhythms of ourselves. London: Allan
Lane.
9 Tognoli, E., Lagarde, J., DeGuzman, C.
D., Kelso, J. A. S. (2007). The phi
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Rapson, R. L. (1994). Emotional
contagion. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
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You and I as One
Any social group can be thought
of as either a collection of individuals or
as a single new entity with emergent,
unified group behavior. When a mob
forms to surge together down a street
one way and then another; when a flock
of birds wheels about together, closely
clustered as they fly without colliding;
and when an orchestra performs with
highly coordinated timing, we
momentarily forget about the individuals
and see the collective behavior as a new,
single social entity. Indeed, as Cacioppo
discusses, many species seem to gather,
flock, and coordinate to form such
collectives. For humans there are many
situations from flash mobs and sports
teams to choirs and audiences, when
people congregate in this way.
The drive for people to affiliate
and group is not sufficient on its own to
produce the coordinated behavior that
emerges from such a collective.
Sometimes an organizing signal, like the
conductor of an orchestra, can
synchronize the behavior. Other times
common goals and behavioral
constraints can synchronize a group, as
in a flock of birds. In his chapter, Gün
Semin discusses how such synchrony
may be self-organizing – that is, it is
achieved without intention, effort, or
awareness by our social brains, even
when there is no clear signal or
constraint. In cases of such human
sociality, the group may act as though it
has a single mind. Indeed, Semin
approaches this issue to relate the
collective behavior as an embodied
consequence of individual social forces
that jointly operate to satisfy our need to
affiliate, and to consider how connecting
behavior through synchrony may create
a collective mind.
Howard Nusbaum specifically
discusses a different invisible social
force that has evolved with the power to
bind people into a collective—language.
Language is the richest social signal that
has the power to move people to act and
to move groups to act together. In order
for language to act as a force, it must
somehow affect people with sufficient
social and emotional impact. As
Nusbaum discusses the impact of
language, it operates at a social and
emotional level similar to that discussed
by Semin rather than exclusively
through the inferences drawn from
meaning.
Page | 66
Chapter 7 7
Action at a Distance: The Invisible
Force of Language
7 The lead author is Howard Nusbaum, Ph.D.,
Professor of Psychology and Computational
Neuroscience, and co-director of the Center for
Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the
University of Chicago. He has served as the
Chair of the Psychology Department since 1997.
He has served as the editor for the International
Journal of Speech Technology and is on the
editorial board of Brain & Language, and has
edited several books on spoken language
processing. His research interests include
spoken language use, mechanisms of learning
and attention, and the role of sleep in learning.
His recent research has investigated the social
use of language and the evolution of language.
In addition, he has been working on neural
mechanisms of reward and economic decisions.
We often think about language in terms
of the information in newspapers or speeches or
reports. However, language is basis of all our
social relationships and institutions. We reward
and praise with language and we shun and
punish with language, perhaps more often than
with any other medium. In the recent election,
Democratic candidates actually gave speeches
outlining different views of the importance of
language in our society. One candidate held that
words are simply words and only have the force
that we give to them by reasoning about them.
The other candidate argued that speech has the
power to move people to connect and act.
Nusbaum was struck by this debate because it
seems to him that the power of language goes
well beyond what linguists and psychologists
talk about as “meaning” and that understanding
the meaning of language may depend on
understanding the social and emotional impact of
language. In this chapter, the idea of the impact
of language at a distance is explored.
Language is one of the most
important ways in which the social brain
makes connections, enhances
connections, and severs connections
among people. Language is our primary
medium of social exchange, grounding
and elaborating our selves and our
relationships in every conversation.
However, language goes well beyond
personal connections to connect us
culturally through stories, songs, and
shared manners of speech. Language
also provides the formal framework that
defines many of our social institutions.
Language gives form and substance to
the governance and behavior of every
social institution from education to law
to religion. Clearly there are many ways
in which language serves to knit us
together both formally and informally.
For a linguist, all of these uses can be
analyzed in terms of the structure of
sentences and their content. However,
structure and content do not, on their
own merits, provide a complete picture
of how language can have the impact it
does on our sense of social connection.
How does language move us to act,
change our feelings, and connect us to
others? It seems unlikely that the impact
of language is simply the result of
dispassionate rational inferences and
conclusions drawn from a logical
analysis of sentences.
In 1976, Barbara Jordan, a
Congresswoman from Texas, gave the
commencement address at Brandeis
University. Listening to her speak about
the importance of public service and the
importance of using talent and ability in
service of one’s country was an
impressive experience. Her delivery was
clear and not particularly dramatic and
yet the force of her speech was riveting.
It was sufficient to turn a graduating
senior’s mind from graduate school in
Page | 67
psychology to (at least momentary)
consideration of a career in government
service. A student with the long-held
intent of becoming a researcher and with
no interest in politics, government, or
public service might seem to be an
immovable object. And yet, in that
moment, Jordan’s speech had sufficient
impact to make government service
seem like the only path one would want
to take or should ever consider.
Although her points were argued
well, the impact of Jordan’s speech was
not simply rhetorical. John F.
Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country
can do for you….” and Martin Luther
King, Jr.’s “I have a dream….” affected
listeners deeply well beyond the
cognitive strengths of a good argument.
Moreover, while all these speeches were
delivered beautifully and from the heart,
it is not the performance of these
speeches alone that can move listeners to
act on behalf of others. The
performance alone cannot give substance
to an empty message. While there are
cases in which a great performance may
suggest briefly that there was content of
import even in the absence of a real
message, it is more likely the
conjunction of message and delivery that
moves people. In these speeches is a
clear demonstration of the power of
language. Language is more than words
and more than delivery. Indeed, Cicero,
in De Oratore, said that rhetoric conveys
information, persuades listeners, and
evokes emotion.
“In the beginning was the word….”
If “the word made flesh” is taken
metaphorically, the power of language
can be made visceral in sermons.
Consider the power of Jonathan
Edwards’ sermon, which Clark Gilpin’s
chapter discusses, to terrify a
congregation, to wrench them from
complacency with images of torment. A
sermon delivers a message, but it can do
so in calm tones of instruction or with
fire and brimstone. The choice and
poetry of words and the cadence and
intonation of speaking can draw the
listener in slowly or seize the listener
suddenly, the very sounds of speech
painting images in the mind while
igniting new inferences with literal and
metaphoric descriptions.
In the realm of the spiritual, there
are few corporeal manifestations that can
be perceived directly. Neither heaven
nor hell, neither God nor the Devil can
be seen or heard or touched. Preaching
is needed to spell out the work of unseen
hands and will and illuminate the power
of the unseen. The force of that which is
not seen can only be felt when
transmitted directly through speech.
In Phaedrus, Plato described
rhetoric as the art of leading the soul.
Thus it is not surprising that, while at the
core of religion is a collection of beliefs
and concepts and canons, the fabric and
form of religion is language. Symbols
and icons are certainly important, but
language is the medium through which
the force of theology is actualized in
prayers, benedictions, sermons, and
teaching. Language can reach across
time and space to change minds,
feelings, and behavior, encoding laws
and beliefs and presenting them with a
concrete reality in the here and now.
This is one kind of impact from author to
audience in which a kind of connection
is constructed bridging minds.
At the same time, in religious
practices, another kind of connection is
formed within a congregation. Joint
recitation, responsive reading, collective
listening, and understanding may serve
Page | 68
to connect people in a religious service.
Although joint participation in any event
(such as sports or theatre) may have
some of the same effect as discussed by
Gün Semin, the content of language and
the intent of the messages in religious
practice is often focused on developing
and strengthening social and spiritual
connections.
Everyone knows someone who
moved to another country, or to another
part of their own country where speech
patterns differ. After a period of time, in
the context of novel speech patterns,
some people adopt the speech patterns
around them. This kind of linguistic
convergence is well documented and is
moderated by social factors such as the
desire to be accepted or the attempt to be
persuasive. 1 When people talk together,
one person’s speech can impact the way
another person talks in order to promote
social connection. Indeed, the same kind
of behavioral convergence is found over
the course of conversations for other
kinds of non-linguistic actions as well. 2
Information, impact, and
understanding
How does language bind us
together and compel us to action,
thought, and feeling? When we talk,
sound vibration is transmitted from
mouth to ears. Facial expressions and
manual gestures punctuate, illustrate,
and illuminate our speech. These
acoustic and visual signals travel over
space and time to the eyes and ears of
the audience. The impact of such
communication is true action at a
distance.
This notion of language as action
at a distance is relatively well accepted
in the scientific study of language. But
in research on language and
communication by psycholinguists and
linguists, the emphasis is on the
information contained within an
utterance and the structure and form by
which this information is presented.
Research questions often focus on the
variety of ways the same message can be
framed and how listeners interpret such
messages. But little of this work
addresses the impact of the message
itself.
The standard view of language
processing is that we hear the sounds of
speech (acoustic patterns) that we
translate mentally into words. The
meanings of these words are determined
and then the meanings combined
(through our knowledge of sentence
structure) to result in sentence meaning.
Given that a sentence typically occurs in
a context of other sentences (e.g., a
sermon) or in response to other speech
(e.g., a conversation), this context is then
used to frame and reinterpret the
sentence meaning.
Metaphor, irony, sarcasm, and
other figures are generally thought of as
being understood later in this process
although in Gilpin’s chapter the
immediate power of these to affect us is
quite clear. Emotion and attitudes are
thought of as not understood until after
the linguistic message has been
determined. The impact of language on
attitudes through persuasion is viewed
by cognitive psychology and linguistics
as occurring after the message has been
understood. However, this does raise the
question about whether a “message” (to
be understood) is simply the linguistic
properties of a sentence or the impact of
the linguistic form on an audience.
A very different view of
language might come from considering
vocal communications that often have a
direct impact on an audience.
Page | 69
Sometimes just listening to laughter
compels listeners to laugh. Sometimes
hearing a cry of terror directly imputes
an instantaneous feeling of fear.
Hearing someone weep can produce a
feeling of sorrow and perhaps even
cause one to cry. This suggests that
some forms of vocal communication can
elicit direct empathic sharing as Decety
discusses in his chapter.
These forms of vocal
communication can produce direct
results in listeners without following a
route of symbolic reference and
interpretation. 3 Language has typically
been viewed as operating by the more
symbolic route because of the linguistic
claim that symbols are not the things
they stand for and thus must be
understood—words and sentences are
not felt. However, the right insult or
angry words delivered in the right way
or the right praise seems to be felt
directly, perhaps through the same kind
of mechanisms by which empathic
sharing occurs.
But how is this achieved? This
kind of impact of language is not a result
of understanding the content of speech.
It reflects social goals and motives. To
the extent that this kind of social impact
may parallel empathic processes, we
might find that similar mechanisms are
involved. Some kind of resonance must
be established between a speaker and
hearer, and language can serve to
establish this resonance and lead to
subsequent action by the hearer. This
idea of a resonance in an audience does
seem more compatible with the effects
of vocal behavior such as laughter or
crying on a listener than the symbolic
interpretative view. This notion of
resonance may also be useful in
understanding other kinds of language
impact from the fiery sermon of
Edwards to the passionate speeches of
Obama and Kennedy and King.
In listening to speech that has
impact, language has created a state in
the listener that reflects the intention of
the speaker. Whether it is fear or
connection, somehow language can
operate as the medium by which social
and emotional psychological states get
transmitted to an audience. But how
does this impact get created in the social
brain?
Language impact in the social brain
Understanding spoken language
has typically been viewed as an analytic
process in which sound patterns are
translated into linguistic symbols by the
brain. However, an alternative theory is
that we understand spoken language by
using our motor system to simulate what
might have been said. The idea is that
trying to mentally produce the speech
internally (without talking) might help
us understand what is said, when speech
is not clear. However, this theory did
not have much neural plausibility.
People do not generally move their
mouths overtly or even covertly while
listening.
The discovery of mirror neurons,
examined at greater length by Steve
Small in the next chapter, suggested one
kind of mechanism that might instantiate
this kind of process. In certain parts of
the brain, involved in the control of
action, some neurons that respond when
making certain actions also respond
when observing the same actions. This
led to the inference that these neurons
are involved in understanding the
behavior of other people. The reasoning
is simply that neural activity in the
observer’s motor system that results
when seeing a behavior essentially
establishes the brain state that would
Page | 70
correspond if the observer were doing
the same thing. Another way to say this
is that there is a resonant response in an
observer’s motor system to observing a
behavior and this may potentiate a
degree of social coordination and
connection, as discussed in Semin’s
chapter. This kind of neural resonance
has been shown to play a role in
understanding speech when seeing a
talker’s mouth move, even if the listener
does not actually make any mouth
movements.
Mirror neurons demonstrate that
observed action can produce a resonant
response in an observer’s brain. Seeing
a talker’s mouth move creates a motorresonant
response that aids in
understanding speech sounds. However,
these two observations are very different
from the idea that the meaning of
sentences can create a resonant response
in the listener’s brain. In the case of
speech, mouth movements are the
actions that create speech. This might
seem like a very special case. The
traditional linguistic view of language is
that words and sentences are symbolic:
Language describing action is not action
itself. Language describing emotion is
not the emotion itself. The entire
concept of a symbol is that a symbol
denotes something, stands for
something, but the symbol is not the
thing itself. But it now appears that this
long-held notion may be wrong.
The idea that seeing an object or
event gives rise to brain states that
resonate with previous experiences of
that thing suggests a mechanism for
language understanding to go beyond
symbolic interpretation. Given that there
is a brain mechanism for re-experiencing
actions or sensations, this same
mechanism may operate even when
there is just a symbolic linguistic
description. Understanding language
may take place by invoking such
resonant past experiences in the brain.
For example, when listening to
sentences about hockey action, hockey
players show neural activity in their
motor system which is not seen for
people who are naïve to hockey. 4
Experience playing hockey recruits the
motor system in service of
understanding hockey sentences as if
one were watching or playing hockey
when only listening to speech. This
suggests one way in which language can
have a direct impact on a listener.
Rather than making inferences about
actions based on the meanings of
sentences, understanding a sentence may
be a resonant motor system response in
the listener to a description of an action.
If this idea is extended more broadly,
language impact may come from such
resonant responses. Language
understanding and the impact of
language may result from processes
more similar to the effects of hearing
laughter. Hearing a sentence may create
in a listener a set of resonant responses
very similar to the patterns that
correspond to the actual situations being
described.
Such resonant responses need not
be confined to the motor system and
actions. Emotions such as fear or joy
may be empathically evoked in listeners
by speech just as a scream or laughter
might. Verbal expression of attitudes
may produce similar attitudinal
responses in listeners. Moreover, if a
listener’s resonant response is strong,
there may be increased empathic overlap
with the speaker, which may serve to
increase social connection. To the
extent that people speak together and
share feelings, social connection may
increase as well.
Page | 71
Evolution of social connection by
communication
The human social brain
constructs connection and understanding
by anthropomorphic projection as
discussed by Nick Epley in his chapter.
When we observe the behavior of
nonhuman entities, anthropomorphic
projection may form a feeling of social
connection. Social connection depends
in part on empathic responses to
observed action. It has been argued that
this same foundation is the basis for the
evolution of language as well--observed
action may be the foundation for
language. 5
A mirror neuron theory of the
evolution of language starts with the
assumption that we understand others by
observing their actions. Communication
depends on the regularization of typical
actions that can be pantomimed. In
principle this could lead to a kind of
manual gestural system of
communication akin to sign language.
Hand and arm movements can depict a
wide range of actions both by firstperson
depiction of an action such as
screwing the top onto a jar and by thirdperson
depictions such as using the
fingers to portray a person walking.
Hand and arm postures can depict
objects such as a cupped hand
representing a bowl. Combining
sequences of such object and action
depictions can communicate relatively
complex messages even without a
formal language. This is a far cry from
sign languages in which the mapping
between hand shapes and movements is
not visually transparent in this way. But
as the pressure to communicate a
broader range of messages increases, a
manual gestural language would have to
be modified to reflect more abstract
symbols ultimately leading in the
direction of a sign language.
However, this kind of manual
language has one major drawback.
Communication depends on visual
contact. In order to understand a
gestural message it is necessary to see
the hand movements. This limits the
distances over which communication can
take place. Moreover, a communication
system that is effective for a group
should not depend on face-to-face
dyadic interaction, but allow for more
broadcast communications. There is a
great survival advantage in being able to
maintain social connection and convey
information over distances that go well
beyond face-to-face communication.
Many species of fish,
amphibians, reptiles, birds, and
mammals commonly exchange
information at a distance through
vocalizations. The learned songs (and
some calls) of songbirds are particularly
rich sources of information conveying,
to the receiver, individual identity and a
host of other characteristics of the
sender. Some mammals exchange
information at great distances through
calling behavior. Humpback whale
vocalizations are perceived over
extremely long distances and may be
used to maintain social groups at
distances as great as 5 km. African
elephants can recognize friends and
relatives from their calls at a distance of
2.5 km. Human sheepherders keep each
other company from the top of one
mountain to another in the Canary
Islands using a whistled language called
Silbo Gomero. Whether for purposes of
mating, threat, warning, or social
organization, conveying information
regarding location, identity and
motivation, and directed at one
individual or towards far-flung groups,
Page | 72
vocal communication plays an important
role in the social connection and
behavior of a great number of vertebrate
species. Thus while human vocal
communication is enhanced substantially
in face-to-face interaction, the evolution
of speech has resulted in a system that
can function even in the absence of
direct visual observation. The sound of
a threat or warning or distress can have
substantial impact even at a distance
from the speaker.
Social impact and embodied language
Many animals use vocalizations
to maintain social group structure and to
provide information relevant to a group.
Even very young children use the way
people speak as a marker of their social
affiliation. 6 Such vocalizations are
typically not viewed as symbolic forms
that must be decoded and interpreted.
Instead these vocalizations are mapped
onto internal states more directly, much
as human laughter may be. Although
linguists and psychologists have often
tried to differentiate human language
from these kinds of vocalizations,
language can impact us in much the
same way. Perhaps language is less
symbolic and more direct than scientists
have thought.
What does it mean for language
to have impact? If we take laughter as
our model, perhaps it means that
language gives rise to responses that
have a direct effect on our perceptual
and motor systems. Sermons may terrify
because they create worlds inside of the
listener that seem real. We can see and
hear torment and imagine the feelings of
pain and suffering. This is not a
symbolic interpretation but a real
experience created from language.
However, just as we can distinguish the
pain we feel from the pain of others,
even when we have strong empathic
responses, we can distinguish such
created experiences from those that
occur in the real world. The stronger the
language, the richer the imagery, the
more intense the delivery, the more
salient the mentally created experience.
One impact of language may be to create
real feelings and sensations, imagined
movement and behavior. 7 When
language hurts us through criticism,
rejection or insult, it may do so by
activating our experiences of real pain.
When we are soothed by language, it
may produce the same kind of endorphin
effect that placebo treatments can
invoke. When language binds us
together, it may do so by creating the
kind of shared emotional states that
characterize empathy.
In many respects, the linguistic
view of language use does not engage
these ways in which language functions.
Linguistics treats language as consisting
of patterns of symbols divorced from
their origins in a human mouth, almost
like print on a page rather than speech.
But it is spoken language that the social
brain evolved to use—print is a very
modern invention which did not play any
role in our evolution. In contrast, speech
is produced from a coordinate action of
muscles compressing lungs and moving
tongue and jaw under the control of
neurophysiology and hormones. Unlike
the shape of printed letters, the sound of
speech is shaped by attitude and emotion
and intent, and its impact may be to
transfer specific embodied states from
the speaker to the listener.
Conclusion
Although physicists have debated
the possibility of action at a distance for
quite some time, the biological form of
action at a distance is well established,
Page | 73
achieved through vocal communication
in an extremely broad range of behaviors
and settings. The force of language is
carried by the form, content, and
delivery of a message. And the impact
of this force may be created in the minds
of an audience by the resonant
invocation of past real experiences. Real
pain and sorrow, real comfort and joy,
real love and caring, are all part of our
shared human experience. The impact
of language may come by invoking
resonant past experiences that can create
a platonic mental moment that flickers
with the shadows of those experiences.
In order to understand how this process
works, we need to study how brain
mechanisms operate to translate the
sounds of speech into the impact of
language.
References
1. Giles, H. (1973). Accent
mobility: A model and some data.
Anthropological Linguistics, 15, 87-105.
2. Lakin, J., & Chartrand, T.L.
(2003). Using nonconscious behavioral
mimicry to create affiliation and rapport.
Psychological Science, 14, 334-339.
3. Foroni, F. & Semin, G. R.
(2009). Language that puts you in touch
with your bodily feelings. The
multimodal responsiveness of affective
expressions. Psychological Science, 20,
974-980.
4. Beilock, S. L., Lyons, I. M.,
Mattarella-Micke, A., Nusbaum, H. C.,
& Small, S. L. (2008). Sports experience
changes the neural processing of action
language. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, 105, 13269-13272.
5. Rizzolatti, G., & Arbib, M.A.
(1999). Language within our grasp.
Trends in Neurosciences, 21, 188-194.
6. Kinzler, K. D., Shutts, K.,
Dejesus, J., & Spelke, E. S. (2009).
Accent trumps race in guiding children’s
social preferences. Social Cognition, 27,
623-634.
7. Shintel, H., & Nusbaum, H.
C. (2007). The sound of motion in
spoken language: Visual information
conveyed by acoustic properties of
speech. Cognition, 105, 681-690.
Page | 74
Systems and Signals for Social
Coordination
How do we understand each other
as people? Do we take people at their
word, or do actions speak even louder?
When moved to affiliate and to act in
concert with other people as a group, we
need to understand the communications
and actions of others. Language can
move us to action even across great
distances but how does it do so? While
we can observe the behavior of groups
of people as coordinated, the mechanism
of achieving this coordination is unseen.
We may be driven socially to form
groups but how does that drive function
in the individual to cause us to cohere.
In order to go beyond the observation
and experiences we have with groups
and group behavior, we need to
understand what makes the engine of
social connection run. At one level, we
can talk about language as a force itself,
as Howard Nusbaum does. We can talk
about the synchronization of individual
behavior as Gün Semin does. However,
both of these are observations about the
way individuals may become part of a
group. To go beyond this we must look
to our biology to understand how the
machinery underneath our sociality leads
to connected minds.
Semin suggested one way our
brains may seek to connect. Some
neurons in an area of the brain that is
involved in the control and planning of
our actions also respond when we
observe actions we have performed.
Such neurons might be thought to
“resonate” when seeing someone act or
speak with our own experiences.
Neurons that mirror actions and behavior
have been thought to play a role in the
process of understanding that behavior
and the social connection that may form
as a result of the resonance. In the next
essay, Steve Small discusses these neural
mechanisms and how they may be
important in helping us understand
spoken language and possibly in
understanding social behavior.
Page | 75
Chapter 8 8
8 The lead author is Steven L. Small, M.D.,
Ph.D., a Professor of Neurology and Psychology,
Associate Chair for Research in Neurology,
Member of the Committees on Neurobiology and
Computational Neuroscience, and Senior Fellow,
Computation Institute, at The University of
Chicago. He is currently Director of the Human
Neuroscience Laboratory and was founder of the
Brain Research Imaging Center. He is an elected
member of the American Neurological
Association, a fellow of the American Academy
of Neurology, and Editor-in-Chief of the
international journal Brain and Language.
Small’s research concerns the neural basis of
human language and its breakdown after injury.
He has published more than 120 scientific
articles, primarily about human language, from
the perspectives of artificial intelligence,
cognitive psychology, computational
neuroscience, human systems neuroscience, and
clinical neurology.
Human language represents a unique
product of our social species and the tremendous
evolution of the primate cerebral cortex
simultaneously supported the development of
both. Language is the defining feature of our
species: In his 12 th century volume, Guide to the
Perplexed, Maimonides viewed it as tautological
that man is a speaking animal, i.e., “there is no
third element besides life and speech in the
definition of man”. But how does the brain
implement this unique function in the context of
its common ontogeny with social function? The
current essay discusses the possibility that the
recently discovered “mirror neurons” of the
cerebral cortex of macaque monkeys play a
special role in the ability of humans to
understand each other with language by using a
mechanism of observation and covert emulation.
If the neurobiology of language were partly
grounded on such systems of visual observation
and imitation, this would overlap integrally with
the biology of the social brain.
Hidden Forces in Understanding
Others:
Mirror Neurons and Neurobiological
Underpinnings
It is one thing to perceive objects
in the environment and another to
understand what is perceived. A rodent
that senses an apple definitely has a
notion that this represents something
edible. A monkey might realize that the
apple can be eaten but also can be
thrown. A human might perceive it as a
food, an object to be propelled, a
temptation that should be resisted, or
something that falls out of a tree at a
specific acceleration. For each individual
animal or person, understanding an apple
means to take the sensory perceptions of
the apple and to use previous experience
and knowledge to fit it into an overall
context. In this way, understanding a
particular apple depends on our
previously having seen, touched, and
smelled apples, eaten them, read about
them, and perhaps even been hit by a
falling or thrown apple. All of our
previous experiences come to bear every
time we encounter a new perception that
we must make sense of, and of course,
this represents virtually every moment of
our waking lives.
Our perceptions vary enormously
from seeing simple objects (e.g., apples),
taking in more complex entities (e.g.,
restaurants, neighborhoods), hearing
noises or speech, and seeing actions
(e.g., simple manual actions, sporting
events). A major question for brain
research is how we can possibly
understand all these different kinds of
input, and what brain circuits are used to
do so. We assume that such an
understanding means taking these inputs,
weighing them against our previous
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experiences in some way or other, and
then integrating in some way the new
and old together. This integration
requires constant and dynamic changes
to the brain structures that represent
what we know and how we use it. 1 One
way this could happen is that when we
perceive something new, we actually reenact
in our mind’s eye the previous
related perceptions. For example, if we
encounter an apple – having encountered
many previously -- perhaps we actually
imagine (seeing) one or more previous
apples or episodes involving apples, or
imagine (performing) one or more
instances of biting an apple or throwing
one, and/or imagine tasting and smelling
one. We might also imagine hearing the
word “apple”, producing the sounds of
the word, seeing the written form of the
word, or even hearing, seeing, or
producing synonyms or related words in
our first (e.g., “Granny Smith”) or
second (e.g., “pomme”) languages. We
propose that understanding an apple is
tantamount to executing this entire set of
processes, and thus, that the circuits for
understanding are very complicated and
take up a large portion of the brain.
Of course, not all of what we
understand is directly available to the
senses; we can clearly understand beliefs
and emotions as well as physical objects
and overt actions. Brain researchers
generally take the view that previous
experience guides understanding of
abstract concepts in much the same way
that it guides the understanding of the
more concrete entities. For example, we
can understand the emotional states of
other people by imagining being in those
states ourselves. When I see someone
feeling happy or sad, I can evoke
examples from my own previous
experience of feeling happy or sad
(perhaps even for the same reasons), and
by feeling the emotion, I can understand
it. The closer my previous experience is
to the perceived one, the better the
“understanding”. This principle holds
whether one is trying to understand
objects or people. An important
distinction between people and objects
when trying to understand their actions
is that people, but not objects, have
intentions.
The Social Brain
The critical question for
neurobiologists is how does the brain
understand. In particular, we want to
know whether the same brain circuits
that are used when we experience things
personally are also used when we try to
understand another person having the
same experiences, whether these
experiences are concrete, like grasping a
cup or hitting a baseball, or more
abstract like feeling sad or fearful or in
pain. We also want to know whether
understanding the simple concrete
perceptions and these highly complex
emotional states are mediated similarly
in the brain. Further, we are interested in
the overlap between conscious and
unconscious understanding and shared or
personal understanding. One way to
address these questions is to examine the
brain structures responsible for specific
types of personal sensations, actions, and
cognitive processes, and to see if these
same ones play a role when individuals
attempt to understand these functions in
others. Using modern techniques of
physiology, experiments of this type
have been conducted in both monkeys
and humans, with some surprising
results.
It is now possible to measure
brain activity of humans while having a
wide range of different kinds of
experiences. Such human neuroimaging
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experiments have suggested that
understanding actions and objects invoke
some of the same brain structures used
to perform the actions and to act on the
objects. With respect to actions in
particular, humans sometimes use their
own motor repertoire in interpreting
actions, possibly by imagining or
mentally simulating the perceived
action. When people are asked to
observe the actions of others,
particularly goal-directed actions
involving the hands or mouth, they seem
to activate brain regions for moving the
hands or mouth. Thus, there is a link
between observing actions and executing
actions. This has a relevance to
education as well: “Understanding by
doing” (i.e., by observing and then
executing) has a long and valued
tradition in American education 2 , and
these recent scientific results might help
us understand why this is effective.
When my son was 5 years old, he
was a member of a kids’ soccer team in
Hyde Park, on the campus of the
University of Chicago. His coach was a
professor of history at the university, a
woman who had never played soccer,
but was a voracious reader, and in her
readings on the subject, took careful note
of all the methods needed to play soccer
as well as the rules and regulations. She
methodically took the kids through all
the (theoretically relevant motor) steps
needed to dribble the ball, to pass, and to
shoot – flex your foot this way, bend
your leg that way, keep your arms this
way, etc. The kids tried to follow the
verbal instructions but their motor
performance was less than stellar – they
learned a little bit, but they lost all of
their dozen games, for a depressing 0-12
record. The next season, the same team
was coached by another volunteer
parent, this time an engineer from
Trinidad, who had played soccer his
whole life. The instructions he gave the
kids were quite different: “Follow me
and do what I do”. There were no
suggested foot flexions or extensions,
and no specific leg movements
proposed. The kids learned the skills,
and won all their games. Why? The kids
learned by observing a good model and
then imitating what they observed the
person doing, which appears to be a way
to learn motor skills that is far stronger
than that of explicit motor instruction.
When people have strokes, a part
of their brain dies, and they can lose the
ability to speak or use a hand properly.
We are now using this idea of imitation
in a treatment program to re-educate
people with strokes to use their hands
better and to pronounce words better.
For these imitation-based treatments,
people first observe a particular hand
action or speech sample on a video
monitor, and then they try to produce it.
In fact, they observe it over and over
again for a while before they even try to
do it at all. They are never told how to
move their hands or mouths; they are
just told to copy what they see. Over the
course of six weeks, people with hand
problems progress from imitating a
simple grasp of a cup to picking up a
telephone and dialing a number to
picking up a toothbrush, brushing their
teeth, and returning the brush to the sink.
Those with speech problems progress
from imitating simple words of a single
syllable to longer less common words
and even short phrases. We have already
shown that these therapies have
beneficial effects in a number of people
and are now trying it out more
extensively.
There seems to be an important
link between observing and executing
actions. Similarly, there is a link
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between observing action and
understanding emotion. This link has
been most clearly demonstrated in the
case of facial expressions – if I observe
the muscles of the face in a position to
convey an emotional state, clearly I
perceive the emotion. What has been
shown recently is that observing such
facial expressions leads to two kinds of
brain activations in the observer: The
first set of regions activated are those
that would be used by the observer to
execute the identical face movements,
just as with hand or mouth movements.
However, additional regions are also
active, and these are precisely the ones
that would be involved if the observer
were to feel the observed emotion
personally. Thus the circuitry for action
observation in the human brain is
interdependent with parts of the brain
critical for understanding more complex
nuanced aspects of the world.
Mirror Neurons
It turns out that there may be
cellular building blocks in the brain that
are particularly important for observing
and executing actions, and may
ultimately lead to an explanation of
action understanding and imitationbased
learning. In fact, such structures
would contribute to any form of
understanding that could be partly
explained by imagined re-enactment of
perceived actions (e.g., seeing an
emotional facial expression, hearing a
cry of pain). The cells under discussion
are a type of nerve cell, or neuron,
discovered in the front part of the
monkey brain by Professor Giacomo
Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the
University of Parma. The scientists
trained monkeys to perform specific
actions like grasping an object or licking
their lips, and were performing electrical
recordings in regions in the front of the
brain known to coordinate movements.
These recording machines note brain
activity both visually, as a graph on a
screen, and auditorily, by a loud series of
clicks, indicating the firing of a neuron.
Rizzolatti and his team were focusing on
a particular region in the front of the
brain, and were having the monkey
perform all sorts of hand, mouth, and
eye movements to see how the brain
cells were organized to make these
movements happen. One day (or so the
story goes), one of the researchers
returned from lunch while the electrical
recordings were being made, and was
finishing off a cone of superb Italian
gelato, when all of a sudden the
recording device starting making a loud
series of clicks. The returning scientist
stopped licking his ice cream cone to see
what was going on, and the noise
stopped. When he restarted licking his
gelato, the clicks resumed, and when he
stopped again, they stopped. The
investigators had discovered a type of
neuron that was sensitive to the monkey
observing a particular human action.
It was not surprising that
following training to perform an action,
some neurons in the motor region of the
brain responded while performing that
action, when the same neurons would
not have responded beforehand.
However, it was extremely surprising to
find that some of those neurons also
responded vigorously when the monkey
observed the very same learned actions.
Through a methodical and systematic
approach, this group was able to make a
more elaborate and far-reaching set of
observations. For a small subset of
neurons, if a monkey had learned to
reach for a particular object, seeing
another monkey reach for the same
object would cause the neuron to fire.
For a different subset of neurons, if the
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monkey had learned to pucker up his
lips, the neuron would fire both when the
monkey did this or when the monkey
observed another monkey (or even a
human) doing this. These motor neurons
have been dubbed “mirror neurons”,
since they respond during both execution
of action and during observation of the
same action in a mirror-like fashion. 3
Mirror neurons are not active during
observation of an appropriate action if
there is no goal (i.e., the object is absent)
or when an appropriate object is
presented alone. Mirror neurons have
been discovered both for mouth actions
and hand actions, and for both visual and
auditory perception of actions.
Seeing a previously learned
action performed by someone else seems
to resonate in some neurons in the motor
system almost as if the action were being
performed by the observer. It is as if the
observed action stimulates some motor
neurons to “remember” what it was like
to perform action. Of course, this is not
memory in the overt sense of conscious
recollection, but rather that the
experience of execution changes the
response of the neurons to observation.
Not all the motor neurons respond this
way but a small number have been
shown to respond when performing and
observing an action. Such mirror
neurons could provide a correspondence
between the experience one has of
performing an action and seeing the
same action performed by others.
These mirror neurons might
provide one basis for understanding
action. Relating actions we observe to
actions we have carried out seems like
an important component for
comprehension. After all, we knew what
we were doing when we performed an
action. If that experience is somehow
reinstated during observation we might
attribute our past experience as the
interpretation of the present observation.
Imitation when observing an action
might occur because our motor system is
stimulated by observing an action.
Coordination of action could occur
because in representing others’ actions
as if they were our own, our brains may
be able to compute the time when we
can act without disrupting the other
person. This is just the kind of process
that is described in Gun Semin’s chapter
when he describes how groups of people
can synchronize their actions like
clapping together.
From monkey brains to human
intention
Of course, relating responses in
monkey brains to human brains is
neither direct nor simple. Parts of the
monkey brain and and parts of the
human brain that putatively correspond,
while similar, are not identical in
number or size or location, and probably
do not do exactly the same things, since
monkeys and humans have evolved to
have somewhat different capacities and
behaviors. Furthermore, the study of
mirror neurons in monkeys is based on
recording the responses of individual
neurons, which is not generally possible
in humans except in rare cases of
medical necessity. The measures we can
make on intact human brains come from
the responses of many thousands of
neurons, so it is difficult to make claims
about neurons that respond in producing
an action and perceiving the same
action. This means that any claims about
human mirror neurons depend on a
degree of good faith and inference rather
than specific empirical demonstration
that individual neurons respond both to
observing and executing action.
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Researchers have measured
human brain responses using a variety of
methods such as functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI), which
demonstrate reliable effects of changes
in neural activity by changes in blood
flow. Although slower to respond than
measures of electrical activity, fMRI
provides evidence about where neural
activity in the human brain occurs. This
kind of research does show that
observing action produces activity in
areas of the human brain more typically
associated with executing action. While
there may be some disagreement about
which motor areas of the human brain
are active while observing or imitating
action and how these would correspond
to areas in the monkey brain, there is
good agreement that the human motor
system responds for observation and
imitation of action. 4
There is quite a difference
between recognizing an action and
understanding that action. We can see a
hand move through space with an open
palm oriented with the flat of the palm
moving toward the surface of an object
and predict where the hand will strike
the object and that it will apply force to
the surface of that object. But
understanding the same general action as
pushing a door open with the intent to
enter and slapping a person in the face is
quite different. A ball can be thrown in a
game of catch or as a missile intended to
do harm. The actions may be similar but
the intentions are different. Therefore it
is important that some researchers have
argued that mirror neurons respond to
the intention as well as the action. 5
However, to date there has been no clear
evidence that such neurons respond to
intention -- just that the sight of the
action of reaching without an object to
grasp, the sight of the object alone, and
the sight of the action with the object
present show different patterns of brain
response. The fact that such different
visual experiences lead to different
patterns of brain activity does not
provide clear evidence that intentions or
goals are somehow part of the mirror
neuron response to observed action.
Understanding spoken language as
action understanding
The potential ambiguity of action
is perhaps clearest if we consider
language. Talking is a form of action and
understanding speech might be a form of
action understanding. In talking, mouth
movements are made in such a way as to
create sounds that will have some affect
on the listener, as discussed in Howard
Nusbaum’s chapter. Listeners must
understand what was meant by making
those sounds. However, if someone says,
“It’s hot in here,” or “You are a great
friend,” there can be ambiguity about the
meaning. Such sentences could be
straightforward observations as they
seem to be or they could be something
very different. We can ask to have a
window opened or we can make a
negative social comment using exactly
the same sentences.
Nonetheless, there is good reason
to believe that the human action system
is involved in understanding speech as
well as producing it. While some
ambiguities in speech or behavior simply
cannot be resolved without broader
contextual knowledge, the motor system
may be important in understanding. If
you try to have a conversation in a noisy
bar, looking at your friend talking makes
it easier to understand what is being said.
We have shown that the motor system
contributes to this process of recognizing
speech. When listeners can see
someone’s face while talking, mouth
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movements increase activity within the
motor system measured using fMRI.
Furthermore, it is possible to show that
the same parts of the motor system can
be active in talking and in understanding
speech. By analyzing which parts of the
brain are active and when they become
active, it is possible to show that when
motor system activity in the frontal lobe
of the brain precedes activity in other
regions (e.g., the temporal lobe),
listeners have a better understanding. 6 It
is as if the motor system “recognizes”
the speech before other parts of the brain
when the talking mouth is visible to the
listener.
This study shows that more
information about the action of
producing speech (visible mouth
movements) can activate the motor areas
of the brain during understanding of
speech. But it is also the case that
understanding speech without seeing the
speaker depends on the motor system.
Hockey players are experts at hitting
slap shots, blocking passes, and
whacking each other in the head with
hockey sticks. They have done these
things in the real world just as monkeys
in Parma have learned to reach for
certain objects. When hockey players
listen to sentences describing hockey
action, even without seeing the speaker
or the action, motor areas are active
during sentence understanding and these
same motor areas are not active in
people without hockey experience. 7
Understanding described actions appears
to be influenced by the motor systems of
people who have experience with those
actions. Understanding action may be
influenced by the experiences of our
motor systems.
Reading minds through action
In understanding other people,
we start with what we understand about
ourselves. As Nick Epley describes in
his chapter, we take this kind of
egocentric perspective in understanding
other people or pets or God or the
behavior of inanimate objects. We know
what we meant when we say something
or do something and we make the same
attribution to others, even nonhuman
others. While this may be a good starting
point for religions to help people feel
connected to God, as discussed by Clark
Gilpin, it may not be uniformly
informative about human behavior.
Behavior is not transparent for the
intention of that behavior. The fact that
any particular action is not necessarily
unique to the intent behind it is the basis
of a great deal of misunderstanding in
daily interactions. As a result, even if
mirror neurons help our brains recognize
actions and sometimes interpret them,
there are real limits to how experienceproducing
actions can correctly inform
social understanding.
In spite of this limitation, we
may often do just this—assume we
understand another’s actions because of
what we would intend were we to do the
same thing in the same circumstance.
Human social understanding does suffer
egocentric limitations often and to the
extent that it does, something like a
mirror neuron system may play a role.
For example, as discussed by Jean
Decety in his chapter, our ability to
understand the pain of others may derive
in part from the neural systems involved
in our experience of pain, but goes
beyond this starting point. The social
brain is on one level perhaps a very
egocentric brain. But the fundamental
motivation to connect with others has
resulted in systems built on top of these
egocentric foundations. If social
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understanding depended entirely on past
experiences of our own intentions and
actions, there might be much more
misunderstanding and cynicism in the
world. However, the capacity to reason,
hypothesize, and model possible futures
may increase social understanding
beyond the anchor of purely egocentric
perspective. We can conceive of
alternatives to our own goals and
motives and relate those alternatives to
the actions we observe. To some extent,
this process might also involve the motor
system by mentally simulating actions
and anticipated responses. By imagining
how we might act in some situation to
achieve a goal or the alternative ways we
may act given some intention, it may be
possible to go beyond the limits of our
own experience. Such constructive
imagery may well depend on the motor
system, along with other neural systems,
but currently there is no scientific
evidence that such a system might be
linked with the operation of mirror
neurons.
Conclusion
We are equipped to understand
the world around us by relating what we
perceive to our own experiences. With
respect to actions in particular, our
brains have specialized circuitry to relate
previously executed actions to newly
perceived ones, possibly by performing
an internal (imagined) simulation of
them. There is evidence too that we
might understand the emotional states of
others by a similar kind of process,
whereby our brains activate circuits for
experiencing the emotion as a way to
understand that emotion in others. These
brain mechanisms might also apply (to a
greater or lesser degree) when we try to
understand actions or feelings by nonhuman
animals or even inanimate
entities. This could be a partial
biological explanation of
anthropomorphism, as discussed by
Epley and Gilpin. Of course as humans
we have the ability to go beyond these
strict egocentric limitations and
recognize and respond to our social
connections more explicitly. This ability
to go beyond the more basic grounding
of the way we understand others may
subserve part of the goal of some
religions, discussed by Kathryn Tanner,
in fostering a more abstract view of our
connection to others. While a mirror
neuron system might help form the basis
for some aspects of social understanding,
there may well be other invisible forces
at work supported by these and other
neural systems in our social brain.
References
1. Hasson, U., Nusbaum, H. C., & Small, S. L.
(2009). Task-dependent organization of
brain regions active during rest. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America, 106(26), 10841-
10846.
2. Dewey, J. (1903). Democracy in Education.
The Elementary School Teacher, 4(4), 193-
204.
3. Gallese, V., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L.,
& Rizzolatti, G. (1996). Action
recognition in the premotor cortex.
Brain, 119 ( Pt 2), 593-609.
4. Iacoboni, M., Woods, R. P., Brass,
M., Bekkering, H., Mazziotta, J. C.,
& Rizzolatti, G. (1999). Cortical
mechanisms of human imitation.
Science, 286(5449), 2526-2528.
5. Iacoboni, M., Molnar-Szakacs, I.,
Gallese, V., Buccino, G., Mazziotta,
J. C., & Rizzolatti, G. (2005).
Grasping the intentions of others
with one's own mirror neuron
system. PLoS Biology, 3, 529-535.
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6. Skipper, J. I., van Wassenhove, V.,
Nusbaum, H. C., & Small, S. L.
(2007). Hearing lips and seeing
voices: how cortical areas supporting
speech production mediate
audiovisual speech perception.
Cerebral Cortex, 17, 2387-2399.
7. Beilock, S. L., Lyons, I. M.,
Mattarella-Micke, A., Nusbaum, H.
C., & Small, S. L. (2008). Sports
experience changes the neural
processing of action language.
Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, 105, 13269-
13272.
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Connecting and Binding Social Brains
and Minds
We evolved as social organisms
in the context of face-to-face interaction.
Much of our human biology was
established before the technology of
email and cell phones. As a result, our
biological nature is tuned primarily to
social signals and interaction that occurs
in the presence of another. It takes just
a moment of observation for us to know
a lot about another person as a social
being. We can understand other
speakers easily within tens of
milliseconds of experience. Our brains
have developed to make this kind of
social connection quickly and easily,
whether through language or action. In
order to understand someone else, we
need to be able to understand their goals
and intentions. Moreover we need to
relate their behavior to our own
individual and personal experience.
Steve Small discusses some of the brain
machinery that may allow us to translate
our perception of language and
observation of behavior into a form that
can be related to our own use of
language and action. This kind of
resonance with experience, rather than
elaborate inferences, may allow us to
connect quickly with others, satisfying
our drive for sociality.
But understanding behavior and
communication is not all there is to
forming social connections. It is one
thing to read intentions and another to
feel someone’s pain. If we only could
understand action and communication,
an important element of human
connection would be missing. In
forming a collective mind, as Gün Semin
discusses it, we need to have collective
emotional responses. Jean Decety
discusses the foundations of empathy
and the brain machinery that supports
this important capacity by providing a
resonant response to the observation of
another person’s distress. Although
sympathy may motivate helping others,
empathy may be one of the social glues
that binds us together as a collective
social organism.
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Chapter 9 9
Empathy and Interpersonal
Sensitivity
A young girl, after watching a
televised documentary account of child
hunger and suffering in Bangladesh,
pleads with her parents to “do
something” to help them. A new child in
9 The lead author is Jean Decety, Ph.D., the
Irving B. Harris Professor in the Departments of
Psychology and Psychiatry, and co-director of
the Brain Research Imaging Center at the
University of Chicago Medical Center. He is the
editor of the journal Social Neuroscience. His
interests include the investigation of the
neurobiological mechanisms underpinning
interpersonal sensitivity, particularly empathy
and sympathy. His recent work focuses on
developmental neuroscience with both typically
developing children and adolescents as well as in
children with deficits in empathic responding
such as antisocial behavior problems. Decety has
published more than 115 scientific papers, and
recently edited the Social Neuroscience of
Empathy (2009, MIT press), and Interpersonal
Sensitivity: Entering Others’ World (2007,
Psychology Press).
Empathy and sympathy play crucial
roles in much of human social interaction and are
necessary components for healthy co-existence.
Sympathy is thought to have a key role in
motivating prosocial behavior, guides our
preferences and behavioral responses, and
provides the affective and motivational base for
moral development. Although the study of these
abilities has traditionally been examined using
behavioral and clinical methods, recent work in
social neuroscience has begun to provide
compelling and novel insights on the neural
mechanisms involved in interpersonal
sensitivity. These developments are explored in
this essay.
daycare is being ignored by the other
children with the exception of one little
boy who takes her hand and includes her
in all his activities. These modest
beginnings signal the important and
ongoing role of empathy for surviving
and flourishing in our social world.
Empathy has been suggested to be
essential to navigating the social world;
it enhances our understanding of others,
improves the effectiveness of our social
communication, and fosters mutually
satisfying social relationships.
Conversely, lack of empathy or its
maladaptive use causes social
relationships to falter and fail.
Empathy refers to our natural
capacity to quickly and automatically
relate to the emotional states of another
person. Rudimentary forms of empathy
appear early in the life course, and with
maturation, empathy can be experienced
by simply reading about or imagining
someone else’s emotion. Empathy
comes so naturally that physicians must
learn to dampen their empathic pain
responses when inserting a needle into a
patient (1). Just because empathy comes
naturally does not mean, however, that it
is instantiated in a discrete brain module
that is automatically activated when one
witnesses another’s distress or suffering.
Rather, the experience of empathy is
underpinned by the combined activity of
several dissociable psychobiological
systems. Further, empathy can be
modulated by various contextual,
dispositional, and interpersonal factors.
The study of empathy, using
sophisticated methods from psychology,
neurology, neuroimaging, and
neuropsychology, provide a unique
opportunity to understand the invisible
power of empathy in shaping our
obligatorily gregarious social nature.
Defining empathy and its functions
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Empathy can be defined as our
natural capacity to share, appreciate, and
respond to the affective states of others.
This capacity is essential for the
regulation of social interactions. For
instance, empathy is believed to
motivate prosocial behavior and inhibit
aggressive behavior (2). In addition, our
ability to share the emotions of those we
observe binds us to each other and
fosters a collective social identity.
Empathy’s invisible power is that it
moves us to cooperate, coordinate our
behaviors, and provide the needed care
for one another. Notably, however,
empathic concern does not necessarily
lead to empathic behavior. First,
empathy poses a paradox, as sharing of
feelings does not necessarily imply that
one will act or even feel impelled to act
in a supportive or sympathetic way.
Second, the complexity of the social and
emotional situations eliciting empathic
concern influences the probability and
nature of the help provided. Whether and
how empathic actions are expressed
depends on the feelings we perceive in
the other, our relationship with that
individual, and the context in which we
share an emotional state.
Empathy is critical for complex
human interactions, but this does not
mean that empathy and prosocial
behavior have suddenly appeared with
Homo sapiens. If empathy is a potent
invisible force generated by the social
brain, some form of emotion-sharing
should also be evident in other social
species such as non-human primates.
Indeed, field observations conducted by
comparative psychologists and
ethologists suggest that behaviors
homologous to empathy can be found in
non-human primates (2). Some have
argued that empathy is not an all-ornothing
phenomenon, and that many
intermediate forms of empathy exist
between the extremes of mere agitation
at the distress of another and full
understanding of their predicaments (3).
Many comparative psychologists view
empathy as a kind of induction process
by which emotions, both positive and
negative, are shared, and which increase
the probability that the protagonists will
subsequently engage in similar behavior.
Though certain non-human
primates may share feelings between
individuals, humans seem to have the
unique ability to intentionally “feel for”
and act on behalf of other individuals
whose experiences may differ greatly
from their own. Such a capacity may
help explain why empathic concern is
often associated with prosocial behaviors
such as helping kin, and why it has been
considered the foundation for altruism,
the expression of empathy and caring for
those who are not kin. Evolutionary
biologists have suggested that empathic
helping behavior evolved because of its
contribution to genetic fitness (kin
selection). In humans and other
mammals, an impulse to care for
offspring is almost certainly genetically
hard-wired. Less clear, however, is
whether an impulse to care for siblings,
more remote kin, and similar non-kin is
genetically hard-wired. The emergence
of altruism is not easily explained within
the framework of neo-Darwinian
theories of natural selection (but see
Cacioppo’s chapter on this point). Social
learning explanations of kinship patterns
in human helping behavior are thus
highly plausible. Indeed, one of the most
striking aspects of human empathy is
that it can be felt for virtually any
“target,” even targets of a different
species (animals included). We can see
a deer hurt by a passing car or the dogs
locked in crates at a shelter and feel
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strongly for their pain or confinement
and future. In part, this kind of empathic
extension may be motivated by the kind
of anthropomorphic attitudes we have
about non-human entities as discussed
by Nick Epley in his chapter. The fact
that we are adept at “feeling for” very
different others whom we can observe
but not truly understand suggests that we
possess a capacity to cognitively rerepresent
others in our mind in a way we
can understand. Indeed, second-order
representation is a key component of
empathy in humans, and may be a useful
adaptation for human survival because it
maximizes the range of individuals with
whom we can form a social bond.
The Components of Empathy
The psychological components
that make up full-blown empathy are
supported by distinct and separable
psychobiological systems. Empathy can
be decomposed into an affective
component that includes the perception
and sharing of an emotional state
observed in another individual, and a
cognitive component that includes the
motivation and intention to respond.
Closely related is a regulatory
component that involves adjustment of
one’s emotional and behavioral
response. The affective, cognitive, and
regulatory aspects of empathy involve
interacting, yet partially non-overlapping
neural circuits. The initial component in
the overall process leading to empathy
draws on somatic mimicry, also known
as “emotion contagion.” This affective
component of empathy develops earlier
than the cognitive component. Affective
responsiveness is present at an early age,
is involuntary, and relies on mimicry and
linking of actions perceived in others
with actions in oneself (i.e., perceptionaction
coupling). For instance,
newborns and infants become vigorously
distressed shortly after another infant
begins to cry. Facial mimicry of basic
emotional expressions also contributes to
affective sharing, and this phenomenon
starts very early in life, by
approximately 10 weeks of age. This
primitive mimicry mechanism, which
may be based on mirror neurons, which
are sensorimotor neurons found in the
premotor, motor, and posterior parietal
cortex of the brain that become active
when observing as well as when
enacting a behavior as discussed in
Steven Small’s chapter. This kind of
mechanism may contribute to the
development of empathy in the early
preverbal period, and continues to
operate past childhood. There is
evidence that when we perceive
emotions and actions of others, we use
the same neural circuits as when we
produce the same emotions and actions
ourselves (e.g., watching another
individual being disgusted and
experiencing disgust in oneself activate
similar neural circuits). For instance,
viewing facial expressions triggers
expressions on one’s own face, even
without explicit identification of what
we’re seeing (4).
The cognitive component of
empathy is closely related to processes
involved in “theory of mind” (i.e., the
ability to attribute mental states to others
and to understand that others’ mental
states can differ from one’s own) and
self-regulation. The capacity for two
people to resonate with each other
emotionally, prior to any cognitive
understanding, is the basis for
developing shared emotional meanings,
but it is not enough for mature empathic
understanding and concern. Such an
understanding requires the observer to
form an explicit representation of the
feelings of another person, a process that
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involves additional mechanisms beyond
the sharing of emotion and includes selfregulatory
mechanisms to modulate the
observer’s experience of negative
arousal. Specifically, in order to
understand the emotions and feelings of
others in relation to oneself, secondorder
representations of the other must
be consciously available and must not
confuse the other with the self. The
medial and ventromedial prefrontal
cortices are known to play crucial roles
in decoupling first-person and thirdperson
information and maintaining
representations of the other as distinct
from the self (5).
The regulatory component of
empathy, especially regulation of
internal emotional states and processes,
is particularly relevant to the modulation
of vicarious emotion and the experience
of empathy as well as sympathy.
Empathy is unlikely to lead to helping
behavior if the observer is incapacitated
by strong empathically evoked emotions,
which is why emotional regulation is an
important component in empathy.
Indeed, children high in effortful control
show greater empathic concern, and the
tendency to experience empathy and
sympathy versus personal distress varies
as a function of their ability to regulate
their emotions more generally.
How We Perceive Other People in
Pain
When witnessing another person
experiencing pain, the scope of an
observer’s reaction can range from
concern for personal safety, including
feelings of alarm, fear, and avoidance, to
concern for the other person, including
compassion, sympathy, and care-giving.
The existence of the perception-action
coupling mechanism apparent in
emotional contagion also seems to
account for our ability to perceive and
understand the pain of others. In the case
of pain, individuals are predisposed to
find distress of others aversive and learn
to avoid actions associated with this
distress. This is even the case in many
mammalian species, including rodents.
For instance, rats that had learned to
press a lever to obtain food would stop
doing so if their response was paired
with the delivery of an electric shock to
a visible neighboring rat (6).
Recently, a handful of functional
neuroimaging studies performed with
healthy human volunteers revealed that
the same neural circuits implicated in
processing the affective and motivational
aspects of pain in oneself account for the
perception of pain in others (7). In one
study, participants in a magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) scanner either
received a painful stimulus or, in other
trials, observed a signal that their
partner, who was present in the same
room, would receive the same stimulus.
First-hand experience of pain resulted in
activation of the somatosensory cortex,
which encodes the way we feel aspects
of a noxious stimulus such as its bodily
location and intensity. Furthermore, the
anterior medial cingulate cortex (ACC),
and the anterior insula were activated
during both first-hand pain and the
anticipated experience of pain in
someone else. These regions are
responsible for the affective and
motivational processing of noxious
stimuli such as those aspects of pain that
pertain to desires, urges, or impulses to
avoid or terminate a painful experience.
A number of other neuroimaging studies
of empathy for pain in adults as well as
in children have demonstrated that the
somatosensory cortex is not activated
only during first-hand pain but is also
activated with the perception of other
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people in pain. Altogether, there is
strong evidence to suggest that
perceiving the pain of others triggers an
automatic somatic sensory-motor
mirroring mechanism between other and
self, which activates almost the entire
neural pain matrix including the
periaqueductal gray, a major site in pain
transmission and for processing of fear
and anxiety, and the supplementary
motor area that programs defensive
movements in response to anticipated
pain. Such a neural resonance
mechanism provides a functional bridge
between first-person and third-person
information. It is grounded in the
equivalence of self and other, which
allows for analogical reasoning, and
offers a possible, yet partial, route to
understanding others.
Of course, human empathic
abilities are more sophisticated than
simply yoking perceptions of the self
and other. In the eighteenth century,
Scottish philosopher and economist
Adam Smith proposed that through
imagination, “we place ourselves in his
situation… enter as it were into his body,
and become in some measure the same
person with” (8). By means of
imagination we come to experience
sensations which are generally similar
to, although typically weaker than, those
of the other person. This capacity to
engage in role-taking has been
theoretically linked to the development
of empathy, moral reasoning, and more
generally, prosocial behavior. Unlike the
motor mimicry and emotional contagion
aspect of empathy, perspective-taking
develops later, possibly because it draws
heavily on the maturation of executive
functions (i.e., processes that serve to
monitor and control thought and actions,
including self-regulation, planning,
cognitive flexibility, response inhibition,
and resistance to interference), functions
that are predominantly centered in the
prefrontal cortex which continues to
mature from birth to adolescence.
Theoretically, imagining the other is
distinct from imagining the self: the
former may evoke empathic concern
(defined as an other-oriented response
congruent with the perceived distress of
the person in need) while the latter
induces both empathic concern and
personal distress (i.e., a self-oriented
aversive emotional response such as
anxiety or discomfort). This distinction
has been supported empirically. When
individuals are asked to imagine how
they would feel in reaction to emotionladen
familiar situations and to imagine
how a known person would feel if she
was experiencing the same situations,
common neural circuits are activated
both for the self and the other. However,
relative to imagining the self, imagining
the other results in specific activation of
parts of the frontal cortex that are
implicated in executive control—the use
of attention and working memory and
decisions—and an area of the brain at
the interface of the temporal and parietal
lobes of the brain that is a key
component of a larger network of neural
circuits involved in attention (sometimes
called the temporoparietal junction).
Some researchers have
hypothesized that the role of the frontal
lobes and the temporoparietal junction is
to hold separate perspectives or to resist
interference against attention to one’s
own perspective. In a recent functional
brain imaging study (9), participants
were shown pictures of people with their
hands or feet in painful or non-painful
situations with the instruction to imagine
themselves or to imagine another
individual experiencing these situations.
During perception of painful situations,
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both the self-perspective and the otherperspective
were associated with
activation in the neural network involved
in pain processing. These results reveal
the similarities in neural networks
representing first- and third-person
information. In addition, however, the
self-perspective yielded higher pain
ratings and involved more extensive
activation of some circuits in the pain
matrix than did the other-perspective,
thus highlighting important differences
between self- and other-perspectives.
Neuroanatomical regions and
circuits form the foundation for the
experience of pain in others, but they are
not sufficient to explain variability in
interpersonal sensitivity. Although
empathetic brain circuits are activated by
the mere perception of pain in others,
activity in these circuits can be
modulated by social, motivational, and
cognitive factors. For example,
observing pain in likable others (i.e.,
those who played a game fairly) resulted
in an enhancement of empathic brain
responses, whereas pain in dislikable
others who played unfairly did not.
Another functional MRI study (10)
found that participants showed
significantly greater responses in neural
regions that are involved in pain
perception when observing the pain of
people who were not responsible for
their stigmatized condition (i.e.,
individuals who contracted AIDS as the
result of a blood transfusion) than either
controls (healthy individuals) or people
who were held responsible for their
condition (i.e., those who contracted
AIDS through illegal drug use). In
addition, participants expressed more
empathy and personal distress in
response to the pain of people who were
not responsible for their stigmatized
condition as compared to controls. The
level of empathic response, therefore,
seems to be influenced by motivational
factors as well as the interpersonal
relationship between the target and the
observer.
Altogether, these findings
demonstrate that the similarities between
affective representations of the self and
the other stem from shared neural
circuits that can be emulated either
automatically or intentionally by the act
of perspective-taking. Importantly, these
findings also point to some distinctions
between these two representations,
distinctions that contribute to our
capacity to detach ourselves from others
sufficiently to make considered
responses to their pain.
Conclusion
Empathy, the natural capacity to
share, appreciate, and respond to the
affective states of others, plays a crucial
role in much of human social interaction
from birth to the end of life. As would be
expected if empathy functions to
enhance social cohesion, social nonhuman
primate species also exhibit
rudimentary versions of empathy. What
humans have in abundance are higherlevel
cognitive and social abilities
(language, theory of mind, executive
functions) that can be deployed to
modulate empathic responses, and that
are amenable to modulation by lowerlevel
processes such as emotional
contagion and mimicry. These levels of
processing enable empathy to have an
impact on a wide variety of human
behaviors. From motivating prosocial
behavior to providing the affective and
motivational bases for moral
development, empathy is an invisible
force to reckon with when considering
how humans behave toward each other.
References
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1. Cheng, Y., Lin, C., Liu, H.L.,
Hsu, Y., Lim, K., Hung, D., &
Decety, J. (2007). Expertise
modulates the perception of pain
in others. Current Biology, 17,
1708-1713.
2. De Waal, F. (2009). The Age of
Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a
Kinder Society. New York:
Harmony Books.
3. De Waal, F. B. M. (2009).
Darwin’s last laugh. Nature, 460,
175.
4. Meltzoff, A.N., & Decety, J.
(2003). What imitation tells us
about social cognition: A
rapprochement between
developmental psychology and
cognitive neuroscience. The
Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society, London, 358,
491-500.
5. Decety, J., & Sommerville, J.A.
(2003). Shared representations
between self and others: A social
cognitive neuroscience view.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7,
527-533.
6. Church, R. M. (1959). Emotional
reactions of rats to the pain of
others. Journal of Comparative
and Physiological Psychology,
52, 132-134.
7. Decety, J., & Lamm, C. (2009).
Empathy and intersubjectivity.
In G. G. Berntson & J. T.
Cacioppo (Eds.), Handbook of
neuroscience for the behavioral
sciences (Vol. 2, pp. 940-957).
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
8. Smith, Adam. The Theory of
Moral Semtiments. Edited by
Sálvio M. Soares. MetaLibri,
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9. Jackson, P.L., Brunet, E.,
Meltzoff, A.N., & Decety, J.
(2006). Empathy examined
through the neural mechanisms
involved in imagining how I feel
versus how you feel pain: An
event-related fMRI study.
Neuropsychologia, 44, 752-61.
10. Decety, J., Echols, S.C., &
Correll, J. (2009). The blame
game: the effect of responsibility
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Seeing into My Mind and Other
Minds
Empathy is defined by Jean
Decety as “the natural capacity to share,
appreciate, and respond to the affective
states of others.” Empathy rests on our
ability to see into the mind of another
while distinguishing it from one’s own
to be in a position to cooperate,
coordinate, and provide the needed care
for others. The possession of empathic
capacity is not sufficient to determine
the precise nature of the response toward
others, however. As Decety points out,
whether an individual attends to and
responds empathically upon observing
emotion in another individual depends
on, among other things, dispositional
tendencies, the relationship between the
individuals, and contextual constraints.
Motivation to help another is also
influenced by the amount of cognitive
effort we are willing and able to exert to
take the perspective of the other.
Perspective-taking is essentially
an attempt to see into the invisible mind
of another. What we can’t see, we model
based on our own mind and like-minded
individuals. Nick Epley shows that
seeing into and connecting with other
minds is such a frequent operation of the
social brain that the absence of others
inclines people to see human minds in
nonhuman entities. Whether it’s a tree, a
pet, or God, ascribing mind to others
endows them with the capacity to
experience the same affective states we
experience. This shared capacity evokes
in us a tendency to feel and express
empathic concern for their well-being.
Unfortunately, humans do not grant all
individuals, much less non-human
entities, an equivalent degree of mind.
Epley articulates how differences in the
capacity to see mind in others have
consequences for the way we feel and
think about and behave toward others.
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Chapter 10 10
Seeing Invisible Minds
Shortly after taking off from
LaGuardia airport in the dead of winter,
the engines of US Airways flight 1549
failed after inhaling several large geese.
The pilots glided their plane onto the
Hudson River, where all of the
10 The lead author is Nicholas Epley, Ph.D., a
Professor of Behavioral Science at the University
of Chicago Booth School of Business. His
research investigates people’s ability to reason
about others’ minds, from knowing how one is
being judged by others to predicting others'
attitudes, beliefs, and underlying motivations,
and the implications of systematic mistakes in
mind reading for everyday social interactions.
His research has appeared in more than two
dozen journals, has been featured by the Wall
Street Journal, CNN, Wired, and National Public
Radio, among many others, and has been funded
by the National Science Foundation and the
Templeton Foundation. Epley has written for the
New York Times, produced lectures for the
Financial Times, been elected as a Fellow of the
Association for Psychological Science, and is the
winner of the 2008 Theoretical Innovation Prize
from the Society for Personality and Social
Psychology.
Other minds are inherently invisible.
You cannot see an attitude, smell a belief, or
touch an intention, and yet you can nevertheless
“see” these mental states in other people with
great ease. You can even see them in agents
ranging from pets to gadgets to gods. How you
are able to see other minds, and how they
become visible, matters because it marks the
difference between treating others as human
beings worthy of moral care and concern versus
treating others as objects or animals.
passengers were rescued, cold, wet, and
almost completely unharmed. Explained
one passenger, “God was certainly
looking out for us.” New Orleans Mayor
Ray Nagin offered a very different
assessment of God’s mind following the
devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina
when he explained that, “Surely God is
mad at America. Surely he’s not
approving of us being in Iraq under false
pretense. But surely he’s upset at Black
America, too.”
Depending on your own beliefs,
such statements will seem somewhere
between insane and insightful. To
psychologists, they seem impressive.
They seem impressive not because they
reveal a keen sense of causal inference,
but rather because they reveal what may
be the most impressive capacities of the
social brain—the ability to reason about,
or “to see,” what other minds see.
Introspection enables you to know your
own intentions, report on your own
thoughts, feel your own pain, and
recognize when you are feeling shame
rather than guilt. Other minds, however,
are inherently invisible. You cannot
know what it is like to be another person
on the inside because your skull gets in
the way.
The inherent invisibility of other
minds poses a major problem for hardnosed
philosophers, who skeptically note
that people cannot infer that other minds
exist at all. Although it is surprisingly
difficult for philosophers to reject the
skeptical conclusion from the “other
minds problem,” almost everyone else
casts it aside altogether some time
around the age of five. At this point
people have developed such a strong
capacity to think about other minds that
they not only see minds in other people,
but they seem to see other minds almost
everywhere 1 . Gods can be caring or
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callous. Pets can be thoughtful or
devious. And every now and then,
computers can have a mind of their own.
Having the capacity to reason
about other minds enables people to
form deep social connections with
others, to empathize with others’ pain
and share in their joy, and to anticipate
others’ actions. But having a capacity
and actually using it are two different
things. People are not naturally inclined
to see invisible things in the
environment. People do not
automatically see into other minds,
either, but instead do so only under
certain circumstances and with some
psychological effort. This chapter will
describe how people come to see other
minds, how other minds can become
more or less visible, and why the
visibility of other minds matters for
everyday life.
Kinds of Minds
Studying how people understand
other minds first requires understanding
how people intuitively define another
mind. Research suggests that people
think of minds as having two distinct
dimensions, the ability to act (agency)
and the ability to feel (experience) 2 .
Mindful agency involves the cognitive
activities that enable action, such as the
capacity to plan, to have intentions, to
engage in deliberate self-control, and to
pursue one’s own goals. Conscious
preferences, attitudes, and beliefs follow
from these capacities. Mindful
experience, in contrast, involves the
cognitive activities involved in reacting
to the external world, such as the
capacity for self-awareness, and the
experience of basic psychological states
(like hunger, thirst, or pain), and otheroriented
emotions (such as empathy or
sympathy). Mindful experience also
involves the capacity for
metacognition—the capacity to think
about one’s own thoughts or emotions—
exemplified in experiences such as
confidence and doubt, or in secondary
emotions such as shame, guilt, joy, or
hope. People seem to represent these
two capacities in others quite
independently. A sociopath, for
instance, can appear to act with a high
degree of mindful agency but no mindful
experience, whereas a baby might appear
full of mindful experience with
relatively little mindful agency. Seeing
other agents as mindful essentially
means seeing them as able to
consciously think and/or to feel.
Because you are aware of both your own
thoughts and feelings, you likely
consider yourself—like most people
do—to be very mindful.
Making Other Minds Visible
Introspection provides a kind of
flashlight that seems to provide direct
access to one’s own agency as well as
experience. Although research
demonstrates that introspection is
actually a process of indirect inference,
it appears to us that introspection
provides direct access to the workings of
our own brain. It seems that we can look
on the inside and feel when we are
suffering, know when we are
experiencing regret, or be aware of our
intentions to lose weight. We can use
our introspective abilities to make
inferences about what others are likely
thinking or feeling (and we very often
do), but such inferences are likely to
seem inherently less direct, less
immediate, and less illuminating. We
cannot see into other minds as clearly as
we seem able to see our own.
When something is difficult to
see, people may doubt whether it
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actually exists, or may not see it at all.
This is true of the relative difficulty that
people have seeing other minds
compared to one’s own, in ways that are
sometimes very subtle and surprising.
For instance, we tend to evaluate
ourselves by consulting our mindful
intentions, but we evaluate others (and
their intentions) by observing their
actions. We may consider ourselves to
be conscientious if we planned to buy
our spouse a birthday gift, but need to
see an actual gift to infer that our spouse
is equally conscientious. 3 We tend to
believe that we are more likely to
experience complicated mental emotions
like shame, guilt, or embarrassment than
are others. 4,5 We tend to believe that our
own behavior will therefore be guided
by moral sentiments like empathy, guilt,
or compassion whereas others’ behavior
is more likely driven by the relatively
mindless motives of self-interest. 6 Other
minds are more opaque than our own,
and some learning, attending, seeking,
and projecting is required for our brains
to become fully social and see into them.
Here’s how 7 .
Learning. Children do not enter
the world able to think about other
minds, but they learn to do so fairly
quickly. At around three months of age,
children start preferentially attending to
animate objects compared to inanimate
objects, and at around six months of age
start to distinguish between intentional
(goal-directed) and unintentional
(accidental) action. At this age, for
instance, children will look reliably
longer at a person who is reaching for a
cup than to a person who is making the
same reaching motion in the absence of
a cup. Over the next 18 months,
children become more likely to mimic
intentional than unintentional actions 8 , to
follow the gaze of another person and
therefore share his or her attentional
focus, and recognize that other people
may have preferences that differ from
one’s own. By age two, children’s
social ability to read other minds seems
to have already surpassed that of our
nearest primate relatives, and over the
next two years they pick up what appear
to be uniquely human mind-reading
capacities. By age five, children
demonstrate the most sophisticated of
mind-reading abilities—the capacity to
recognize that others’ beliefs may differ
from one’s own and to use those
differing (sometimes mistaken) beliefs to
predict the other agent’s behavior.
Variability from age five onward comes
from learning more specific details about
how other minds actually work, largely
gathered from personal experience,
religious practice, or broader cultural
norms.
Many psychologists and
neuroscientists speculate that learning to
read other minds comes from the deeply
social tendency, present at birth, to
mimic others’ actions. For example,
Steve Small examines a neurological
underpinning for mimicry, and Jean
Decety argues in his essay that an inborn
capacity for mimicry underlies the
human capacity for empathy. Looking
where others look and copying their
actions is a reasonable way to copy their
likely mental states as well. This
egocentric method of using one’s own
mental experience as a guide to other
minds continues to be employed
throughout adulthood, and can give
insight into others’ mental states but can
also lead people to overestimate the
extent to which others’ minds are similar
to one’s own. These biases tend to be
called egocentric when reasoning about
other people, and they tend to be called
anthropomorphic when reasoning about
Page | 96
nonpeople such as a god or a gadget or a
pet.
Attending. People rarely notice
things in their environment unless they
are specifically attending to them. Other
minds likewise tend to be relatively
invisible unless attention is specifically
drawn to them. For instance, take a
moment to think about how happy you
are compared to the average American…
No really, please take a moment…If you
just spent some time thinking about how
happy you are and no time thinking
about how happy the average American
is, then you are no different from the
majority of people in psychology
experiments who do likewise 8 . People
can consider others’ thoughts, feelings,
beliefs, or emotions, but doing so
requires mental effort that is in short and
limited supply. Consider, for instance, a
simple experiment in which you are
playing a game with another person 9 .
Both you and the other player in this
game must first choose privately to
cooperate or compete with each other. If
you both choose to cooperate, you both
earn $5. But if the other player chooses
to cooperate and you choose to compete,
then you win $10 and your partner gets
nothing. If you, however, choose to
cooperate and the other player chooses
to compete, you win nothing and your
partner wins $10. If you both choose to
compete, you both win a measly $2. It
seems obvious in this situation that you
should consider both what you would
like to do, but also consider what the
other player is likely to be thinking.
Experimental evidence suggests that
people do indeed think about the former
but spend little time thinking of the
latter. In a basic version of this
experiment, 60% of people chose to
cooperate. However, when people were
simply asked to think about their
partner’s thoughts before making their
choice, only 27% chose to cooperate. If
people had already been thinking about
others’ thoughts, as it seems like they
would naturally be doing in this
situation, then a simple instruction to
consider others’ thoughts would have no
effect on people’s own behavior. That is
not the case. This simple experiment
shows that people may not naturally
consider other minds even when it
appears that they should. Thinking
about other minds requires attentional
effort. It does not necessarily come
automatically. Indeed, as Tanya
Luhrmann describes in her chapter,
people may have to work very hard to
discern other minds, such as the mind of
God, even when they are actively
looking for them.
Seeking. If seeing other minds
requires attention, then other minds are
especially likely to become visible when
people are motivated to think about
them. There are many reasons why
people might try to get into the mind of
another agent, from a spouse to a pet to a
god, but two are reasonably wellsupported
by existing research. First,
people tend to think about other minds
when they are trying to form a social
connection with others. 10 Making
people feel lonely or isolated, for
instance, increases the tendency to
describe one’s pet as thoughtful,
considerate, or sympathetic (all mindful
traits). And those who are made to feel
lonely are also likely to report believing
in mindful supernatural agents, such as
God. Second, people tend to think about
other minds when they are trying to
achieve some understanding and control
over their environment or over another
agent’s behavior. 1 Concepts of mind,
including attitudes, beliefs, goals, or
desires, can provide compelling cause-
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and-effect explanations of behavior that
give a sense of predictability and
control. A meteorologist may know that
a hurricane may strike here or there
depending on environmental conditions.
Lacking such knowledge, a hurricane
that strikes here rather than there may
lead people to invoke a mindful agent—
such as a God—to explain that action.
Projecting. If introspection
makes your own mind visible, then you
might assume that those who look
similar to you on the outside might look
similar to you on the inside as well.
Indeed, animals that move at a
humanlike speed (such as a horse) seem
more mindful to people than do animals
that move either much slower (such as a
sloth) or much faster (such as a
hummingbird). 11 And an agent that look
humanlike, such as a computerized
avatar with human face, seems more
mindful than avatars that do not look
humanlike. Any parent knows how well
toy makers love to capitalize on this
tendency. But it is the converse of this
effect that is even more interesting—
other minds become less visible as the
agent becomes less similar to the self.
Others that differ from you in their
interests, nationality, or social status are
likely to be seen as less mindful—less
thoughtful, less likely to experience
complicated emotions, less able to
experience pain or suffering—than those
that are similar to you. It is little
wonder, then, that the history of human
conflict is filled with instances of people
dehumanizing radically different others,
treating them like mindless animals or
objects. 12
Why Minds Matter
It may not be obvious to you why
it matters that your neighbor, every now
and then, thinks that her computer has a
mind of it’s own, that a mayor believes
that God punished his city by sending a
hurricane, or that you truly believe that
your pet poodle is thoughtful and
considerate. Some of these attributions
of mind seem purely metaphorical and
therefore unimportant, as ways of
speaking rather than ways of believing,
whereas others seem to represent
genuine beliefs about the real presence
or absence of another social mind. But
metaphors have a way of influencing
behavior in ways that are consistent with
believing the metaphor to be literally
true. People metaphorically refer to
feeling dirty after behaving unethically,
and yet washing one’s hands actually
reduces the guilt that people report
feeling from engaging in unethical
actions. 13 People are surely just
speaking metaphorically when they refer
to rejection as being given the cold
shoulder, and yet research demonstrates
that people do indeed report feeling that
a room is colder after someone has just
rejected them than after someone has
just accepted them. 14 And surely people
are only speaking metaphorically when
they refer to the stock market as anxious
or jittery, and yet describing the market
as mindful leads stock traders to believe
that trends are likely to continue whereas
describing the market as mindless leads
traders to predict more random
variability. 15 Whether metaphorical or
literal, seeing other agents as mindful
matters because people tend to treat the
agent as if it has a mind. That matters
for at least three major reasons.
First, mindful agents have both
intentions and the capacity for selfcontrol.
Mindful agents can therefore be
held responsible for their actions.
Possessing a guilty mind (mens rea) is
necessary for being held criminally
responsible for a crime in the US, a
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precedent found in courts around the
world dating back to the Middle Ages.
In times past and cultures in which
people did not so naturally restrict
intentional capacities to other humans,
animals (such as rats) and objects (such
as “possessed” statues) were common
targets of criminal prosecution 16,17 .
Increasing the extent to which other
agents seem mindful also increases the
praise or blame that they receive for
their actions. And even diminishing the
extent to which people feel in mindful
control of their own behavior (e.g., by
undermining people’s belief in free will),
leads people to behave in ways that are
consistent with diminished self-control
(such as by cheating on an exam when
tempted to do so). 18
Second, other minds are capable
of thinking, and may therefore be
thinking about you. Being under
scrutiny by mindful agents has two basic
effects on human behavior. One is that
mindful agents become sources of social
influence, increasing the extent to which
people behave in socially desirable
ways 20 . Imagine, for instance, how you
might behave if you found a magic ring
that made you invisible… and you’ll get
the point. This ability for mindful
surveillance to control behavior has been
proposed as one of the reasons, if not the
primary reason, why religious systems
that posit an omnipresent deity are able
to maintain such large-scale cooperative
societies. The other effect of mindful
surveillance is that it is mentally taxing
to monitor others’ thoughts. This
effortful monitoring can diminish a
person’s performance on other
cognitively demanding tasks 21 . And
while waiting for a stressful event, such
as giving a speech, people show less
stress-related responses when in the
presence of their relatively mindless pet
than when in the presence of their
relatively more mindful spouse 22 .
Finally, other minds matter
because mindful agents become moral
agents worthy of care and compassion 7 .
The principle of autonomy captures this
most basic of human rights—that
because all people have the same
minimal capacity to suffer, deliberate,
and choose, no person can compromise
the body, life, or freedom of another
person. Agents with mindful
experience, the capacity to suffer,
deliberate, and choose, become those
that evoke empathy and concern for well
being, whereas agents without mindful
experience can be treated simply as
mindless objects. From debates about
abortion to animal rights to euthanasia,
the mindful experience of the agents in
question is often either the explicit or
implicit focus of debate. Making
invisible minds visible, and hence more
like one’s own, enables people to more
readily follow the most famous of all
ethical dictates—to treat others as you
would have others treat you.
Conclusion
It is impossible for scientists to
examine whether God was looking out
for the passengers of flight 1549 or
punishing the residents of New Orleans
with Hurricane Katrina, but it is very
possible to examine why people might
make such inferences. These
examinations have revealed a
remarkable capacity to look beyond the
visible behavior that the environment
provides to reason about a completely
invisible world of intentions and goals,
of motives and beliefs, of attitudes and
preferences—an invisible world of other
minds. Understanding when people are
likely to recognize other minds (and see
into them) and when they are not is the
Page | 99
key to understanding when people may
be likely to invoke natural versus
supernatural explanations, when gadgets
can seem to have minds of their own,
and when people are likely to treat their
pets as people and their enemies as
animals. A mind like our own, with the
capacity to see into other minds, is
essential for an agent to be, as we are,
fundamentally social.
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Inferring Minds Where None
Can Be Seen
The social brain seeks
connections with others. But what is the
foundation that we use to build such
connections? We experience empathy as
a form of emotional resonance and
understanding of other people. This
connection allows us to comfort and
support and celebrate with others. Being
in tune with emotional states of others
allows us to respond in ways that
strengthen a group. But how do we
understand the thoughts and goals of
others? How do we predict choices and
decisions to facilitate cooperation in
groups? Anthropomorphism is the basis
for predicting behavior and thoughts and
goals. Nick Epley discusses how
anthropomorphism is rooted in an
egocentric view of others. Moreover our
view of others is not confined to the
others that are people. It is perhaps
reflective of the deep and fundamental
nature of anthropomorphism in the
social brain that its anthropomorphic
inferences about agents can be derived
from observed behavior, allowing us to
understand “minds” where none may
exist, as in mechanical toys or alarm
clocks. Of course we tend to understand
those minds by thinking they are just
like us.
Even when there is no agent to
be seen, events in the world may be
understood by attributing them to unseen
agents. During World War II, the
bombing of London was demonstrably
random, but citizens of London could
not help but discern intentional patterns
in the attacks. As Epley points out,
hurricanes and floods are even today
attributed to the hand of God, perhaps an
angry God. Clark Gilpin discusses how
religions may use this aspect of the
social brain to achieve an understanding
of God and what God wants. This kind
of anthropomorphism can be taken to
different metaphoric extremes in
personifying God as father or friend.
But an overly concrete personification
may have costs perhaps diminishing the
universality and pervasiveness of God in
other religions. Thus religions may
differ in theological perspective on the
value of the anthropomorphic impulse
inherent in the social brain.
Page | 102
Chapter 11 11
Anthropomorphism: Human
Connection to a Universal Society
When Jonathan Edwards, an
angular New England minister in his late
11 The lead author, Clark Gilpin, Ph.D., is the
Margaret E. Burton Professor of the History of
Christianity at the University of Chicago
Divinity School. Clark studies the cultural
history of theology in England and America
from the seventeenth century to the present.
From 1990 to 2000, he served as dean of the
Divinity School, and from 2000 to 2004 he
directed the Martin Marty Center, the Divinity
School’s institute for advanced research in all
fields of the academic study of religion. His
current research projects include a book with the
working title Alone with the Alone: Solitude in
American Religious and Literary History, which
explores ways in which the spiritual discipline of
solitary writing—autobiographic narratives,
journals, and letters—shaped the careers of
major New England intellectuals of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Anthropomorphic representations of
God make many modern people very nervous,
including many religious people. Attributing
human-like ideas and emotions to the
comprehending powers of the universe not only
seems out of step with modern science but also a
presumptuous confinement of the world within
merely human needs and capacities. Yet, the
impulse to speak anthropomorphically about our
“ultimate environment” has vigorously persisted
into the modern age. Rather than dismissing
anthropomorphism as an outmoded way of
thinking, this essay adopts a historical approach
to rethink why anthropomorphism exhibits this
perennial capacity to focus the human ethical
imagination on our relations with and obligations
to the universe within which we live.
thirties, mounted the narrow steps into
the pulpit on July 8, 1741, the sermon he
was about to preach would become one
of the most famously electrifying
orations in American history, “Sinners in
the Hands of an Angry God.” Edwards
preached this sermon during the massive
transatlantic religious revival that gave
rise to Methodism in England and came
to be known in the American colonies as
“the Great Awakening.” This was not
the familiar pulpit of his congregation in
Northampton, Massachusetts, but rather
the church at Enfield, a town that had
gained notoriety for stubbornly resisting
the exhortations of previous preachers of
spiritual awakening. From his scriptural
text—“their foot shall slide in due time”
(Deut. 32: 35)—Edwards drew the
doctrine that “there is nothing that keeps
wicked men, at any one moment, out of
hell, but the mere pleasure of God.”
Sinners living here and now, Edwards
declared, were “the objects of that very
same anger and wrath of God, that is
expressed in the torments of hell,” and
that wrath was an annihilating fire that
already “burns against them; their
damnation does not slumber; the pit is
prepared; the fire is made ready…to
receive them.” In a notorious image,
Edwards portrayed God dangling the
sinner’s soul over the fires of hell like a
spider on a single, slender filament of its
web. The sermon achieved stunning
results, as recorded in the diary of one of
those present, Stephen Williams:
“before the sermon was done, there was
a great moaning and crying out
throughout the whole house—what shall
I do to be saved; oh, I am going to hell;
oh, what shall I do for a Christ.” The
“shrieks and cries were piercing and
amazing,” Williams reported, and the
scene was so tumultuous that Edwards
had to stop before finishing his sermon. i
Page | 103
As the classic American example
of fire-and-brimstone Protestant
preaching, “Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry God” depends, for its effect, on
anthropomorphism: ascribing human
form and attributes—hands, emotions,
and purposive agency—to nonhuman
phenomena. Anthropomorphism has
been a hotly debated feature of religion
since classical antiquity. But, in the
modern world, religious
anthropomorphism has become
especially controversial, while, at the
same time, also becoming a crucial
concept in modern theories about the
very nature of religion. ii Modern
objections to anthropomorphism have
taken two major forms. First, traditions
within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
have long opposed the worship of
“idols,” and regarded anthropomorphism
as a dangerous assault against genuine
piety and properly theological
understanding of existence. In the
modern period these religious objections
against anthropomorphism have
eventuated not only in sophisticated
intellectual polemics against
anthropomorphic concepts of God but
also in popular movements of
iconoclasm, which protested against
anthropomorphic representations of the
divine and sometimes physically
destroyed anthropomorphic images.
Second, the rise and development of
modern science has emphasized the
regularity of the processes that structure
the natural world. And even when these
orderly processes were described as
natural “laws”—a term with obvious
anthropomorphic connotations—they
have generally been understood in ways
that are thoroughly impersonal and
lacking any intrinsic purpose or design.
Hence, modern science has generated
numerous questions about religious
interpretations of influence on the course
of nature by divine ideas and purposes.
Since the late nineteenth century, many
instances of the so-called “warfare”
between science and theology have
turned on the issue of whether any
scientific plausibility could be attached
to concepts of a divine mind, purpose, or
intention that guided or ordered the
structure of the universe. iii According to
the philosopher Charles Taylor, the
transition from perceptions of a divinely
ordered, purposive universe to an
“impersonal order” of nature marked a
pivotal change that, especially since the
eighteenth century, has shaped “a secular
age” among the societies of the modern
West. iv In short, anthropomorphism has
not only become a source of tension
within religions but also something of an
impasse between religious and scientific
interpretations of the universe.
Nonetheless, anthropomorphic
assumptions remain vigorously present
in many of the modern forms of
theology, spiritual practice, and religious
art, a persistence that suggests the
strength of the psychological and social
functions performed by
anthropomorphic representation.
In light of these longstanding
controversies about religious
anthropomorphism, the graphically
anthropomorphic, spider-dangling deity
of Edwards’s sermon would seem to
offer a good test case for understanding
how anthropomorphic religious language
works in the modern era. Such an
understanding begins with one of the
central themes of this book, namely, the
powerful human motivation to establish
and maintain social connections.
Anthropomorphism extends this drive
for social connection beyond the
boundaries of human societies by
attributing human characteristics to
Page | 104
nonhuman phenomena. In this way,
anthropomorphic language incorporates
human society in a web of ethical
obligations that connect to the natural
environment and, by imaginative
extension, to the universe as a whole.
Although the drive toward social
connection is a general human trait,
however, persons neither seek nor find
satisfaction in a generalized sense of
connection. Instead, satisfying social
connections are sought and experienced
in terms of the social norms and values
of particular historical and cultural
settings. Likewise, anthropomorphism,
as an inferred social connection to the
nonhuman, takes shape and becomes
persuasive in terms of historically and
culturally specific assumptions about
society and social relations. This
chapter will, therefore, step back from
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,”
in order to describe how contemporary
scholarship in social neuroscience and in
the history of religions provides a fresh
point of view on the workings of
anthropomorphic perception and then
test that interpretive model by
reappraising Edwards’s famous sermon
in its historical context.
The Boundary of the Human
The line between the human and
the nonhuman is, perhaps, the most
consequential presupposition that any
society, group, or individual adopts
about life in the world. The way various
cultures draw this line, between “us” and
“the other,” has shaped civilizations and
their goals as well as the norms of
personal conduct and identity. Although
concepts of the human have a long and
contentious philosophical history, people
in their everyday lives show remarkable
consensus in the features they use to
define “human.” Central to this process
of perceiving the human is a perception
of mind in other agents, including the
presence of goal-directed agency,
emotions such as anger, guilt, or pride, a
capacity for self-awareness, and free
will. As Nick Epley demonstrated in the
preceding chapter, the perception of
these distinctively human traits—“seeing
invisible minds”—is a psychological
mechanism with tremendous influence
on the way humans order and understand
their social environment.
Mind perception is such a
powerful tool of inductive inference,
however, that it regularly crosses the line
it has itself drawn between the human
and the nonhuman. Scholars from a
wide array of disciplines have long
observed humans’ anthropomorphic
tendency to see nonhuman things or
events as humanlike, imbuing the real or
imagined behavior of nonhuman
phenomena with human motivations,
agency, and emotions. By perceiving
the world in terms of human capacities
and social relationships,
anthropomorphism builds a complex
system of analogies that uses knowledge
of what it is like to be a person, in order
to interpret the behavior of animals, the
function of technological devices, the
operation of complex social systems
such as “the market,” or natural
occurrences such as violent weather
patterns or catastrophic events. v Hence,
anthropomorphism, as a process of
inference that not only draws but also
crosses the line between the human and
the nonhuman, has very substantial
consequences for the human sense of
connection to nonhuman animals, to
larger ecological systems, and to the
structure of the universe taken as a
whole.
Contemporary psychological
research has created an intellectual space
that opens the phenomenon of
Page | 105
anthropomorphism to fresh possibilities
for interpretation that are especially
important for understanding its role in
the human spiritual traditions in
modernity, as well as the controversies
surrounding that role. This research
proposes that a single set of
psychological mechanisms is likely to
explain when people perceive a mind at
work in an encountered phenomenon,
regardless of whether the thing in
question is a god, a machine, an animal,
another person, or an uncanny sequence
of events. From this perspective, the
psychological process of
anthropomorphic inference works in
concert with two other motivational
mechanisms: the need to interact
effectively with nonhuman phenomena
in our environment and the desire to
establish social connections with other
humans. vi The phrase anthropomorphic
inference fails to capture, however, the
interactive dynamism that infuses a
person’s perception that a mind is at
work in another agent. Put more
strongly, our sense that mind is present
in the other is, in no small measure, the
sense that we are communicating. The
absence of this communicative
dimension of mind perception is
precisely the tragedy in the family of an
Alzheimer’s patient—the loss of
reciprocal recognition. As Tanya
Luhrmann vividly illustrates in the next
chapter, religious anthropomorphism
builds on the notion that this
communicative reciprocity extends
beyond the boundary of human society
into the wider environment and includes
social connection and communication
with the divine.
Anthropomorphism adds an
obvious but important twist to these
psychological mechanisms: whenever a
person ascribes human attributes to a
nonhuman phenomenon, the person
nonetheless continues to perceive it as
nonhuman. When, for instance, a pet
owner observes a dog’s reliability and
infers that this behavior arises from the
dog’s faithfulness, the owner does not go
on to say that the dog is human. Indeed,
an indispensable aspect of an
anthropomorphic way of seeing Fido’s
faithfulness is that the person also
continues to see Fido as a dog. This dual
perception is even more pronounced in a
parallel illustration: a person observes
the everyday reliability of gravity and
infers that this arises from faithfulness at
the heart of the natural order. Both
illustrations indicate a close connection
of anthropomorphism to metaphor, in
which persons understand one kind of
thing in terms of another by identifying a
feature that bridges their difference
without eliminating it. The specific
feature, in this case faithfulness, posits a
point of comparison that enables a
familiar human capacity for loyalty to
enable interpretation of another,
unfamiliar or alien phenomenon. The
illustrations further suggest that Fido’s
faithfulness is what could be called weak
anthropomorphism, because one could
plausibly argue that dogs and humans
actually do share a capacity for
faithfulness. We perceive that, as
mammals, they exhibit many behavioral
similarities. By contrast, the perception
of faithfulness as an attribute of the
natural order is strong
anthropomorphism, because it makes a
far more daring inference in its effort to
draw an analogy that produces insight or
knowledge about the communicative
reciprocity of the human and the
nonhuman. Religions, as Edwards’s
sermon illustrates, build primarily on
strong anthropomorphism in order to
propound communicative social
Page | 106
connection with the nonhuman world.
The metaphorical and analogical
reasoning so characteristic of religious
interpretations of the world is not merely
a rhetorical flourish but is, instead,
closely tied to general psychological
processes in which self-knowledge and
knowledge of other humans function as
the most readily accessible starting
points for inferences we make about
human connections to the most
comprehensive and consequential forces
at work in the nonhuman world. vii
Anthropomorphism’s dual
perception of nonhuman phenomena—as
simultaneously both like and unlike
human persons—has shaped modern
religious and spiritual perceptions in two
especially intriguing directions. In one
case, it has fastened on the difference
between the human and the divine and
cultivated iconoclastic perceptions of the
spiritual in which anthropomorphic
representation is regarded as a
dangerously misleading, albeit
necessary, accommodation to the
limitations of human reason. viii In the
other case, it has emphasized the point of
metaphorical identity between the human
and the nonhuman. Thus, an ancient
idea held that the physical universe was
a macrocosm mirroring the human
microcosm, and this included what
literary critics have named “the pathetic
fallacy,” that is, a sympathetic response
in nature to the affective states of
humans. The early modern political
philosopher Hugo Grotius (1583-1645),
for example, described how human
disobedience to divine law prompted an
anthropomorphic emotional response
from nature: “with sad motion
wheeling, let the sky lament and
mourn.” ix In the modern history of
religions, these two modes of
anthropomorphism, one accentuating
difference and the other accentuating
identity, have varied according to social
circumstance, rhetorical purpose, and
political ramifications. “Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God” illustrates, in
one historical context, how
anthropomorphic language crosses the
boundary of the human in order to
interpret human ethical responsibility to
both the human and the nonhuman
environment.
The Rhetoric of Divine Wrath
Clearly, Edwards’s
anthropomorphic rhetoric destabilized in
a terrifying way the Enfield
congregation’s complacent perceptions
of the world. It did so by starting from
an assumption that Edwards and the
congregation shared: that humanity’s
ultimate environment should be
construed, anthropomorphically, as a
cosmic society held together by a
covenant that God had made with the
whole of creation. The sermon induced
terror among the congregants by
graphically portraying their own
responsibility for disrupting the
harmonious order of this allencompassing
society and provoking
divine wrath for their rebellion against
the covenant.
The primary evidence for this
divine wrath came not, however, from
the external orders of nature and divine
providence, which Edwards imagined
working together to maintain the
harmonious order of the world. Instead,
wrath had arisen from a clash between
the benign will of the world and the
rebellious human will: “there is laid in
the very nature of carnal men a
foundation for the torments of hell:
there are those corrupt principles, in
reigning power in them, and in full
possession of them, that are seeds of hell
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fire.” For the present God restrained
human wickedness “by his mighty
power, as he does the raging waves of
the troubled sea,” but, if God should
withdraw that restraining power,
humanity’s willful self-regard would
overturn nature. The most dangerous
fire in creation was not, therefore, the
fire of hell but rather the hellfire bursting
forth from an unrestrained human will:
“The corruption of the heart of man is a
thing that is immoderate and boundless
in its fury; and while wicked men live
here, it is like fire pent up by God’s
restraints,” but, should God ever relax
his governance, humanity’s boundless
fury “would set on fire the course of
nature.”
The turmoil stirred by human
willfulness, like a violent storm at sea,
threatened to capsize the ark of the
universe, and the earth responded to this
threat in a terrifying version of the
pathetic fallacy, in which not empathy
but enmity arose between humans and
their natural environment.
Consequently, except for “the sovereign
pleasure of God, the earth would not
bear you one moment,” and Edwards
warned the Enfield congregation that
“the creation groans with you” and
resented its subservience to human
usurpation: “the sun don’t willingly
shine upon you to give you light to serve
sin and Satan; the earth don’t willingly
yield her increase to satisfy your lusts;
nor is it willingly a stage for your
wickedness to be acted upon; the air
don’t willingly serve you for breath to
maintain the flame of life in your vitals,
while you spend your life in the service
of God’s enemies. God’s creatures are
good, and were made for men to serve
God with, and do not willingly subserve
to any other purpose, and groan when
they are abused to purposes so directly
contrary to their nature and end.” A
rebellious humanity antagonized the rest
of creation, “and the world would spew
you out, were it not for the sovereign
hand of him who hath subjected it in
hope.”
The just order of the cosmos
would rightly destroy humanity for its
willful rebellion against the order of the
whole, and the fact that this had not
already happened was the expression of
something like the self-restraining mercy
of a monarch who does not order the
execution of a traitor who has offended
the royal honor: “The bow of God’s
wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready
on the string, and Justice bends the
arrow at your heart, and strains the bow,
and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of
God, and that of an angry God, without
any promise or obligation at all, that
keeps the arrow one moment from being
made drunk with your blood.”
The Great Awakening was
coterminous and interactive with the
eighteenth century development of the
modern physical sciences, especially
building on the work of Isaac Newton
(1642-1727). Edwards’s assumptions
about the harmonious order of creation
combined the science of his day with the
aristocratic social order of eighteenthcentury
society. In warning the town of
Enfield that it had transgressed the
cosmic order, Williams was also
asserting that it had violated the societal
aspect of that order; as minister, he
called the town to task for both
violations.
Conclusion
Edwards imagined the
Newtonian universe as an aristocratic
social hierarchy held in harmony by
sovereign law, at once moral and natural.
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In this hierarchy one member—the
human—had stepped beyond its
assigned place in the cosmic society and
now lived in an unwitting complacency,
ignoring the precarious finitude of a life
being pursued by a radical judgment:
“’tis nothing but [God’s] hand that holds
you from falling into the fire every
moment: ’tis to be ascribed to nothing
else, that you did not go to hell the last
night; that you was suffered to awake
again in this world, after you closed your
eyes to sleep: And there is no other
reason to be given, why you have not
dropped into hell since you arose in the
morning, but that God’s hand has held
you up.”
Like his contemporaries, the
deists and religiously inclined scientists
such as Newton himself, Jonathan
Edwards assumed the “Newtonian world
machine,” operating with the
metronomic regularity of natural law.
Presupposing both the science and the
aristocratic social hierarchy of his day,
Edward introduced anthropomorphic
language to create a clash between this
harmonious order and the willful selfinterest
of humans who dared to ignore
their proper rung on the ladder of
existence. As a preacher of penitence,
he carried his anthropomorphic imagery
to extravagant heights in order to induce
a reversal of behavior in a recalcitrant
town. The sermon effectively threatened
the people of Enfield with what
amounted to “metaphysical ostracism,”
an expulsion no less thoroughgoing than
the primordial ejection of Adam and Eve
from the garden. The palpable effect of
this imagery depended on the evocation
of the natural and social orders rising up
like, and yet unlike, an angry monarch to
crush rebels against the cosmic
commonwealth.
References
1 In the interests of clarity, I have
slightly rearranged and modernized this
quotation. It and all quotations from
Edwards’s sermon are taken from Jonathan
Edwards, Sermons and Discourses, 1739-
1742, ed. Harry S. Stout and Nathan O.
Hatch, with Kyle P. Farley, The Works of
Jonathan Edwards 22 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003), 404-18.
1 Social scientific analysis of the relation
between anthropomorphism and religion is
summarized by Steward Elliot Guthrie, who
argues “religion is anthropomorphism” in
his book Faces in the Clouds: A New
Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 178. The most
lucid and succinct historical treatment
remains Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth
Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1959).
1 I have in mind such authors as John
William Draper, History of the Conflict
between Religion and Science (1874), and
Andrew Dickson White, A History of the
Warfare of Science with Theology in
Christendom (1896). For a more recent
example, see Richard Dawkins, The God
Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2008).
1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2007), 270-95.
1 For a sampling of relevant recent
work, see Philip Husbands, Owen Holland,
and Michael Wheeler, eds., The Mechanical
Mind in History (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2008); and Lorraine Daston and Gregg
Mitman, eds., Thinking with Animals: New
Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
Ralph Waldo Emerson made the classic
American argument for the positive
reciprocity between the human and the
natural. This idea of mutuality takes a
different turn in our contemporary situation,
in which industrial and technological
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advances have begun to alter the climate and
thereby blurred the boundary between the
human and the natural in another way. See
for examples of this phenomenon, Bill
McKibben, The End of Nature (New York:
Random House, 1989).
1 Nicholas Epley, Adam Waytz, and
John Cacioppo, “On Seeing Human: A
Three-Factor Theory of
Anthropomorphism,” Psychological Review
114 (2007): 864-86.
1 Sheldon Sacks, ed., On Metaphor
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978); David Tracy, The Analogical
Imagination: Christian Theology and the
Culture of Pluralism (New York:
Crossroad, 1981).
1 Alain Besançon, The Forbidden
Image: An Intellectual History of
Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000); Joseph Leo Korner, The Reformation
of the Image (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004).
1 Merritt Y. Hughes, “Earth Felt the
Wound,” English Literary History 36
(1969): 193-214.
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Personifications of God
Jonathan Edwards wrote during a
time in which monarchs reigned
supreme. Writing from this perspective,
he argued that the universe is a cosmic
society organized under the leadership of
a King of kings, a society against which
humans have rebelled and, as a
consequence, humans are at risk of
annihilation except for the mercy of the
King. Judgment day will come,
according to Edwards, and those who
have failed to meet their moral
responsibility to the directive of the
universe face eternal isolation. Clark
Gilpin notes that by conjuring up a
personified God – a God with emotions,
intentions, and the capacity to act –
Edwards instilled great fear and
trembling in his listeners that
presumably motivated them to change
their behaviors in the desired direction.
It is hard to imagine that Edwards would
have had comparable success had he
resorted to simple instructions or
exhortations to engage in certain
behaviors and avoid others. The innate
tendency of people to understand divine
entities in terms of what people do
understand, namely their own thoughts,
feelings, and beliefs, provided the
leverage on which Edwards relied to
drive his message home.
Tanya Luhrmann also discusses a
personalized construction of God – a
God with whom one can consult and
who intervenes in one’s daily life.
People are intrinsically motivated to
form social connections, and very little
in life is more rewarding to people than
their social relationships. Luhrmann,
who adopts the perspective of a
participant observer, finds that a new
evangelical Protestant movement, the
Vineyard Church, appeals to this
motivation to depict God as one’s
personal guide and friend, well within
one’s sensory reach. By conjuring up an
anthropomorphic God with loving
emotions, intentions, and actions, the
Vineyard Church creates a desire for a
personal relationship with God. But
developing a relationship with an
invisible God defies rationality. People
must learn how to transform an abstract
concept of an invisible God into a
concrete sensory presence in their lives.
Just as the social brain can perceive
nonhuman objects as human, the social
brain is also capable of selectively
attending to sensory experiences and
interpreting these sensations as God’s
presence.
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Chapter 12 12
How Does God Become Real
How does God become real to
people when God is understood to be
12 The lead author is Tanya Luhrmann, Ph.D., a
professor in the Stanford Anthropology
Department. Her interests include the social
shaping of psychological experience, and the
way that social practice may affect even the most
concrete ways in which people experience their
world, particularly in the domain of what some
would call the “irrational”. Her first project was
a detailed study of the way apparently reasonable
people come to believe apparently unreasonable
beliefs (“Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft”,
Harvard, 1989). Her second project explored the
apparently irrational self-criticism of a
postcolonial India elite, the result of colonial
identification with the colonizers (“The Good
Parsi”, Harvard 1996). Her third book identified
two cultures within the American profession of
psychiatry and examined the way these different
cultures encouraged two different forms of
empathy and two different understandings of
mental illness (“Of Two Minds”, Knopf, 2000).
She trained at the University of Cambridge (PhD
1986), and taught for many years at the
University of California San Diego. Prior to
moving to Stanford she was the Max Palevsky
Professor and a director of the Clinical
Ethnography project in the Department of
Comparative Human Development at the
University of Chicago.
Religion is often understood as a matter
of belief: a yes/no proposition. This essay
suggests that it may be more helpful, and more
accurate, to understand religious commitment as
a response to sensory experience that can be
learned, and that the capacity to learn depends
upon one’s knowledge and belief, one’s
proclivity for experiencing the world in
particular ways, and the impact of devotional
practice.
invisible and immaterial, as God is
within the Christian tradition? This is not
the question of whether God is real, but
rather how people learn to make the
judgment that God is present. Such a
God is not accessible to the senses.
When you talk to that God, you can
neither see his face nor hear his voice.
You cannot touch him. How can you be
confident that he is there?
Anthropology cannot answer the
question of whether God is real. But the
traditional method of the discipline,
participant observation, can use the
slow, careful method of fieldwork to
explore the way that people learn to
experience God as present in their lives.
And what the method can teach us is that
this often intensely private and personal
relationship between a creature and its
creator is built through a profoundly
social process.
In fact, one of anthropology’s
most useful contributions to
understanding the experience of God is
to draw attention to just how much work
faith takes, and to the fact that different
kinds of faith—and different
understandings of God—demand
different kinds of work. Many who do
not believe in God approach the question
of religious belief as the problem of why
people should believe in the existence of
an invisible, intentional agent in their
world. One of the more persuasive
recent answers emerges from the
observation that many of our cognitive
traits evolved to help us survive.
Evolutionary anthropologists and
psychologists argue that belief in
invisible beings is an accidental
byproduct of the way our minds have
evolved over the millennia. Our quick,
effortless, automatic intuitions lead us to
“anthropomorphize,” or to see faces in
the clouds, as one scholar puts it. From
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this perspective, people believe in God
because it is so easy to believe in
invisible supernatural presence, and the
great religions are elaborations around
this basic core. 1
Belief in the Invisible
Yet it is also true that in many
ways it is hard for people to believe in
the invisible, intentional being of God, at
least in some ways and at some times. It
is one thing to believe in the abstract that
there is a good and loving God; it is
another thing to believe that this God
loves you in particular this very
afternoon when your car has broken
down in the rain. Many Christians
struggle at some point with whether God
exists or with whether they understand
God’s nature. A young man may come
to university as a devout Christian, take
a course on religion, and begin to
wonder whether Christ as well as
Krishna are cultural constructions. A
depressed woman may understand
herself as devout, but find that when she
sits down to pray she feels that no one is
listening to her prayers. And always
there are times when terrible things
happen to good and faithful people who
often continued to believe in God in the
abstract, but who find that they can not
longer pray at all. The struggle between
espoused religion (the religion one
asserts; the Nicene creed) and lived
religion (the way in which one
experiences God from moment to
moment) is central to the life of the
Christian, and perhaps to the lives of
most believers.
The problem for believers is that
to experience the Christian God as
present, one must override three basic
features of human psychology, features
that are also part of our evolutionary
inheritance. A person must override the
expectation that our minds are private,
an expectation so substantial that
researchers have shown that it develops
around the world at a more or less
similar age and can be found even in
non-human primates. A person must
override the expectation that persons are
visible. And finally, a person must
override the expectation that love is
conditional, as it is for all social beings
beyond a certain age, when right
behavior is expected as a condition of
human interaction. At least, some
versions of Christianity expect
unconditional love.
The deep puzzle of faith is not
why but how. How is it possible that
people are able to violate such
fundamental expectations of presence?
The answer, in part, is that they do not.
For most Christians, it will be a lifelong
process to believe in all times and in all
ways that their God is real for them in
the way that their church tells them that
God is real. As the psalmist laments:
“how long wilt thou forget me, Oh Lord?
For ever? How long wilt thou hide thy
face from me?” (Psalm 13: 1). What they
do to make God plausible for them
depends upon their understanding of
God and on what the social world of a
faith teaches about how to experience
their minds and bodies to find evidence
for God’s presence.
Learning to Sense the Presence of God
In 2004 I set out to study
ethnographically the way God becomes
real for people in a church that would
exacerbate the cognitive burden of
belief. I chose an example of the new
Protestant church that grew up after the
1960s. 2 Those churches set out as an
invitation to experience God as
concretely and as vividly as God had
been experienced by the earliest
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Christian disciples. This God is both
intensely human and intensely
supernatural. In these churches, God is
understood as so person-like that he
becomes someone to joke and argue
with, someone one chats to when
walking down the street, about the little
trivial things that matter only to the
congregant. Coming to know God in
such a church is described as to hear
God “speak.” Dallas Willard, a beloved
evangelical’s intellectual, puts it baldly:
that God’s face-to-face conversations
with Moses are the “normal human life
God intended for us.” I conducted
ethnographic fieldwork at a church that
exemplifies this approach to God, a
Vineyard Christian Fellowship in
Chicago and then on the San Francisco
peninsula (there were eight such
churches in Chicago and four on the
peninsula). For three years I went to
Sunday morning gatherings. I joined
three small groups, or housegroups, each
for a year; I went to conferences and
retreats; and I interviewed many
congregants casually and also more
formally about the way they experienced
God.
Overall, what I observed was that
the process of coming to know God in
such a church could best be described as
a mapping process in which the
congregants learn to use the familiar
experience of their own minds and
bodies to give content to the abstract
experience of God. This is the way that
humans learn most commonplace
abstract words, in effect cognitively
mapping from what we know to what we
can only imagine. God speaks: so
congregants learn to infer from their own
experience of inner speech the way in
which God talks to them. God relates: so
congregants learn to imagine a
relationship with God based on their
own experience of relationship. And
God loves: and congregants use their
own experience of being loved by a
human as an example of the way they
are loved by God. But unlike learning
about time, congregants also map back.
They build up a model of God by
interpreting out of their own familiar
experience into a representation shaped
by the social world of the church and the
narrative of the sacred text, and then
they seek to re-map their own interior
emotional experience by matching it to
this representation. This demands
constant effort, continual work on the
way one pays attention and interprets
one’s experience. As an ethnographer, I
could see three kinds of work.
First, God must be recognized as
present. What congregants learn to do is
to cherry-pick mental events out of the
everyday flow of their awareness, and to
identify that moment as other than
themselves, as being of God. God was
said to speak in several different ways.
He spoke through the Bible, so that a
verse “jumped out” at a congregant, or in
some way drew their attention. For
example:
“I was reading in [some book] and I
don’t even know why I was reading it.
There’s a part where God talks about
raising up elders in the church to pray
for the church. And I remember, it just
stuck in my head and I knew that the
verse was really important and that it
was applicable to me. I didn’t know
why. It was one of those, let me put it in
my pocket and figure it out later.” How
did she know that it was important?
“Because I just felt it. I just felt like it
really spoke to me. I don’t really know
why. And a couple of days later a friend
asked me to be on the prayer team and it
was like, wow, that’s what it was.”
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God spoke also through circumstances.
What a skeptic might interpret as
coincidence is understood as God’s
intentional decision to direct the
congregant’s attention. For example:
“Everything in my life right now is
focused on trying to get to England, and
I needed to get some ID pictures. So I
was really anxious—the money hasn’t
really come together—and one afternoon
I just felt like God said, you need to get
up and go get those. Go get those ID
pictures that you need. I was like, that’s
totally inefficient. I don’t have a car, so
it’s like walking half an hour to
Walgreens and another half an hour
back. Like, I could do this later and
combine it with several things I need to
get done. But I felt it was a step of faith
to do this thing. So I did it—grumbling.
Then on the way there and back I ran
into three people I knew, and I felt that
there was a kind of pattern, and that I
was in the right place at the right time.”
These ways of recognizing God are
widely shared in many forms of
Christianity. More specific to
experiential evangelical Christianity is
the expectation that God will speak
directly into the mind, by placing a
mental image or thought or sensation
there. For example:
“I’m praying for someone and, you
know, they say their situation, what they
want me to pray for. I start praying and
start trying to, you know, really
experience God, and, you know, I see
these vivid images, and I’m explaining
these vivid images and what I think they
mean and, you know, sort of checking in
with the person, you know, does this
resonate with you? They’re like “oh, my
gosh, yes! How did you know that?”
Most congregants find this process of
pulling out specific thoughts and
ascribing them to God baffling at first:
again, the process violates the basic
human experience that the mind is
private. A congregant commented: “now
I know that the ‘something’ is God,
God’s voice. But I didn’t at all have
words to describe it at that time I didn’t
understand. It was very confusing.”
The social world of the church
taught specific ways to differentiate
between mental events that are God and
that are not. This technique has been
taught in the church since the earliest
time as “discernment,” although the
content of the word and its rules has
varied with the era. In the modern
experiential evangelical church, the rules
of discernment are more often taught by
example and gossip than explicitly.
Nevertheless, there appeared to be four
principles. A thought might be said to
come from God if: the thought was
unexpected; the thought was consonant
with God’s nature; the congregant had
additional confirmation (one “tested” the
thought); and one felt peace during the
experience. The process was understood
to be ambiguous, and left room not only
for the congregant to be wrong, but for
different congregants to disagree about
whether God had, in fact, spoken in a
particular manner. One afternoon, a
woman spoke in front of the church
explaining that God had spoken to her
and told her that she should carry out
some mission work in a lovely part of
Mexico. The man sitting next to me said
drily, “God sure wants a lot of
evangelizing in Puerto Vallarta.”
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Second, God must be
experienced in relationship. Such
churches invite congregants to
experience God in their imaginations as
a person. Again, this violates a basic
psychological expectation: persons have
faces to observe and hands to shake.
Human relational interactions are based
on sensorial response. Churches like the
Vineyard explicitly suggest that one
should imagine a sensorial response
from God and encouraged congregants
to participate in a kind of let’s pretend
play in which God was present. The
pastor suggested one Sunday morning
that congregants should put out a second
cup of coffee for God, and sit down with
him to chat. People went on “date night”
with God. They would get a sandwich,
and sit down on park bench to talk with
God as they imagined his arm around
their shoulders. They would ask God
truly trivial questions like what shirt they
should wear in the morning and what
movie he thought they would like. These
behaviors were clearly play-like. One
congregant remarked: “I definitely do
that. When I can’t decide what to wear.
Like, God, what should I wear?” Then
she laughed. “And you know, then I kind
of forget about the fact that I asked God.
I think God cares about really, really
little things in my life. I mean I know
God cares, but I don’t expect him to tell
me what to wear. I’m like, Oh, I think
I’ll wear that and forget I even asked
God!” This invitation to play was C.S.
Lewis’ explicit contribution to twentieth
century Christianity: “let us pretend to
turn the pretense into a reality.” In
churches which encourage such play,
heresy fades in importance. The pastors
and the committed congregants worry
about “deadness,” not flawed imagining.
Third, congregants must learn to
respond emotionally to God as if God is
real. If God is real, a Christian (at least,
the modern evangelical Christian) should
experience the emotions that one would
feel if one were loved unconditionally.
Most do not. It is, in fact, difficult for
humans to experience themselves as
unconditionally loved because no matter
how warm and loving a parent may be,
at some point the child is expected to
control his or her behavior and parental
love will becomes contingent. The task
of feeling unconditionally loved imposes
upon the congregant not only the burden
of identifying and relating to an invisible
being, but experiencing emotions in
response to that being’s love which the
congregant rarely, if ever, truly
experiences. Congregants talk about the
experience of unconditional love as rare:
they speak of “those moments” when
one really feels God’s love.
I was driving home from grocery
shopping in the car and I stopped at a
light and suddenly for no reason that I
could come up with, I was weeping and I
felt a massive and awesome sense of the
presence of God in the car with me. It
just came and I had absolutely no control
over it. I pulled over to the side of the
road—I remember thinking that I was so
in love with Jesus at that moment that no
one else on the planet could come close.
After about twenty minutes of real
intensity the feeling subsided somewhat,
but the presence of Jesus stayed with me.
I drove home not really ever able to fully
express what happened without sounding
like I’d taken something illegal.
The more immediate aim seemed to be
to experience what Galatians 5:22-23
calls the “fruits of the spirit”: love, joy,
peace, patience and so forth. The social
life of the church was rich in emotional
practices which sought to reshape the
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congregants’ interior emotional world by
modeling the self on God, or on the self
as seen from God’s loving perspective.
One of the most important was prayer
ministry, where the person for whom the
prayer is given is often crying and in
visible pain; those around the person are
offering prayers which describe the ways
in which the sobbing person is loved by
God. Another was treating prayer like a
psychotherapy session. One congregant
explained: “It’s just like talking to a
therapist, especially in the beginning
when you’re revealing things that are
deep in your heart and deep in your soul,
the things that have been pushed down
and denied.” In these churches which
emphasize God’s love and intimacy, hell
and fear largely disappear.
The central demand of these
learning practices is to use one’s own
mental experience as evidence and
content for the responsive presence of
this God, who is believed to be other
than oneself, and to use pretend play to
integrate those mental events into a
representation that is persuasively
external to the self. The emotional
practices provide both direct evidence of
God’s love and, more generally,
evidence that participation in church is
satisfying and worthwhile. In effect the
process asks the congregants to carve
God out of their own experience and to
experience those phenomena as other;
and it uses the emotional practices taught
by the church and the social world of the
congregation to help them hold that God
separate and apart and lovingly
responsive.
This is hard work to do, and not
everyone was able to do it, or to do it
easily. Here two congregants describe
their difficulty in experiencing God
directly despite their efforts.
Jake: “I remember desperately wanting
to draw closer to God, and [to have] one
of these inspired Holy Spirit moments …
I wanted those [experiences] and I
sought them out, but I never found
myself encountering them”
Irene: “I don’t understand the gift of
prophecy completely. I’ll probably
never will and I don’t have it and I don’t
want it because it would scare me.”
Here is another congregant who has been
able to do so:
Nora: “It was pretty early on in my
relationship with him. I was just all full
of myself one morning. I just had
wonderful devotions and worships and
just felt so close. I went out, and it was
the most god-awful day. It was icy rain
and gray and cold and it was sleeting.
I’m just full of the joy of the Lord, and I
say, “God, I praise you that it isn’t
snowing, and that nothing’s
accumulating, and that the streets aren’t
icy”—and then I went around the corner,
and I hit a patch of ice, and just about
went down. It was so funny to me. I just
burst out laughing out loud. It was just
so funny that he would put me in my
place in such a slapstick personal kind of
way. But then he just graced me the rest
of the morning. The bus showed up right
away, which it never does. I was
reading, and I missed my stop to get off,
and I heard God say, “Get off the bus.” I
looked up and hollered, and the bus
actually stopped, half a block on, to let
me get off. I just felt that intimacy all
morning. Like when you go from
holding a new boyfriend’s hand to
kissing him goodnight ….”
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Some people experience God speaking
directly to them in an easy relationship.
Others do not.
As a result of my involvement
with the Templeton group, I decided to
carry out some quantitative and
experimental work to see whether we
could figure out the differences between
those who found it easy to do this work,
and those for whom it was difficult. That
work suggests that there is a
psychological capacity that makes the
process of knowing this kind of God
easier, though its absence does not
prevent religious experience, and its
presence does not predict it. It is the
capacity for absorption, which is at the
heart of imagination. Absorption is the
capacity to focus one’s attention on a
non-instrumental (and often internal)
object while disattending to everyday
exterior surrounds. Absorption is related
to hypnosis and dissociation, but not
identical to either. All of us go into light
absorption states when we settle into a
book and let the story carry us away.
There are no known physiological
markers of an absorption state, but as the
absorption grows deeper, the person
becomes more difficult to distract, and
his sense of time and agency begins to
shift. He lives within his imagination
more, whether that be simple
mindfulness or elaborate fantasy, and he
feels that the experience happens to him,
that he is a bystander to his own
awareness, more himself than ever
before, or perhaps absent, but in any
case different. And as the absorption
grows deeper, people often experience
more imagery and more sensory
phenomena, sometimes with
hallucinatory vividness. Scholars do not
discuss training in absorption, although
researchers of hypnosis and dissociation
are clear that some kind of practice
effects can be seen. 3
Conclusion
Prayer is basically training in
absorption, at least the kind of prayer in
which the person praying focuses
inwardly and disattends to the everyday
world in order to engage with God. It
would be hard to over-estimate the
importance placed on prayer and prayer
experience in a church like this and
indeed, in Christian America today.
Many of the best-selling Christian books
are books on prayer technique, and they
sell in the millions. Such books often
begin by presenting the concrete sensory
experience of God described in the
Hebrew Bible as the everyday
relationship for which the ordinary
believer should strive. In these manuals,
the act of praying is understood as a skill
that has to be deliberately learned. I
discovered that these evangelical
congregants assumed that prayer was a
skill which had to be taught, that it was
hard, that not everyone was good at it,
and that those who were naturally good
and well trained would experience
changes associated with a more richly
developed inner world. Their mental
images would seem sharper; they would
be more likely to report unusual sensory
experiences. They would be more able,
in short, to experience God. The more
quantitative work—done in
collaboration with Howard Nusbaum
and Ron Thisted--suggests that those
who have a proclivity for absorption and
who trained that proclivity through
prayer are indeed more able to
accomplish the demanding learning that
this concept of God sets out. 4 They are
more able to identify God’s presence in
their mind. They are more likely to
experience God as an invisible
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companion. They may be more capable
of responding to God emotionally.
All theologies have trade-offs.
This one offers an intensely personal and
person-like God. He can comfort, like a
friend, and respond directly, like a
friend. He can be like a real social
relationship for those who make the
effort to experience him in this way. But
because that social relationship lacks so
many features of actual human
sociality—no visible body, no
responsive face, no spoken voice—such
a theology demands a great deal of effort
from those who follow it. They must
constantly work with their attention,
reinterpreting the ordinary and natural
into the presence of the extra-ordinary
and super-natural. Faiths which manage
God differently—less personal, more
present in the everyday natural world—
make fewer demands on their followers’
attentional habits. But it may be,
perhaps, that such a God may be easier
to take for granted. Paradoxically, it may
be that this high-maintenance, effortful
God appeals to so many modern people
(as many as a quarter of all Americans,
according to a recent Pew study)
precisely because the work demanded
makes the God feel more real in a world
in which disbelief is such a real social
option.
References
1
Scholars who contribute to this
perspective include Scott Atran, Justin
Barrett, Pascal Boyer, Stewart Guthrie,
and Harvey Whitehouse.
2
These churches have been described by
Miller, D. 1997. Reinventing American
Protestantism. Berkeley: University of
California; see also Wuthnow, R. 1998.
After heaven: spirituality in America
since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of
California Press. A survey by the Pew
Foundation 2006 (Pew, 2006, Spirit and
Power: Ten nation survey. Pew Forum
on Religion and Public Life) found that
23% of all Americans belong to a
loosely similar style of “renewalist
Christianity.”
3
Good summaries of work on hypnosis
and dissociation, with some reference to
absorption, can be found in Spiegel, H.
and D. Spiegel. 2004[1978], Trance and
treatment. New York: Basic Books;
Seligman, R. and L. Kirmayer. 2008,
“Dissociative experience and cultural
neuroscience.” Culture, Medicine and
Psychiatry 32(1): 31-64; and Butler, L.
2006, “Normative dissociation.”
Psychiatric Clinics of North America.
29: 45-62.
4 The empirical work is presented in
Luhrmann, T., H. Nusbaum and R.
Thisted. 2010. “The absorption
hypothesis.” American Anthropologist.
March; cf. Tellegen, A. and G. Atkinson.
1974, “Openness to absorption and self
altering experiences (“absorption”), a
trait related to hypnotic susceptibility.”
Journal of Abnormal Psychology 83:
268-277
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Belief and Connection
We tend to think of beliefs as
wisps of the mind that have no power in
the material world. However, as Gary
Berntson and Louise Hawkley have
discussed, beliefs can affect our health
even to the extent of determining life
and death. As Tanya Luhrmann
discusses, in some forms of Christianity,
there is a real belief in the presence of
God. This is not simply a belief of God
in the world, but a belief of a God who is
by one’s side. The idea of God as a
friend and companion clearly motivates
the desire to make such a presence
manifest in tangible ways. For some, it is
the sense of God with which they
commune, for others it is what they
believe to be a sensory experience of
God that they seek. Luhrmann outlines
how this belief, coupled with a
supportive social structure, can lead to
powerful personal experiences, such as
hearing the voice of God, reflecting the
operation of our social brains.
Our sense of social connection is
not dependent on a single set of religious
beliefs, however. In human social
connections, we can form individual
relationships with a spouse or friends
but, as John Cacioppo outlined, there are
other kinds of connections that our social
brain seeks, as well. We seek
connections with emergent structures
such as groups, clubs, teams,
congregations, and beyond. Kathryn
Tanner argues that the belief that God
created the world and bears causal
responsibility for it serves to connect
believers to life in a broader way than is
provided through individual
relationships. This broader connection to
life does not depend on the manifestation
of a presence to whom we can talk
because the evidence of social
connection is apparent in the very fabric
of daily existence. Thus, whereas
Luhrmann discusses God as a palpable
friend that one can learn to attend to and
experience as an active presence in one’s
life, Tanner discusses God as the
initiator of life and the very fabric of
existence, a presence so ubiquitous that
there is no specific point on which one
can focus to attend to or experience God.
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Chapter 13 13
Theological Perspectives on God as an
Invisible Force
An individual’s beliefs about
God are one factor to be included in a
multi-dimensional investigation of the
social consequences and possible health
benefits of religion, an aid in particular
13 The lead author is Kathryn Tanner, Ph.D., the
Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Theology at
the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her
research relates the history of Christian thought
to areas of contemporary theological concern
using critical, social, and feminist theory, with a
special focus on the possible practical
implications of Christian beliefs and symbols.
She has lectured widely throughout the United
States and Europe, and is the author of six books:
God and Creation in Christian Theology:
Tyranny or Empowerment? (1988, Blackwell);
The Politics of God (1992, Fortress); Theories of
Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (1997,
Fortress); Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity (2001,
Continuum and Fortress Press); Economy of
Grace (2005, Fortress); and Christ the Key
(2010, Cambridge).
Christian beliefs are not just theoretical
matters, involving putative truth claims about the
nature of ultimate reality, but practical ones:
Christian beliefs are often promulgated with the
hope of impacting the way human beings live, by
establishing, for example, the meaningfulness of
and motivations for certain forms of social
behavior. Prior research has concerned the
possible economic, social and political
consequences of Christian beliefs about God's
relation to the world. This essay extends such
questioning to the topic of perceived social
isolation. How might belief in God as an
invisible force in everyday life affect an
individual's sense of social connection?
to scientific hypothesis generation. x
Scientists can better test for the social
and health consequences of religious
commitment when they know more
about the character and range of beliefs
about God that such commitment brings.
This chapter hopes to show, in
particular, that exactly what Christians
believe about the nature of God’s
influence on their lives is likely to have
an important bearing on one of the
questions of this volume: How can
religion encourage a sense of connection
to others, especially in situations of
perceived social isolation, and thereby
assuage the adverse health consequences
of loneliness?
Depending on what they think
God is like, Christians vary in the way
they expect God to be a present
influence on their daily lives. God’s
nature is supernatural or transcendent,
which means God is not very much like
any of the ordinary persons or things
with which they come into regular
contact. Christians use the same terms
for God that they use for talking about
ordinary persons and things but they
therefore know that neither set of terms
is really adequate to capture who or what
God is. On the one hand, God is
something like a human being in that
God loves them and wants to do them
good, and in that God is unhappy with
their failings and trying, through the use
of carrots and sticks, to get them to
change. But, on the other hand, God is
really not very much like an ordinary
human being in that God is present at all
times and everywhere, working
inexorably to bring about what God
intends throughout the entirety of
peoples’ lives by way of influences of
both personal and impersonal sorts--for
example, through personal words of
advice and warning found in the Bible as
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well as apparent accidents of fortune like
car crashes and the weather. Though
retaining personal characteristics such as
love or anger, God operates less like an
individual human person with limited
reach and partial interests, and more like
light, air or gravity do—quite
pervasively and constantly.
Usually one side or the other
comes to the fore in the way Christians
feel connected to God: for some
Christians the personal side of God is
central; for others, the more impersonal.
Thus, some Christians expect God to be
very much like a human friend, offering
companionship and good advice. xi As
Tanya Luhrmann explores in her essay,
their religious lives often revolve around
the internal sensory or imaginative
experiences that make a God of that sort
seem real to them--the sense that God is
in the room with them, that God speaks
to them, and so on. They work to
cultivate a prayer life that heightens the
vividness of those experiences and
thereby allays doubts about the actual
existence of this invisible, otherwise
seemingly unreal, divine friend. In short,
good practitioners of prayer gain a
stronger and more reliable sense that
God is present as a friend directing the
course of their lives.
Other Christians have
expectations of a more overarching and
impersonal sort about the way God is a
force in their lives; these expectations, I
suggest below, are the consequence of
their holding certain beliefs about God
as the creator, sustainer, and savior of
the world. In this case a strong sense of
God’s presence in one’s life does not
depend on having experiences of a
literally personal sort or on developing
the spiritual practices that help cultivate
such experiences. The sense that God is
present as an influence on one’s life is
rather something one feels all the time
simply in virtue of the beliefs one holds
about God and the world. Given a
particular construal of those beliefs—a
relatively impersonal one, I argue—
simply having those beliefs in mind,
with some awareness of their quite
obvious presuppositions and
implications, makes clear one is never
alone, never a self-sufficient operator. In
contrast to the understanding of God as
friend, here God’s invisibility does not
threaten to interrupt a sense of God’s
presence and influence. God’s
invisibility to the contrary enables the
sense of God’s presence and influence to
be the routine backdrop of all one’s
experience, to constitute a general
outlook on the world, no matter what the
circumstances.
Belief in Creation as a Backdrop to
the Whole of Life
For example, a common
Christian construal of the belief that God
is the creator of the world makes it
possible for the sense that God is with
one—one’s supporter and sustainer—to
be a constant feature of one’s life as a
whole. Contrary to first impressions,
God’s creation of the world need not
refer to the origin of the universe, or to
the beginning of its more specific
features or components. Were either to
be its meaning, belief in God as the
creator of the world could not be a very
central component of a generally
applicable Christian outlook, of much
relevance, that is, for more than the
occasional speculation about origins:
e.g., why am I here at all? The belief
concerns instead a causal dependence
upon God of a more continuous sort,
spanning, in short, the whole time of the
universe’s existence and therefore the
whole time of one’s individual life. To
be created by God is to exist in a relation
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of dependence upon God for what one is,
However, long one exists. xii A human
being therefore depends upon God for
more than the fact of his or her birth: he
or she remains dependent upon God in
the same way ever after. God’s creation
of the world in general is simply not
temporally indexed; it is no more closely
associated with the beginning of things
than with what comes later. A
preoccupation with temporal origins
therefore commonly drops out of
Christian accounts of creation: the world
is just as dependent upon God for its
existence whether it has a beginning or
always exists. xiii Belief in God’s creation
of the world for these reasons blurs into
belief in God’s supportive maintenance
of it at every point in time.
Also enabling belief in God as
creator to form a general backdrop to all
one’s experience—to be relevant on
every occasion as a universally
applicable worldview--is the fact that
God is thought to be responsible as
creator for the whole of what happens in
the world at any one time. To believe
that God is the creator of the world is at
the very least to believe that God holds
into existence the entirety of the world in
any and all respects in which it is good.
In the case of one’s own life, therefore,
every aspect of value at every moment—
one’s existence, fine qualities and
capacities, enjoyments and
achievements, beneficial connections
with natural and social environments,
and so on—is to be attributed to God’s
agency as creator. While there is a good
deal of disagreement within Christianity
on this matter, Christians, moreover, not
uncommonly affirm that God is equally
behind the bad things that happen, at
least insofar as those bad things can be
turned to good account--for example,
harm suffered turned into a salutary
pedagogical correction, just punishment
for sin, the necessary testing of one’s
faith, or simply a beneficial form of
sympathy with God’s own suffering on
the cross. For both the general reasons
just mentioned—because of its holism
and temporal inclusiveness--belief in
God as the creator of the world
encourages love, gratitude, and trust
toward God, and toward the world that
God brings about, as constant Christian
dispositions, basic Christian attitudes of
wide-ranging applicability, whatever
might be going on in one’s life.
Social Connectedness and Invisibility
The same all-inclusive causal
dependence upon God at all times is
what ensures individuals are never left
on their own, never abandoned to their
own devices. Christian theologians
(especially in the Protestant tradition)
usually develop the psychological
implications of this in terms of avoiding
either anxious or arrogant selfconcern.
xiv According to this theology,
one does not believe he or she ever
operates independently of God.
Therefore, one should never attribute
successes and achievements in a prideful
way to oneself, but rather one should
always give the glory to God as their
ultimate source. For the same reason,
one should never despair of failings, as if
one’s own inadequacies were the last
word; one believes a supremely
powerful and loving influence, God,
remains an operative force in one’s life,
However, desperate the situation
otherwise appears to be from the
standpoint of one’s own powers and
capacities to improve one’s lot in life.
By discouraging isolated selfregard
or self-understanding generally,
the same nexus of Christian ideas about
God as creator has clear consequences
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for loneliness or perceived social
isolation. Because they believe
themselves to be creatures of God,
Christians feel related to God whatever
happens. Whatever their social
circumstances--no matter, at the
extreme, how isolated or strong their
feelings of abandonment by human
others--individuals are to remember that
they remain in a relationship with God,
who is concerned about them. Even
when they feel themselves utterly
forsaken by others, Christians have
reason to believe God cannot be
forsaking them. They can believe they
are never alone even when they appear
to be absolutely so. In such
circumstances, Christians can always
avail themselves of a completely
counterfactual sense of social connection
with the best-connected “superfriend” of
all—the God who remains, they believe,
in a relationship of ultimately beneficial
causal efficacy with not just themselves
but everyone and everything.
It is the very unapparent,
counterfactual character of God’s
influence on human lives—the
invisibility of God’s influence, in short--
that permits Christians to perceive their
relationship with God as an unbreakable
constant. Because God’s influence is
unapparent or invisible Christians can
continue to believe God is operative for
creation’s benefit in the absence of any
of the obvious confirming evidence
required in ordinary cases of beneficent
human influence. Christians who believe
that God is a universal influence for
good as the world’s creator do not
expect God to be present in the way one
expects a human person to be; and
therefore God’s apparent absence, in
human terms, need not break down their
sense of being in relation to God.
Having God as one’s creator (in
the best case scenario) is like having a
perfectly loving human benefactor; but it
is the unusual invisibility of this
benefactor that allows Christians to think
God present even when not apparently
so. Being in a relationship with God for
Christians who believe God is a good
creator is something like being in a
relationship with a human person who
never lets one out of her sight and who
intends one’s good comprehensively. It
is, for example, very like being in a
relationship with a loving parent who is
fully responsible, not just for the fact of
one’s existence, but in a comprehensive
way for one’s nurturance throughout an
extended minority. Unlike a relationship
with an ordinary human person of that
sort, however, God is believed to be
invisible and this is what allows
individuals to assume God’s constant
presence, all appearances to the contrary.
The invisibility that underlies the
Christian affirmation of God’s constancy
here is a function of the very diffuseness
of God’s influence, a diffuseness of
influence no human person, invisible or
otherwise, could possibly match. Belief
in God as the creator of the world does
not encourage one to single out God as
the cause of any specific happening in a
way that suggests God is one cause
among many, the cause of this particular
happening rather than some other with a
different cause. Belief in God as the
creator of the world does not allow one
to identify God’s influence in overly
close fashion with any particular causal
influence of a beneficent sort. Instead, as
I have suggested, whatever is of benefit
to the individual, over the long or short
term, taken as a whole, is to be attributed
to God’s influence.
The Christian cannot, then, locate
or pick out God as one could a loving
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parent from within the field of variously
operative forces or influences on one’s
life, and for that reason the Christian
need neither fear God’s loss nor rue
God’s absence as one would such a
parent’s. Unlike relations with human
others, which are situation-sensitive and
thereby susceptible to change of
character, rupture, and decline, God,
Christians believe, is with one, whatever
happens, in exactly the same capacity--
as the creator and sustainer of whatever
it is that remains good about one’s life,
be that only at a minimum the bare fact
that one continues to live. The Christian
who believes God is his or her creator is
therefore confident that God continues to
work for his or her ultimate good, that
God is engaged in the effort to increase
it, whatever the impediments in human
life suggesting the contrary, absent, that
is, almost any confirming evidence.
The Problem of Inattention
Although invisibility and
apparent absence do not pose the same
problem here as they do when God is
one’s friend, this rather more impersonal
understanding of God’s influence as
creator and sustainer has its own
problem maintaining a strong sense of
connection to God. The diffuseness of
influence that lies behind God’s constant
invisible presence can prompt simple
Christian inattention to God. The very
monotony of the always pertinent
Christian affirmation that everything is
to be attributed to God can make that
affirmation recede from focal awareness,
make it fail to come focally to mind.
Belief in God’s uniform presence would
thereby become functionally
indistinguishable from the sense of
God’s absence. The invisibility of God
that follows from a belief in the
comprehensiveness of God’s influence
simply means in that case that God drops
out of sight and mind, drops out of
Christian consideration for most intents
and purposes, most of the time. Such a
God has little to offer as a “para-social”
entity, as a factor fomenting or
supplementing a sense of social
connection.
In the back of their minds
Christians may believe that God is the
source of everything, but they may not
feel compelled to consider that fact
actively in the course of their everyday
lives. God hides behind, so to speak, all
the creaturely influences that God is
working through, which become matters
of primary Christian preoccupation. At
the center of attention are all the
ordinary influences and connections with
one’s natural and human environments;
preoccupation with them pushes out of
focal awareness the fact of God as the
ultimate source of them all. Apart from
specifically religious obligations—say,
the demand to give God thanks and
praise at times of worship—Christians
who believe God is their creator would
have no particular reason to dwell on
that fact.
Christian theologians commonly
tie this sort of practical worry--about
what from a Christian point of view
amounts to sinful neglect of one’s
connection to God--to the understanding
of double agency in the account of
creation I sketched above. xv According
to that account, it is true, God’s
influence on human life does not have to
go by way of the human and natural
causal powers and influences on human
life that God creates; God can influence
human life without producing sufficient
created causes for what God wants to
happen in human life. (The Christian
claim that Jesus was resurrected from the
dead—an event without natural causes--
is a case in point, one that Christians are
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usually very reluctant to give up.) But
part and parcel of the account of creation
is the suggestion that God ordinarily
influences human life by bringing about
the very natural and human influences
that shape it. In general, because God
influences the world as its creator, God’s
working does not begin where created
causes break off; God works, instead, in
and through the created causes that God
brings about. Christians are therefore
able to give a double account of most
happenings in the world: one that
discusses what has happened in terms of
the coordinated created powers and
activities sufficient to explain it within
the created order; and one that talks
about God’s creative activity in bringing
about those same coordinated created
powers, activities, and their
consequences in their totality. It is the
sufficiency of the explanation in terms of
created causes—the self-containment of
that explanation within its own order—
that allows human beings to attend to the
created order without taking into account
the relationship of dependence upon God
that is its presupposition.
The temptation to lapse into
habitual obliviousness of one’s
relationship with God is easily
countered, however, by other beliefs
about God that Christians hold.
Christians do not just believe that God is
the creator and sustainer of the universe,
but believe a lot of other things about
God. For example, the common
Christian belief that God acts as more
than a creator in individual lives helps to
counter obliviousness to God. God does
not merely act as creator by giving
individuals the created gifts that make
them what they are—for example, their
own capacities and operations, the
ability to influence and be influenced by
their human and natural environments,
and so on. God also acts to give them
God’s very presence—by way, for
example, of their relationship with Christ
who Christians believe is God in human
flesh. The very presence of God in
human life means one’s relationship
with God cannot be ignored. The created
causes and influences, through which
God also influences human life,
consequently no longer have the same
capacity to distract human attention from
God.
Christians often believe,
moreover, that God’s direction of human
life by way of God’s own presence to or
within it is no optional matter: God’s
presence forms an essential component
of human life. In addition to created
capacities and influences brought about
by God, God’s presence is necessary for
ordinary human capacities to operate as
they should. xvi To be morally good, for
example, requires not just virtuous
capacities of one’s own, given to one by
God, but the presence of the Holy Spirit
within one. Knowing well requires not
just the formation of good ideas through
the usual human processes of
investigating one’s environment—the
entirety of which has its source in a good
creator God--but also a mind informed
by the very Word of God. And so on.
Such beliefs imply that attention
to God’s presence, some sort of Goddirectedness,
should be a constant
feature of an individual’s everyday,
ordinary life, in order for that life to be
lived well. The individual Christian is
accordingly given a reason to bring to
mind his or her relationship with God,
motivated to attend to that relationship
as much as possible, indeed, in the effort
to lead a better life. An active Godreference
becomes part of a prospective,
goal-oriented process of self-reformation
Page | 126
in accord with what is believed to be
God’s intentions for one.
Beliefs like this about God’s
presence as a constituent feature of
human operations are at times
incorporated by Christians within an
account of creation: God’s presence to
or within them is then believed to be an
element of what God as the creator of
the world gives to every human being;
and is in that sense part of the natural or
ordinary constitution of human life that
God intends in creating the world. xvii But
more often than not the gift of God’s
presence as an effective influence on
human life is specifically associated by
Christians with salvation. Human beings,
Christians typically believe, have either
lost altogether, or at a minimum,
habitually fail to attend properly to a
presence of God always theirs, in ways
that corrupt human well-being. The
Christian claim is that God saves human
beings by giving them the presence of
God as an effective force for human
transformation in virtue of something
that Jesus suffers or accomplishes.
God acts as an invisible force in
human lives here because God
influences humans through God’s very
presence. Christians, if they follow the
common teaching of theologians in this
regard, believe God is invisible or
unapparent because God is not capable
of being delimited or circumscribed by
the usual boundary drawing and sorting
mechanisms used to cordon off and pin
down other things. xviii God is not, in
short, a kind of thing, set off by clear
boundaries that distinguish God from
what God is not. But there is also here
the kind of invisibility discussed earlier:
the invisibility of apparent absence in
human terms.
Christian claims about salvation
often have an eschatological edge. They
frequently point, that is, to an end time,
indefinitely deferred from the
perspective of anything achievable in
this life. What God gives to remedy the
sin of human life through Christ is,
accordingly, not commonly thought to
be fully effective in any visible way in
this life. Christians typically think that
their connection to Jesus brings with it a
new availability of the presence of God
as a force for change in their lives, but
what they expect to achieve by way of
that constantly available relationship
remains invisible in the form of an
always deferred hope. Once again it is
invisibility—here the invisibility of the
revolutionary changes in one’s life for
which one continues to hope--that
permits Christians to believe the
presence of God, made available to them
in a new way in Christ for the very
purpose of bringing about those changes,
is nevertheless always with them.
Conclusion
The main intention of this
chapter was to make the case that basic
Christian beliefs are likely to have a
bearing on perceived social isolation.
After suggesting that Christianity is not
all of a piece on that score, I developed a
particular construal of basic Christian
beliefs that would seem to have great
potential to alleviate perceived social
isolation through attention to connection
with God. While that argument was
merely a logical or prima facie one, it
forms a testable—though as yet
untested—hypothesis: Does the
particular construal of the beliefs
commended here for their
encouragement of a focal sense of
constant connection with God really
have those consequences? Do people
actually feel less lonely, in other words,
Page | 127
when they hold such beliefs? Can they
be made to feel less lonely by calling
them to mind? More specifically, how
does the influence of this construal on
feelings of social isolation compare with
that of other construals—for example, a
construal that directly associates God’s
creative influence with the irredeemable
bad? How might the stronger sense of
God’s presence in the hardships one
suffers balance out in the latter case
against the unhappy quality of the
connection? Might one feel oneself to be
better off alone, in other words, if God is
as much one’s tormentor as one’s
benefactor? Finally, comparable
problems to the ones for belief surface in
the more experience-driven God-asfriend
outlook in Christianity, and make
experimental testing pertinent. xix If the
problem in both cases is that a strong
sense of connection with God is hard to
sustain—because God is invisible in the
one case or crowded out by more
obviously pressing matters in the
other—how is the imaginative force of
the idea of relationship with God better
shored up? By imagining that one is on a
date with God, or by imagining that God
is always all around one like the air one
breathes or the sun that shines? And
what works for the greater number of
people? What if the former imaginative
capacities are hard to cultivate, and
require in any case exceptional abilities
of concentration or inward focus that
many people lack? Might beliefs be
easier for most people to hold in mind
without sustained or disciplined
practice? A simple visit to church or
occasional perusal of a prayer book
would do?
References
1 
For
the
general
importance
of
belief
for
such
investigation,
see
the
essays
by
W.
Clark
Gilpin
and
Tanya
Luhrmann
in
this
volume.
1 
See
Luhrmann
in
this
volume.
1 
Thomas
Aquinas
is
one
prominent
theologian
in
the
Christian
tradition
who
highlights
this
idea:
“creation
.
.
.
is
the
very
dependency
of
the
created
act
of
being
upon
the
principle
[God]
from
which
it
is
produced.”
Summa
Contra
Gentiles,
Book
Two:
Creation,
trans.
James
F.
Anderson
(Notre
Dame
and
London:
University
of
Notre
Dame
Press,
1975),
chapter
18,
section
2,
p.
55.
1 
See
again,
for
example,
Thomas
Aquinas,
Summa
Contra
Gentiles,
Book
Two:
Creation,
chapters
31‐38,
pp.
91‐115.
1 
See,
for
example,
Martin
Luther,
Lectures
on
Galatians
(1535),
in
Luther’s
Works,
ed.
Jaroslav
Pelikan
(St
Louis,
Missouri:
Concordia
Publishing
House,
1964),
vols.
26‐27.
1 
Thomas
Aquinas
again
provides
a
clear
theological
exposition
of
this
view.
See,
for
example,
his
Summa
Contra
Gentiles,
Book
Three:
Providence,
Part
1,
trans.
Vernon
J.
Bourke
(Notre
Dame
and
London:
University
of
Notre
Dame
Press,
1975),
chapter
70,
section
8,
p.
237:
“It
is
also
apparent
that
the
same
effect
is
not
attributed
to
a
natural
cause
and
to
divine
power
in
such
a
way
that
it
is
partly
done
by
God,
and
partly
by
the
natural
agent;
rather,
it
is
wholly
done
by
both.”
1 
For
prominent
examples
of
such
a
view
in
the
history
of
Christian
thought,
see
Augustine,
The
Literal
Meaning
of
Genesis,
trans.
John
Hammond
Taylor
(New
York:
Newman
Press,
1982),
chapters
10‐12,
pp.
49‐51;
and
Cyril
of
Alexandria,
Commentary
on
the
Gospel
According
to
John,
trans.
P.
E.
Pusey
(Oxford:
James
Parker,
1874),
Book
1,
chapters
7‐9,
pp.
66‐87.
1 
See,
for
example,
Athanasius,
“On
the
Incarnation
of
the
Word,”
trans.
Archibald
Robertson,
in
Philip
Schaff
and
Henry
Wace
(eds.),
Nicene
and
Post‐Nicene
Fathers,
vol.
IV,
Second
Series
(Grand
Rapids,
Michigan:
Eerdmans,
1957),
sections
3‐5,
pp.
37‐39.
1 
See,
for
example,
Gregory
of
Nyssa,
“Answer
to
Eunomius’
Second
Book,”
trans.
M.
Day,
in
Philip
Schaff
and
Henry
Wace
(eds.),
Nicene
and
Post‐
Page | 128
Nicene
Fathers,
vol.
V,
Second
Series
(Peabody,
Massachusetts:
Hendrickson,
1994),
p.
257.
1 
See
Luhrmann
in
this
volume.
Page | 129
The Elusiveness of Meaningful
Connection
Kathryn Tanner’s chapter has
developed the classical Christian idea
that God is the creator and sustainer of
the world, in order to suggest the ways
in which this notion of the creator might
be one factor providing persons with a
sense of social connection and a hopeful,
generous, and caring disposition toward
the world that assuages the adverse
health consequences of loneliness. In
this classic interpretation of God as
creator, the idea refers not to the origins
of the universe but rather to the allinclusive
dependence of life upon God at
all times. This sense of a sustaining
divine presence spanning the whole time
of one’s life thus contributes a deep
sense of one’s connection to the whole
order of creation. However, as Tanner
notes, people may become inattentive to
a presence so pervasive, just as people
can become inattentive to the forces of
gravity holding them to the surface of
the Earth as they go about their everyday
life. In more extreme versions of this
inattention, the person understands
humanity as “alone” in the universe, a
sort of metaphysical loneliness that
might exacerbate more concrete feelings
of loneliness.
Perhaps surprisingly, Chris Masi,
from the perspective of a physician and
medical researcher, casts a fascinating
and fresh perspective on the theological
notion that we live in a sustaining
connection to creation as a whole. After
describing the negative health
consequences of loneliness, Masi
proceeds to describe a cycle of
loneliness in which a person’s sense of
isolation frustrates well-intended efforts
to make social connections. Masi finds
that efforts to intervene and break this
cycle are not notably successful, in large
part because the preconscious
disposition of lonely people toward the
world is difficult to change. Like Tanner,
although using different terminology,
Masi’s review of the scientific literature
suggests both that the character of one’s
general disposition toward the world is
profoundly important for one’s
connections to others, and that the
processes by which these general
dispositions change are complex and
warrant further scientific attention.
Page | 130
Chapter 14 14
Visible Efforts to Change Invisible
Connections
14 The lead author is Christopher M. Masi, M.D.,
Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department
of Medicine at the University of Chicago. He is
co-founder of Every Block A Village Online, an
Internet-based community development
program, and is past president of the Illinois
chapter of Physicians for a National Health
Program. He is the current president of the
Midwest Society of General Internal Medicine
and has received numerous awards, including a
Models That Work Award from the United
States Bureau of Primary Health Care and the
New Investigator Health Sciences Research
Award from the Gerontological Society of
America. With a medical degree, as well as a
PhD in social service administration, Dr. Masi’s
research focuses on the socioeconomic factors
underlying health disparities. He currently has
two projects, one aimed at developing an
intervention to reduce loneliness and one focused
on the role of sex hormones in gender, age, and
racial differences in cardiovascular disease. He
is a reviewer for several scientific journals and
grant-making organizations and has published
research and reviews on diverse topics, including
health insurance reform and racial disparities in
breast cancer and hypertension.
Human capacity for creativity,
compassion, and learning is unparalleled in the
animal kingdom. However, humans reach their
full potential only when they are socially
engaged. Lack of social engagement impairs
creativity and learning, and limits opportunities
for caregiving and emotional growth. Numerous
studies have shown that loneliness is also a risk
factor for illness and premature mortality.
Because loneliness is increasing in modern
society, it is critically important to understand
this condition, as well as strategies to reduce it.
This essay describes our review of the literature
regarding loneliness reduction interventions.
The 17 th century English
philosopher Thomas Hobbes proposed
that without the organizing structure of
government, humans would experience
bellum omnimum contra omnes (war of
all against all) and life would be
“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short”(1). While this colorful description
is often quoted, less attention is paid to
Hobbes’ premise that such misery can be
avoided if humans codify and enforce
the rules of a civil society. Not everyone
agrees with Hobbes’ views, but history
is replete with examples of human
misery when anarchy reigns and of
relative peace when a social contract is
observed. A question that philosophers
continue to debate is whether
collaboration for mutual benefit is part
of human nature or whether promotion
of the self above all others is man’s
primary motivation. In this volume,
Cacioppo argues that sociality is an
integral part of human nature. He notes
that given each child’s prolonged period
of total dependence, survival into childbearing
age depends entirely upon the
support and protection of adults, most
often parents or kin. As a result, those
who survive long enough to procreate
pass along genes for nurturing and
protection, thereby hardwiring a form of
sociality into our genetic code.
This protective behavior helps
ensure that genes within a family are
passed on to future generations.
Cooperation among unrelated adults or
the support and protection of children by
adults exists beyond kin, as well,
because these activities also provide
survival benefit. Examples from early
human existence include hunting and
gathering, which are more likely to
succeed when pursued as a group than
individually. To these structural benefits
Page | 131
of non-familial sociality, we may now
add physiological benefits. A 1979
population-based study showed that
adults lacking social ties were 1.9 to 3.1
times more likely to die during a 9-year
follow-up than those who had more
social contacts, all else being equal (2).
Since then, at least five population-based
prospective studies (3) and numerous
smaller studies have found positive
associations between social integration
and either survival or improved health
outcomes. The mechanisms by which
social integration enhances survival are
several and include improved health
behaviors, increased access to resources
and material goods, and strengthened
immunity against infection (4).
Whereas sociality is a normal
state, loneliness is an unusual state, akin
to hunger, thirst, or pain (5). As with
those states, loneliness is unpleasant and
serves to remind us that we should
change the status quo. Therefore,
loneliness can be an adaptive motivator
for increased social surveillance and
interaction. Unfortunately, not all
individuals succeed at achieving the
level of social connectedness they desire
and suffer instead from chronic feelings
of loneliness. Cacioppo and others have
shown that lonely individuals interpret
events and social interactions more
negatively than non-lonely individuals.
As a result, they unconsciously develop
defense mechanisms, including social
barriers, which shield them from insults
and rejection. While this approach may
achieve its goals of self-protection, it
also reduces opportunities for positive
social interactions and perpetuates
feelings of social isolation (5). John
Bunyan, a 17 th century Christian writer
and preacher, described the barriers
associated with loneliness when he
wrote of a vision in which he
“saw the people set on the sunny
side of some high mountain,
there refreshing themselves with
the pleasant beams of the sun,
while I was shivering and
shrinking in the cold, afflicted
with frost, snow, and dark
clouds. Methought, also, betwixt
me and them, I saw a wall that
did compass about this mountain
(6).”
For chronically lonely people,
the wall between themselves and others
is partly of their own making and
reflects continuous surveillance for
negative signals from others (5). The
challenge is to help lonely individuals
break down the barriers between
themselves and others and ultimately
return to the normal state of sociality. In
his vision, Bunyan achieved this, but
only through great effort:
“About this wall I thought
myself, to go again and again,
still prying as I went, to see if I
could find some way or passage,
by which I might enter therein,
but none could I find for some
time. At the last, I saw, as it
were, a narrow gap, like a little
doorway in the wall, through
which I attempted to pass; but the
passage being very strait and
narrow, I made many efforts to
get in, but all in vain, even until I
was well-nigh quite beat out, by
striving to get in; at last, with
great striving, methought I at first
did get in my head, and after that,
by a sidling striving, my
shoulders, and my whole body;
then I was exceeding glad, and
went and sat down in the midst
of them, and so was comforted
with the light and heat of their
sun (6).”
Page | 132
Genetic studies indicate that
heritability accounts for approximately
50% of loneliness while social
circumstances account for the other 50%
(7). Research also suggests that
loneliness is common - reported by as
many as 20 percent of the population at
any given time (8). In addition, some
evidence suggests that the prevalence of
loneliness may be increasing, at least in
the U.S. A recent national survey found
a threefold increase in the number of
Americans who indicated they had no
confidant or person with whom to
discuss important matters (9). Although
differences between this survey and its
1985 predecessor may be sufficient to
account for this increase, this suggestive
report raises the possibility that
contemporary societal factors may be
interfering with the natural tendency for
humans to form meaningful, long-term
social connections. One factor is social
mobility, which increased dramatically
during the 20 th century. A second is the
aging of the U.S. population. In 1900,
4.1% of Americans were 65 years or
older. By 2006, that percentage had
increased to 12.4%, representing 37.3
million Americans (10). With less value
placed on older individuals in the U.S.,
we have witnessed an increase in
marginalization of this segment of
society. Third, as life expectancy
increases, more elders are living longer
as widows or widowers and are therefore
at increased risk for loneliness. Other
factors which may place Americans at
increased risk for loneliness include less
intergenerational living, delayed
marriage, increased dual- career
families, increased single-residence
households, and increased age-related
disabilities and health conditions. Given
the mental and health risks associated
with loneliness described in Hawkley’s
chapter, interventions are needed to help
lonely individuals regain normal social
connections. As Bunyan’s account
suggests, breaking through the wall of
loneliness may require considerable
effort. When individual effort is not
sufficient, assistance from others may be
needed. Unfortunately, contemporary
interventions to reduce loneliness have
fared more poorly than has been
recognized.
Repairing Broken Connections
Almost a century ago, scholars
began to propose strategies for reducing
loneliness. Karen Rook (11), for
instance, amassed over 40 interventions
dating back to the 1930’s in her attempt
to identify effective loneliness reduction
strategies. Since Rook’s review, five
scientific publications have provided
qualitative reviews of strategies to
reduce loneliness, social isolation, or
both (12-16). The most recent
publication identified 30 interventions
published between 1970 and 2002 (16),
and evaluated the effectiveness of those
intervention studies that were not flawed
by poor design. Among the thirteen trials
deemed to be of high quality, six were
considered effective, one was considered
partially effective, five were considered
ineffective, and one was inconclusive.
The authors’ conclusions were similar to
those of prior reviewers who found that
interventions which emphasized social
skills training and/or group activities
were the most successful.
However, qualitative reviews are
subject to invisible biases that can color
our judgments of the scientific evidence
we see. Thomas Kuhn, a 20 th century
physicist and epistemologist, noted that
scientists too easily accept results which
conform to previous intuitions and too
readily reject results which do not (17).
Page | 133
In the case of loneliness interventions,
all of the reviews essentially confirmed
the findings of previous reviews that
social skills training and group-based
interventions can succeed in reducing
loneliness. Is this conclusion justified, or
is this a case in which prior conclusions
have been perpetuated in the manner
Kuhn describes?
To combat bias favoring results
that confirm dominant theories, some
scientists have argued that specific study
criteria should be met to warrant an
evaluation of the effectiveness of the
intervention (18). These criteria include
random assignment of study participants
to receive the intervention, evidence that
the intervention is more effective than no
intervention, findings that are replicated
by at least one independent research
group, and results that are published in
peer-reviewed journals. Previous
reviewers of loneliness interventions
have, in fact, placed a premium on
randomized trials that contrast a group
randomly selected to receive the
intervention with a group randomly
selected to receive no intervention.
However, none has employed metaanalysis,
a quantitative technique for
calculating the average effect of diverse
interventions designed to accomplish the
same goal. Whereas qualitative reviews
are subjective and vulnerable to
confirmatory biases, quantitative reviews
are objective and relatively impervious
to bias as long as all relevant studies are
included in the analysis.
To minimize bias in our metaanalysis,
we first combed the literature
to identify all the intervention studies
that specifically targeted loneliness. To
further meet our criteria for inclusion in
the meta-analysis, studies had to be
published in a peer-reviewed journal or
as a doctoral dissertation (to ensure the
scientific integrity of the findings),
between 1970 and 2009 (to include and
extend the time interval reviewed
qualitatively in prior research), and had
to measure loneliness quantitatively.
Fifty-two intervention studies for
loneliness met our inclusion criteria.
These studies were divided into three
categories based on the experimental
design used to assess the effects of the
intervention. Twelve studies used a
single group pre-post design in which
loneliness among participants was
assessed at baseline and again after
exposure to the intervention. The single
pre-post design is weak in terms of
measuring the effectiveness of an
intervention, however, because
individuals who have high scores on a
loneliness measure on one occasion are
likely to score less extremely on a
second occasion even if no intervention
had occurred. Said differently, people
whose measurements suggest they are
very lonely at one point in time, on
average, appear to be less lonely when
measured at a later point in time. Our
meta-analysis of these studies indicated
there was indeed a lowering of
loneliness as measured before and after
the interventions, but we cannot
conclude from this evidence that the
reductions in loneliness were due to the
interventions.
Eighteen studies utilized a nonrandomized
group comparison design in
which some of the participants sought
out the intervention (the experimental
group) while others (the control group)
did not. In this design, assignment of
individuals to the experimental or
control groups was based upon
convenience, participant preference, or
some other factor, which means the
groups that did and did not receive the
intervention may differ in ways that
Page | 134
explain different outcomes in the two
groups. For example, people who
volunteer to be in the experimental arm
of a study may be more gregarious by
nature and may be more likely to
become less lonely over time regardless
of exposure to the intervention. Results
of the meta-analysis suggested the
interventions might be effective, but to
know it’s the intervention and not an
artifact of subject selection, we need to
look at the effect of these interventions
when assessed using randomized group
comparison designs in which
participants are randomly assigned to the
experimental or control group.
Twenty-two studies utilized such
a design. Quantitative analysis revealed
that, on average, the interventions had a
small but significant effect in reducing
loneliness. Moreover, efficacy in
reducing loneliness did not differ
significantly as a function of
intervention strategy nor as a function of
individual- versus group-based
implementation. Whereas once a
consensus existed that social skills
training and/or group activities could
reduce loneliness, we found insufficient
evidence to support that conclusion.
Why have successful
interventions to reduce loneliness been
so elusive? There are several possible
reasons. Some of the interventions have
been designed with the notion that if
only lonely individuals had better social
skills they would be able to form
satisfying connections with others.
However, recent research suggests that
at least for most adults, the social skills
they know are not related to the
loneliness they feel. Other interventions
have been developed with the notion that
lonely individuals simply need to
interact more with others, so the
interventions are designed to increase
contact with others. However, people
not only tend to like lonely individuals
less than nonlonely individuals, lonely
individuals are especially negative
toward other lonely individuals.
Therefore, bringing lonely individuals
together is unlikely to result in warm,
satisfying social connections. Finally,
some interventions were designed with
the notion that what lonely individuals
need is social support, such as someone
who is available to provide help when
needed. However, loneliness affects not
only how people think, but how people
think about others: loneliness
diminishes people’s executive
functioning and biases them to see others
as threatening and rejecting even when
they are not (5).
Cacioppo and Patrick (5)
proposed a framework for reducing
loneliness which includes four elements.
First, unconscious barriers that
chronically lonely people develop to
shield against being hurt by others tend
to reduce their likelihood of having
positive social interactions, and they
may benefit, therefore, from
encouragement and practice in forming
social connections gradually in “safe”
environments where threat of rejection is
minimal. For instance, because
chronically lonely people are selffocused
in their hypervigilance for social
threat, they may benefit from learning to
shift their attention from themselves to
others through other-oriented activities
such as volunteerism. The notion is to
intervene to diminish or eliminate the
negative effects loneliness can have on
social perception and cognition. Second,
we tend to think of loneliness as the
same thing as a personal weakness, as
being a social isolate, being depressed,
or being weak. As noted above, we now
know these accounts to be incorrect, and
Page | 135
that acute loneliness, just like acute
physical pain, serves an important
biological function for our species.
Being aware of how loneliness fits into
our remarkable achievements as a social
species and what loneliness does to our
social cognition and behavior can help
us better understand the actions of others
toward us. Third, to the extent that
desperation for social connections leads
chronically lonely individuals to
misguidedly vest their interest in those
who are unlikely to meet their
relationship needs, they may need to
learn how to be selective and choose
friends and groups with whom
reciprocally rewarding relationships can
be expected. This decision is critical to
success. Research indicates that the
people with whom we are most likely to
form positive, lasting relationships are
those who have similar attitudes, beliefs,
values, interests, and activities to our
own. Therefore, people should not seek
friendships based on physical
appearance, status, popularity, or
convenience, but rather on attitudes,
beliefs, values, and behaviors. Finally,
because chronically lonely people expect
to be disappointed with themselves and
others in their relationships, they may
benefit from training and practice in
taking a more optimistic perspective, in
expecting the best from themselves and
from others. We play a much more
important role in shaping our social
environment than we often realize.
Although no intervention to date
has incorporated all of these elements, at
least one randomized trial has
demonstrated that an intervention based
upon volunteerism (Experience Corps)
can increase social activity in older
adults (19). In this trial, older adults are
paired with grade-school children and
dedicate at least fifteen hours per week
throughout the school year to assist the
teachers in supporting and encouraging
children in reading, writing, and
mathematics. This strategy engages at
least two of the principles that emerged
out of Cacioppo and Patrick’s theoretical
framework (5)—the provision of a
“safe” venue for making social
connections (i.e., the classroom of nonthreatening
children), and the shifting of
older adults’ attention away from their
own concerns and toward the needs of
someone else. In addition, this strategy
capitalizes on Erikson’s notion of
generativity (i.e., helping future
generations) (20). Interventions of this
form deserve further assessment (21).
Conclusion
We began this chapter by noting
that loneliness is not uncommon and,
although unpleasant, may prompt
individuals to attend to and repair their
social connections. Loneliness affects
cognition as well as well-being,
however, and when loneliness persists it
is a risk factor for myriad health
problems. Previous reviewers have
suggested that loneliness can be reduced
through interventions that emphasize
social skills development and groupbased
activities. By quantitatively
analyzing twenty-two well-designed
studies, we found no evidence that these
strategies were any more effective in
reducing loneliness than increasing
social opportunities or social support, or
modifying maladaptive social
cognitions, whether in a group or
individual context. A larger number of
intervention studies may be needed to
determine the relative efficacy of these
intervention strategies. In the interim, it
is clear from this review that global
impressions and intuitions will not
suffice when trying to reduce loneliness.
Future interventions should
Page | 136
acknowledge that loneliness is not
synonymous with social isolation but is a
social pain that functions to motivate the
formation and renewal of meaningful
social relationships. When feelings of
loneliness fail to accomplish their
adaptive purpose, chronic loneliness
may ensue. Chronic loneliness tends to
be self-perpetuating through
confirmatory biases that alter cognitions,
emotions, and behaviors. Given the
importance of social connection to
people’s health and well-being, it is
important that we solve the puzzle of
how to help the chronically lonely
connect with others in meaningful and
satisfying ways.
References
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3. House JS, Landis KR, Umberson
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5. Cacioppo JT, Patrick W.
Loneliness: Human Nature and
the Need for Social Connection.
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6. Bunyan J. Grace Abounding to
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characteristics, effectiveness, and
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16. Cattan M, White M, Bond J,
Learmouth A. Preventing social
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17. Kuhn TS. The Structure of
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Page | 138
Reflections on Invisible Connections
Echoing a prominent theme in
this volume, Christopher Masi highlights
once again the centrality of social
connectedness for human well-being and
the function of loneliness in signaling a
rupture in a sense of social
connectedness. One might reasonably
expect that a social species like Homo
sapiens would have a sufficiently large
behavioral repertoire to be able to
resolve feelings of isolation and restore a
sense of social connectedness. Although
resolution is accomplished readily in
some instances for some people some of
the time, the reality is that at times
people are at a chronic loss for how to
satisfy their need for social connection.
Unfortunately, the invisible bonds of
social connection are not easily repaired.
We see others’ social activity, but we do
not see how they feel about their social
lives and sense of connection. Despite
our inability to recognize loneliness in
others, or, as Nick Epley and Jean
Decety argued earlier in this volume,
because of this handicap in seeing into
the minds of others, we tend to attribute
to others what we ourselves have felt or
would expect to feel in particular
circumstances. Is it any surprise that we
target for intervention those
circumstances where we observe few
opportunities for social interaction,
inadequate social skills, and poor social
support? On the other hand, because
loneliness is in the mind of the sufferer,
it is perhaps surprising that we would
expect changes in objective social
circumstances to be sufficient to
alleviate loneliness in all its sufferers.
Masi provides a quantitative review of
strategies employed to alleviate
loneliness to show that interventions to
date have been only modestly successful
in reducing feelings of loneliness,
attesting to the challenge of effectively
addressing the problem of ruptured
social connections.
Invisibility should not thwart
attempts to alleviate distress, however.
Biological causes of disease were no
more visible or evident in the 18 th
century than psychological causes are
today. Yet significant scientific advances
during the 19 th and 20 th centuries
completely revolutionized medical
practice, life expectancy, and quality of
life. Farr Curlin is less interested in the
invisible causes of disease than in the
primordial need for social connection
that John Cacioppo introduced and that
Curlin regards as a preexistent condition
for medicine. If science can be viewed as
a cognitive system that steps us back so
that we can deal more objectively and
effectively with another person’s
distress, then religion can be viewed as a
cognitive system that steps us forward to
connect and care for others. Curlin
argues that the practice of medicine
requires a balance of these forces, and
that the resulting tension between the
two produces better care for the patient
than does the practice of medicine using
either alone.
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Chapter 15 15
15 The lead author is Farr A. Curlin, M.D., a
hospice and palliative care physician, researcher,
and medical ethicist at the University of
Chicago. His empirical research charts the
influence of physicians' moral traditions and
commitments, both religious and secular, on
physicians' clinical practices. As an ethicist he
addresses questions regarding whether and in
what ways physicians' religious commitments
ought to shape their clinical practices in our
plural democracy. Curlin and colleagues have
authored numerous manuscripts published in the
medicine and bioethics literatures, including a
New England Journal of Medicine paper titled,
“Religion, Conscience and Controversial
Clinical Practices.” As founding Director of the
Program on Medicine and Religion at the
University of Chicago, Dr. Curlin is working
with colleagues from the Pritzker School of
Medicine and the University of Chicago Divinity
School to foster inquiry into and public discourse
regarding the intersections of religion and the
practice of medicine.
In the world of contemporary medicine,
science is front and center, and for good reason.
Science provides modern medicine with
extraordinary diagnostic and therapeutic
capacities that can be employed to care for
patients. Yet there is more to medicine than
science can know. Science cannot provide
visions to animate care of the sick, moral
frameworks to guide the application of medical
technology, or practices that nurture and extend
our sociobiological capacity to care for others.
For these medicine turns to religious and secular
moral traditions and practices. This essay
examines how religious concepts are implicit and
operative in practices of medicine and in the
formation of fully human physicians. By
attending to these concepts, we may gain a richer
understanding of the way self-conscious human
practices like medicine both depend on and
Social Brain, Spiritual Medicine?
No one ever asks what science
has to do with medicine any more than
they ask what books have to do with
education or what tools have to do with
carpentry. Before the middle of the 19th
century, there was almost nothing that
physicians, however well intended,
could do to actually restore health to the
ill. Modern science changed that. Over
the past century and a half, dramatic
improvements in health outcomes have
been wrought through the application of
sterile surgery techniques, specialized
hospital care, public health measures to
prevent the spread of infectious diseases,
antibiotics to treat those diseases, and
myriad subsequent technologies. All of
these have been undergirded by the
discoveries of biomedical science.
As a result, the life expectancy in
developed nations has doubled. People
live not only longer but with much less
disability. Diseases that formerly
disfigured and killed, such as smallpox
and polio, have been almost completely
eradicated. Epidemics of malaria, yellow
fever, measles and diphtheria have been
restrained. Injuries from war or other
traumatic events, which in earlier
periods led predictably to death or
profound disability, now can be
ameliorated using sophisticated surgical
reconstruction techniques, advanced
prostheses, and intensive rehabilitation.
Medical science already has
accomplished an extraordinary amount
in alleviating human illness and
forestalling death, and there is good
reason to expect further progress. Yet,
for all that science has made possible,
medicine is animated by other, less
tangible, forces.
extend our unique, human, biopsychosocial
capacities.
Page | 140
To give a robust account for the
practice of medicine, one must explain
why sick and debilitated strangers are
worthy of attention and care, and how
the medical arts contribute to human
flourishing. For some Americans, such
accounts begin in secular moral
tradition, but for most they begin in
religion; nine out of ten Americans
endorse a religious affiliation 1 . Either
way, medicine looks beyond science to
find a vision that animates care of the
sick, a moral framework that guides the
application of medical technology, and
practices that nurture and extend the
human capacity to care for patients as
persons rather than as mere objects. In
this sense, even though religious
concepts are rarely made explicit in
public and professional discourse about
medicine, they are everywhere implicit
and operative, and necessarily so.
Why care for the sick?
Humans in all cultures are moved
to care for the sick. The question is why?
The concept of the social brain provides
the beginning of an answer. The peculiar
human need and capacity for
constructive, complex and meaningful
relationships seems to involve
neurological structures and functions
that also facilitate attending to the sick.
For example, Epley describes the human
capacity to pay attention to our own
mindedness and the mindedness of
others. We are not only conscious of
ourselves, but we are conscious of others
being conscious of themselves and of us.
This capacity allows us to be mindful of
others’ bodily suffering and mindful of
their consciousness of our relation to
them in that suffering. To mindfulness is
added the capacity to empathize. Decety
describes a neurological structure
through which the sight of pain in
another person triggers a response in our
own brains that mirrors (albeit at a level
attenuated by training and other
contextual factors) the response we
would have if we were suffering the pain
ourselves. These features of the human
brain allow us to pay attention to and to
some extent share in the suffering of
others—capacities that are psychological
building blocks for caring for the sick.
Yet to explain medicine strictly
on the basis of empirical science, one
must solve a particularly thorny version
of the more general problem of
explaining altruistic human behavior.
Decety notes, “The emergence of
altruism, of empathizing with and caring
for those who are not kin, is … not
easily explained within the framework of
neo-Darwinian theories of natural
selection.” Indeed one can scarcely
imagine a practice less conducive to the
reproductive fitness of a population than
spending enormous resources caring for
the sick, the deformed, the weak, and the
aged. Natural selection and the physician
would seem to be at cross-purposes: one
works to eliminate the sickly, the other
to save them from elimination. On this
account, medicine appears to be the sort
of dead end into which the evolutionary
process sometimes blindly drifts.
Cacioppo, however, argues that
altruistic behaviors can be explained
within evolutionary theory by paying
attention to inclusive fitness and the
multiple levels of selective pressure:
…for species born to a period of
utter dependency [e.g., humans],
the genes that find their way into
the gene pool are not defined
solely or even mostly by
likelihood that an organism will
reproduce but by the likelihood
that the offspring of the parent
will live long enough to
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reproduce… one consequence is
that selfish genes evolved
through individual-level selection
processes to promote social
preferences and group processes,
including reciprocal social
behaviors, that can extend
beyond kin relationships
The concept of inclusive fitness helps to
explain why humans care for the young
when they are sick, and even why they
care for those who when healthy are able
to contribute to caring for the young. In
addition, it may be that hunter-gatherers
were more likely to survive and
reproduce when they cared for a
wounded or sickened member of the
clan—thereby establishing an
expectation of reciprocity that would
contribute to social cohesion, collective
effort, and defense of other group
members. These provide at least the
rudiments of an evolutionary rationale
for the practice of medicine.
Yet, medicine does not involve
caring merely (or even primarily) for the
young, much less for those who are most
genetically fit. Rather, medicine in large
measure involves caring for those who
either have no capacity to contribute to
the gene pool because they are aged and
otherwise infertile, or whose
contributions to that pool will reduce
population fitness because they are
genetically predisposed to sickness and
disability. Concern about the latter led
Francis Galton and many of his
American and European contemporaries
to embrace social Darwinism and to
champion efforts to keep the diminished
and infirm from reproducing. In the
United States, the eugenics movement
was memorialized in the infamous words
of Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes, who justified the
constitutionality of the forced
sterilization of mentally ‘unfit’ women
in the case of Buck v. Bell by writing,
“Three generations of imbeciles are
enough.” Sterilization rates under
eugenic laws in the United States
increased following this ruling until the
Skinner v. Oklahoma case in 1942, after
which point they declined.
The practice of medicine
expresses more than a straightforward
social instinct for protecting the young.
To borrow from Browning, it may be
that medicine builds on and extends the
dynamic of inclusive fitness much like in
Catholic moral theology caritas (love)
builds on and extends eros (desire).
Browning writes, “[Aquinas] held – and
Christianity has always taught – that
Christian love includes more than kin
altruism and the care of our familial
offspring; it must include the love of
neighbor, stranger, and enemy, even to
the point of self-sacrifice.” The
theological concept of God as creator
and Father of all “made it possible for
Christians to build on yet analogically
generalize their kin altruism to all
children of God, even those beyond the
immediate family, their own children
and their own kin.” Even those beyond
the reasonable hope of reproducing or
helping others to reproduce.
Notably, the self-conscious
commitments that animate medicine do
not include promoting population fitness
or ensuring survival of offspring to the
point of reproduction. Rather, physicians
discipline themselves to practices that
make possible the commitment of
medicine: to preserve and restore the
health of patients, notwithstanding
patients’ other characteristics. Religions
ground this care for the sick in sacred
and transcendent obligations to God and
neighbor, and it is not incidental that the
hospital began when Christian monastic
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communities enfolded the care of the
sick into a communal life of liturgy and
prayer. This is not to say that the
substantively irreligious lack proper
motivation to practice medicine. It is to
say that an animating vision for
medicine as a good and worthy activity
seems to require moral concepts that
science alone does not provide.
How should medical science be
deployed?
Medicine is not only animated by
something like a religious vision; it also
requires a thick moral framework for its
ongoing direction. To know how best to
care for patients, we need to know
something about what human flourishing
entails and how medicine can contribute
to it. Medical science is less helpful here
than one might hope.
Science facilitates the sort of
religious humanism that Browning
encourages, because it helps us better
understand the empirical world and
therefore helps all moral communities
refine their efforts to bring about human
flourishing. Science elucidates a range of
technical possibilities and provides
information about what we can
reasonably expect as the consequence of
choosing one course over another. Yet,
even the successes of medical science
highlight its limits. As medical science
generates technologies that can be put to
ever-wider uses, it exposes
disagreements about which of those uses
are worthwhile. Although medicine
proceeds in scientific ways in the care of
patients, it does so in pursuit of goals
that science cannot set. These goals
come from moral traditions and cultures,
religious or otherwise.
In the same way that the
influence of a dominant culture on
medical practice is often invisible or
taken for granted precisely because of its
dominance, so the influence of religious
ideas on medical practice is often
invisible in those areas where
commitments are shared in common
among different religions and other
moral traditions. For example, we
generally take it for granted that
mending injuries, treating infections, and
removing diseased organs are good
things to do. That is because the moral
commitments that undergird these
practices are shared by virtually all
moral communities, religious or
otherwise. Moral commitments that are
shared by all may not seem ‘moral’ at
all. Yet even the idea of sickness implies
a norm of and concern for health that are
not fully derivable from empirical
science.
The influence of religion on
medical practice becomes more visible
where the commitments of particular
traditions diverge from one another or
where they diverge from the values of
the dominant culture. For example,
religious measures have been found
consistently to strongly predict
physicians’ attitudes regarding ethically
controversial practices such as abortion,
physician-assisted suicide, withdrawal of
life-sustaining therapies, contraception,
physician interaction with patients about
spiritual concerns and, as we have found,
physicians’ ideas about the relationship
between religion and health. 2
Yet overtly controversial issues
merely highlight the tips of proverbial
icebergs. Disputes about practices such
as abortion or physician-assisted suicide
concern whether the practices are
intrinsically unethical. Much more
commonly physicians agree about the
range of legitimate clinical strategies,
but they disagree about which is to be
recommended in a given moment. For
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example, physicians may agree that the
experience of depression can be treated
legitimately by antidepressant
medications, referral to a psychiatrist, or
referral to a counselor whose practice is
rooted in a specific religious tradition.
Yet our research suggests that the
religious characteristics of physicians
strongly influence which of these
options they would recommend in a
given case 3 .
Controversies over a particular
medical intervention often represent
deeper unspoken disagreements that,
unfortunately, science cannot settle. For
example, controversies over the use of
stimulants to manage childhood behavior
disorders, or the medicalization of social
anxiety, seem to reflect disagreements
about more basic questions: What brings
human happiness? Which moods and
behaviors should be considered normal
parts of human experience and which
should be considered abnormal? What
sorts of suffering should we try to
alleviate? What leads to disordered
behaviors? What resources (social,
psychological, spiritual or otherwise) are
best suited to addressing disruptions in
individuals’ mental and emotional
states? How does modern medicine fit
into our response to these experiences?
Although physicians may not ask or
answer these questions explicitly, they
implicitly answer them in their responses
and recommendations to patients.
So, for all that is hoped for in
‘scientific’ and ‘evidence-based’
practice, clinicians must in the end act as
practical moral philosophers, making
judgments about how best to pursue the
goals of medicine for a particular patient
in a particular context, all things
considered. Among those things to be
considered are moral valuations about
which religions and other moral
traditions have much to say, but about
which medical science remains silent.
Caring for the patient as person
So far I have suggested that
religions provide a vision that animates
care of the sick and a moral framework
that guides the application of medical
technology. Religions make another
contribution by fostering practices that
nurture the human capacity to care for
patients as persons rather than as mere
objects.
Patients commonly complain that
their physicians treat them as mere
objects or specimens rather than
appreciating and attending to them as
unique persons. This problem has always
plagued the profession. To learn how to
heal, the novice physician must learn of
patients as representing abstract general
types and classes. She must learn about
coronary artery disease and hematuria
before she can begin to interpret Mrs.
Smith’s chest discomfort and Mr.
Jones’s red urine. These abstractions
allow knowledge of when and how
things happen, and that knowledge
guides technological interventions that
may bring healing to the body. These
abstractions also help doctors objectify
their patients’ humanity enough to
violate social norms that operate in every
other social situation, such as asking
patients to expose their nakedness in
vulnerable positions, or cutting patients
apart in hopes of making them whole.
As long as the process does not
go too far, scientific detachment serves
to make our concern effective. Yet the
collective experience of both patients
and physicians suggests that such
detachment usually does go too far and
occurs too easily. As a result physicians
treat patients as mere objects and
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instances of disease; they treat patients
as less than the human persons they are.
Physicians, it would seem, are
subject to a particular form of the more
general psychological challenge of
paying attention to other minds. Like all
humans, physicians easily ignore the
mindfulness of others. This matters,
Epley reminds us, “because mindful
agents become moral agents worthy of
care and compassion.” As such, patients
who are seen as mindful “evoke empathy
and concern for well-being, whereas
agents without mindful experience can
be treated simply as mindless objects.”
There are obstacles to recognizing the
mindfulness of patients. Illness makes a
patient different, or deviant, from human
norms, and we tend to pay less attention
to the minds of those who are different
from ourselves. In addition,
“Considering other minds requires some
attentional effort. It does not come
automatically.” Physicians learn to go
through the technical motions of caring
for the sick until those motions become
‘automatic’—that is the mark of a skilled
and effective clinician. But paying
attention to the mindfulness of patients
requires a sustained investment of time
and energy that physicians are often
unwilling to make.
How could religious practices
help? As Luhrmann notes, most people
find it very difficult to pay attention to
God. To help in this difficult and
lifelong task, many religions have
developed disciplines of prayer and
other practices that call to mind what we
tend to forget—including the ideas that
motivate genuine human concern for
those who suffer. Christians, for
example, practice remembering that all
people are ultimately united as children
of the one creator God, that “the ground
is level at the foot of the cross”
regardless of one’s social status, one’s
biological fitness or one’s reproductive
capacity. Epley notes that we are better
able to pay attention to what another is
thinking or feeling when we are
motivated to do so. Christianity seeks to
stimulate such motivation by
encouraging Christians to meditate on
the fact that Jesus comes to us in those
who are sick and otherwise suffer 4 .
Moreover, it reminds us that we are
never alone. As Katherine Tanner
details in her chapter, God is always
with us. This central theological claim,
when remembered in song, prayer,
liturgy, reading of Scriptures and other
rituals, provides a particular form of
what psychologists call “mindful
surveillance”—our actions become more
“prosocial” (even altruistic) when we are
aware of being observed by others. All
of these practices depend on and extend
the capacities of the social brain. They
are also, from the vantage of
Christianity, ways in which one may
come to receive grace, the unmerited
help of God.
Religious practices have
therefore at least the potential to
encourage and strengthen the human
capacity for attending to the
mindfulness, and therefore the
personhood, of those who are sick and
diminished. As Epley suggests, “Making
minds visible, and hence more like one’s
own, enables people to more readily
follow the most famous of all ethical
dictates—to treat others as you would
have others treat you.”
Conclusion
Science and religion are invisibly
and inextricably intertwined in the
practice of medicine. Science has
provided modern medicine with
extraordinary diagnostic and therapeutic
Page | 145
capacities that can be employed to care
for patients. Science gives knowledge of
the remarkable neurological and
psychological features of the social brain
that make activities like caring for the
sick possible. But science can also
depersonalize the patient viewed through
the eyes of the physician scientist.
Religions (and other moral communities)
motivates an attention to the person who
is the patient, providing a fuller vision
for the worthiness of caring for the sick,
and drawing the physician and patient
closer together. Religion and moral
communities can also provide a
framework to guide the application of
medical science in that endeavor, and
practices that strengthen the human
capacity for treating patients as the
mindful persons they are. It is the
balance of the tensions produced by the
forces of science and religion that may
hold a key to better medical practice and
patient care.
References
1 Curlin FA, Lantos JD, Roach CJ,
Sellergren SA, Chin MH.
Religious characteristics of U.S
physicians: A national survey. J
Gen Intern Med. Jul
2005;20(7):629-634.
2 See Curlin FA, Chin MH, Sellergren
SA, Roach CJ, Lantos JD. The
association of physicians’ religious
characteristics with their attitudes
and self-reported behaviors
regarding religion and spirituality
in the clinical encounter. Med
Care. 2006;44:446-53, and Curlin
FA, Sellergren SA, Lantos JD,
Chin MH. Physicians' observations
and interpretations of the influence
of religion and spirituality on
health. Archives of Internal
Medicine. 2007;167(7):649-54.
3 Curlin FA, Odell S, Lawrence RE,
Chin MH, Lantos JD, Meador KG,
Koenig HG. The relationship
between psychiatry and religion
among US physicians. Psychiatr
Serv 2007;58(9):1193-1198.
4 Holy Bible. Matthew 25:40.
Page | 146
Invisible Forces
Farr Curlin meditates on the
puzzle of medicine—what is its
evolutionary and social function, what
draws individual practitioners to it, and
what grounds its fundamental values.
The values of scientific inquiry lead to
treating the objects of inquiries in just
that way: as objects. But objectifying
patients and their disease would seem to
work against the human values of
empathy and caring for the weak that
also seems to be part and parcel of what
medicine is as a practice. Curlin argues
that religious values inform and nurture
the human side by insisting that there
must be a connection between physician
and patient, acting as an often
unrecognized invisible force that
humanizes the practice of medicine.
Religion is neither necessary nor
sufficient for an individual to adhere to
such values. The question of what it is
that grounds the fundamental values that
govern our relationships, and how those
values are reflected in invisible social,
psychological, and biological forces, is
central to the work of our network. In a
concluding essay, Ronald Thisted
reflects on the many threads of
investigation and discussion that have
made up our conversation, and how they
are interwoven into a network of inquiry
that sheds light on invisible forces and
the social brain.
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Chapter 16 16
Epilogue
Over the past six years, our
network of scholars has engaged in an
16 The lead author is Ronald Thisted, Ph.D., a
Professor in the Departments of Health Studies,
Statistics, and Anesthesia & Critical Care at the
University of Chicago, where he currently chairs
the Department of Health Studies. Trained in
philosophy and mathematics at Pomona College
and in statistics at Stanford University, his
interests include the nature of argument and
evidence, particularly in the context of health,
disease, and medical treatment. He has
published articles on topics ranging from
treatment for back pain to computational
mathematics, and from social determinants of
health to the size of Shakespeare’s vocabulary.
He is a Fellow of the American Statistical
Association, and a Fellow of the American
Academy for the Advancement of Science.
The question of how we come to
know—or to claim that we know—things, is left
unexamined all too often. The similarities and
differences in modes of argument across
disciplines, and the variations in what counts for
evidence supporting or refuting a position within
and across disciplines can be illuminating.
Statistics, and statistical argument, provide a rich
framework for thinking about such issues as
measurement, learning, uncertainty, variation,
and experiment. Statistical principles provide a
framework for disciplined investigation, for
communication about the extent of and
limitations to the information at hand, and for
combining information from different sources.
Although there is enormous variability between
individuals, there are also commonalities to their
experience that transcend their differences. As a
species and as individuals, we rely on these
common threads, even when they are invisible to
us.
on-going conversation that we have
come to recognize as being centered on
unseen forces that shape, and are shaped
by, the social nature of human beings.
The essays that make up this volume
give a hint as to what our conversation
has been like, but the linear structure that
a book imposes cannot fully evoke the
give and take of vigorous debate, the
excitement of viewing an old problem
from a new perspective, or the
satisfaction that comes from sharing the
search for knowledge – even when we
did not agree on the interpretation of
what we discovered in our search.
We deliberately chose to describe
our membership as a network rather than
a committee, or seminar, or task force, or
club, or salon. A network is defined as
much by the connections between people
as it is by the individual people
themselves. Networks can be described
pictorially as nodes (points that represent
individuals), some of which are
connected by edges (lines that represent
links between two individuals). In our
network, we have focused on the value
of the edges, and have held the
conviction that much is to be gained by
exploring previously untested
connections. We started with a set of
nodes having only a handful of edges,
and we ended with many more edges
than nodes.
As a result, our network – and
each individual in the network – has
been enriched as we have learned more
about, and more from, perspectives that
initially were unfamiliar to each of us,
the end result being that our whole is
decidedly greater than the sum of our
parts. This illustrates a recurrent theme
in the book, that of emergent
phenomena—characteristics that can be
ascribed to entities at a higher level of
organization that, without conscious
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design or intent, seem to arise from
behaviors and interactions at a lower
level of organization. How this can
come about is a puzzle, but it is a puzzle
that is amenable to thoughtful
investigation, both scientific and
philosophical. What forces are at play,
we might ask, that makes such a
collection cohesive? Just what
chemistry can transform a collection of
individuals into something both more
than and different from what in
aggregate they bring to the table? We
seek to understand more fully the bonds
of marriage, family, friendship, or
membership—invisible forces that bind
and simultaneously transform the
underlying nature of their constituents
no less than chemical bonds transform
atoms of hydrogen and oxygen into
water.
Our origin was rooted in distaste
for the unproductive and unenlightening
shouting matches between proponents of
views of science that denigrate religious
belief and views of religion that are antiscientific.
We started from the
assumption that scholars from the
sciences and from religion and
philosophy could have fruitful
conversations about what is known, what
counts for knowledge, what can be
observed, and what can be tested
through experiment and observation.
And we all believe in the value of the
scientific method as a means for
expanding our knowledge. Internal
tension is needed for the structural
integrity of buildings and bridges, and
that is no less true of social structures
such as our network. Through
appropriate construction, deep tensions
between theology and science (or even
between scientific disciplines or
theological perspectives) that have the
potential to drive us apart can instead be
shaped to release creative energy and
shared purpose.
Berntson notes that “beliefs and
emotions have consequences, both
behavioral and physiological.” The
network starts from the premise that one
can learn about such apparently invisible
phenomena as beliefs by studying and
reasoning about their consequences.
In his essay, Browning advocates
starting with a critical hermeneutic
phenomenology, a “careful description”
of our instruments, our observations, and
the stories we use them to tell. Clearly
articulating our assumptions and starting
points has been of immense value. After
doing so for the benefit of colleagues
outside our disciplines, those colleagues
in turn have helped us become aware of
unarticulated assumptions implicit in our
approaches or in our experiments.
These observations have led in turn to
better science and more convincing
evidence. Our colleagues in the network
have helped each of us to see more
facets of the same elephant that
individually we are too blind to
appreciate fully.
Revising our thinking and our
research to take those observations into
account has increased the rigor of our
thought and broadened the scope of our
conclusions. The presence of a rich
variety of disciplinary perspectives has
helped us to weave the nets of Sir Arthur
Eddington’s parable more tightly,
enabling us to see for the first time some
of the “smaller fish” that earlier would
have escaped our notice.
Shedding light on invisible forces (a
koan)
Invisible forces of culture,
connection, and curiosity bind us
together and define us as a species that is
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at once both individual and social.
Because both individuality and sociality
are fundamental to the human species,
we are fundamentally interdependent,
connected by invisible, yet powerful,
threads. In exploring these threads, we
have also been led to questions about
how social forces can have effects on
individuals, how the meaning that
individuals (and groups) apply to
particular phenomena or relationships
affect both behavior and biology, and
how our biology makes social
connection possible. We have used the
phrase “invisible forces” to describe the
mechanisms that account for these
effects that we essentially take for
granted, and to suggest by analogy that
they can be investigated rigorously just
as other phenomena, such as gravity or
autonomic regulation, that also are not
immediately present to our visual or
other senses can be studied.
Human minds are unparalleled at
discerning patterns in what they see
against a background of noise and
variation, and they are equally adept at
attributing meaning to them. As the
essays in this volume demonstrate
repeatedly, we readily ascribe patterns
we encounter (or seek to encounter) to
invisible forces of nature, of God, of
kinship, of genes, of culture, of love, of
social connection. A common premise
underlying the work of the network is
that what we know (or what we think we
know), and how we come to know it, are
social endeavors embedded in a shared
view of both the world and how one
talks meaningfully about the world. And
mindful of our human facility to see
patterns (even where none exist!), we are
acutely aware that constant rigorous
testing of assumptions, methods, and
arguments is necessary to make sure that
we are not fooling ourselves into seeing
only what we hope to see.
Humans have a deep need to
create meaning in their interactions with
the world and with each other. We also
have a deep need for making
connections beyond ourselves. The
biological structure we call our brain has
evolved to reward social connection, just
as it rewards the satisfaction of hunger
or thirst. The human biology that directs
and reflects these human needs is what
we have termed the “social brain.”
It is worthwhile to reflect on the
range of invisible forces that we have
considered here. These forces operate at
several different levels, from the
molecular, to individual bodily
functions, to social groups, to societies,
to species. They include such disparate
ideas as evolutionary selective pressure
favoring social connectedness,
anthropomorphism, loneliness, social
connection, emergent phenomena,
connection to a higher being,
transcendence, empathy, language as
carrier for meaning, belief, collective
will, group synchrony, autonomic
regulation, and neural resonance. These
forces interact with one another, too:
loneliness, for instance, acting as an
internal signal of the inadequacy of
one’s bonds of social connection, with
consequent effects on health, mediated
through autonomic regulation, or the role
of belief in mediating scientific
objectivity and empathy.
It is tempting to view individuals,
both souls and bodies, as arising from
lower-level forces within, such as the
operation of specialized neurons and
regulatory biological processes. And it
is tempting to view social structures and
the forces that tend to maintain them as
arising, perhaps emergently, from the
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individuals that make up societies. On
this view, the social level of organization
arises out of the interaction of lowerlevel
entities. But invisible forces
operate in both directions; one’s degree
of social integration or isolation (at the
higher level) can have profound
influence on one’s mental and physical
health (at the lower level). Just how
these forces operate—in both
directions—is one of the main themes of
this book.
A recurring theme is the human
need for connection. As we have
explored this fundamental need, it has
become clear that it can be satisfied in
part by connections not necessarily to
other human persons, but to other minds.
Since the minds of others are in part of
our own construction, connections to a
higher being, or to our pets, or even to a
transcendent order underlying the world,
can fulfill part of what we strive to
attain. Indeed, such non-human
attachments can share the character of
human connection: we can feel valued
by our pet (just as we can feel validated
in a social relationship), we can have an
intimate dyadic relationship with God
(just as we can be intimate with a close
friend), and we can feel a sense of
belonging to the universe (just as we can
feel that we belong to social group).
This explains how different, even
contradictory, notions of a relationship
to God, for instance, can lead different
people each to find meaning in such a
relationship: finding God on the
downtown bus versus encountering God
in the purposeful unfolding of the natural
order.
The ideas of symmetry,
complementarity, coordination, and coregulation
also run through several of
our essays. Regulation of biological
systems is often maintained through
paired systems of biological checks and
balances; when one system is activated,
the other tends to restore equilibrium.
For instance, one set of muscles flexes
the arm, and an opposing set extends it.
We have seen that the sympathetic and
parasympathetic components of the
autonomic nervous system—the system
that makes us breathe and that makes our
heart pump—operate in this way, and
that chronic stimulation of some
systems, like overstretched elastic bands,
lose their ability to spring back. The
notions of observing a behavior and
performing that behavior not only are
conceptually similar, they may be rooted
in a common set of neurological
structures which may, in turn, help us to
understand how we can perceive another
human being as being like us, but not us.
Anthropomorphism is the belief that
other minds mirror our own; this colors
the way we perceive the world and the
other actors in it, a mechanism that
allows us to simulate getting under the
skin of the other person.
Happiness and loneliness are
perceptions about our place in the world
that profoundly affect our physical
bodies and our social relationships.
Religious beliefs, too, can have profound
effects on health and physical wellbeing,
working through the same
biological mechanisms that in health
maintain equilibrium.
Unseen, yet powerful, forces
regulate social behavior. Empathy, for
instance, contributes to the regulation of
social interactions. Synchronous
behavior points to a phenomenon that
makes the individual feel subsumed by
the group, feeling part of a larger,
organic whole. These behaviors can be
as disparate as “the wave” at a sports
stadium or congregational prayer at a
church service. Shared feelings of
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transcendence and belonging can
simultaneously lead to greater fitness of
the individual and increased cohesion
and sustainability of the social
organization—another indication of
positive selection associated with the
social brain.
The notion of resonance with
another appears repeatedly through the
book. Our connections to others derive
in part from being able to see what they
see, to hear what they hear, to know
what they know, to feel what they feel.
Or we have to be able to believe not only
that this is possible, but that it happens.
The social brain, in which the same
regions are activated by our own
experience of pain and by our perception
of others in pain, makes both aspects
possible. There is a close connection
between being able to “feel for” another
(empathy) and to “see into” another
mind (anthropomorphism).
Language has the potential to
affect people and groups in part because
it is tied to meaning. Language is the
medium through which we convey,
preserve, and transmit meaning from one
individual to another, and from one
social generation to another. Language
is powerful because it can activate
belief, which in turn can activate
physical responses. Words can bind;
words can terrify; and words can cause
physical pain and death. The power of
words comes from the meanings they
entail about our connections to one
another.
Paradox
Our investigation of invisible
forces involving the social brain has led
us repeatedly to factors that
fundamentally conflict. An important
invisible force is the respect we pay to
the boundary between self and other.
Our relationship to it comes into play in
conceptualizing loneliness,
anthropomorphism, spirituality, group
behavior, empathy, and inclusive fitness.
When we speak of loneliness, this
boundary seems to be an impenetrable
barrier. When we speak of empathy or
anthropomorphism, however, the selfother
boundary is defined by the
similarity and congruence of individuals
to one another, providing a transparent
window through which we perceive and
interact with others (who must be like
us). And when we speak of group
synchrony, the boundary vanishes
completely: self and other are one.
Successful engagement with
others requires work. It is the work of
attending to something, and it is work
that often is needed to resolve competing
forces. Thinking about other minds is a
demanding task and requires attentional
effort. It is this effort that allows us to
manipulate the transparency of the selfother
boundary by what we put in
through learning, attending, seeking, and
projecting. In effect, we can tune the
degree of resonance we have with
members of different groups. Similarly,
consistent attentional effort is also
required for the physician to attend to
the mindfulness of patients, for the
Vineyard church member to experience
God as present in one’s life, and for
another to find connection to an
omnipresent yet invisible God who
works through the very workings of the
world.
What it means to feel a
connection to a higher being is a theme
that several essays explore. As is
evident in these essays, the Network has
considered very different, even
divergent, pictures of what such
connection might entail. These apparent
inconsistencies that can be found in
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these portrayals are rooted in the
different aspects of human connections,
and each is grounded in a social context.
Social connection can be intimate,
relational, or collective. For the member
of the Vineyard Church, connection with
God is an intimate two-way relationship,
while in Jonathan Edwards’s sermon in
the Great Awakening, the connection is
relational and involves the coherence (or
lack of it) of the individual with God’s
approval. And the Christian theological
view of connection as a higher order can
be conceived in terms of one’s belonging
within a whole that God’s constancy
makes larger than oneself.
While religion certainly speaks to
individual connection to others and to
the divine, religious practices can also
serve an evolutionary and social function
by strengthening the human capacity for
attending to the personhood of those
who are sick and diminished. The
objectivity of medical science all too
often leads to an objectification of the
patient or, more frequently, the patient’s
disease. The social brain’s capacity to
see others as minds rather than objects
makes it possible to assign meaning to
patients and the ways in which they lack
wholeness.
Crescat scientia; vita excolatur
The possibility that religion and
science can enrich one other, even as one
sets aside truth claims about such
matters as the existence of a deity, is by
no means obvious. But we have come to
see that science can describe what
religion does in rigorous ways that
benefit religion, and religion can serve a
meaning-making function that science
itself disclaims. Gilpin notes that rifts
between science and religion “have
centered on whether one can make
scientific sense of the notion of divine
mind, purpose, or intention.” Our
network sidestepped this question from
the beginning, focusing instead on
related matters such as the consequences
of believing in such a mind, and of
seeing into that mind, for the one doing
the divining.
Those are questions amenable to
empirical investigation, and it is at that
juncture that we can see benefit from our
discussions. As Berntson says, “beliefs
color the way we perceive the world,
they direct and shape our actions, and
define our personalities.” Studying and
debating about how they do so has been
gratifying and immensely enjoyable.
We have engaged in no theological
debate, but have focused on questions
about human beings, their beliefs, their
behaviors, and how those things affect
and are affected by multiple levels of
human connection.
How we conceptualize our
relationships to persons and things
outside our selves has implications for
our health and well-being. Specifically,
we have seen that viewing our
relationships in terms of meaningful
connections with other minds can have
positive implications for individual – as
well as social – health and function. The
more that we can learn about those
implications, the more our increase in
knowledge has the potential to enrich
human life.