CHAPTER 1
WHY DO WE SEE SUPERNATURAL SIGNS IN NATURAL EVENTS?
Jesse Bering
Introduction
Shortly after my mother died, I began to experience certain events that challenged my otherwise skeptical beliefs about the afterlife. To any objective observer, these events wouldnât seem particularly profound; some were in fact so subtle and mundane that they likely wouldnât have even registered in my consciousness under normal circumstances. But in the wake of my loss, my mind freighted with grief, these banal happenings took on special significance. It was as though my momâor rather, her spiritâwas attempting to part the veil between this world and the next, intent on communicating with me, her stubbornly atheistic child, by delivering ambiguous messages from beyond the grave.
The morning after she passed, for instance, I awakened to the faint, melodious sounds of the wind chimes that hung from a tree branch just beneath her bedroom window. It was a still morning, but surely a breeze must have stirred it. My knee-jerk thought was not at all in keeping with my beliefs. âThatâs her,â I said instinctively to myself. âShe telling me sheâs okay.â
One evening, as I lay reading in bed, I heard a loud crashâthe sound of broken glass. Rushing downstairs to see what had caused it, I found that a stained glass window, an extraction from an old church that Iâd propped up decoratively on a shelf, had somehow fallen and shattered on the concrete floor. My mind raced to find an explanation. The cat, perhaps? But the cat had been sleeping soundly at the foot of my bed and had jumped at the sudden noise just as I had. I still canât be certain, but in all probability, Iâd merely left it leaning precariously on the shelf, with an eventual disastrous tumble being inevitable.
Yet just as with the wind chimes, it wasnât the logical explanation that first leapt to my mind. Rather, it was a supernatural one. My mother hated that stained glass window. âItâs not for me,â I recalled her saying when I first eyed it at an antique shop in Louisiana a few years prior. âBut go on, get it if you like it.â And now there it was in a thousand broken pieces on the floor. I should add, this also happened on her birthdayâthe first since her deathâand sheâd been occupying my thoughts that whole somber day. In any event, the rationalist in me rejected any such supernatural attributions out of hand. Still, it certainly felt like a sign.
There were also the conversations weâd had on her deathbed. A secular Jew, she was agnostic about the afterlife. We enjoyed speaking openly about it, however. âWho knows,â sheâd muse. âBut itâs you Iâd come back to . . . your brother and sister, they already believe. They wouldnât need any proof. If I can, Iâll give you a sign.â So, was I just being dense now? The thought of my kind, gentle mother trying desperately to get my attention from the other side was emotionally evocative, and guiltily I began to feel like one of those stereotypical hardheadedâand hardheartedâscience types who refuse to open their minds and acknowledge the numinous.
Ultimately, itâs a philosophical question, whether such things have a paranormal element to them. I didnât believe they did then and I donât believe they do now. But what does it matter what people say they believe? (See also Gendler 2008.) The fact that my mind so naturally gravitated toward seeing such events as if they were signs fascinated me. And as a cognitive psychologist, I wanted to get to the bottom of these strange subjective phenomena (see also Bloom 2007). What is it about the human mind that so effortlessly translates natural events into messages from another realmâeven despite our best attempts to deny that thereâs any message in them at all?
Inspired by my momâs ostensible phantom presence, this was the question I sought to answer in a study I published a few years after her death, conducted when I was still an assistant psychology professor at the University of Arkansas. My colleague Becky Parker and I started off with a simple premise: seeing meaning in natural events (colloquially, what most people would call signs or omens) requires a special form of human social intelligence (Bering & Parker 2006). The technical term for the psychological capacity in question is called theory of mind.
In the everyday social world, we use our theory of mind constantly, and itâs especially easy to grasp the concept when applied to other peopleâs unexpected behaviors. Letâs say, for example, that youâre out for a stroll at the park one sunny day, minding your own business, when you notice a naked man staggering out from behind some bushes ahead of you. Heâs now heading your way. Now, consider the dilemma. Does this person need helpâperhaps heâs the victim of a crime or is caught in the grip of a psychotic episodeâor is his strange appearance and behavior more sinister? What you see is a body with all its sinews and muscles and eyes darting this way and that. What you donât see, what you canât see, is the mind that stirs behind those eyes, causing the curious body before you to behave the way it is.
After all, mental states are abstractions that cannot be directly perceived; similar to other causal properties such as gravity and mass, theyâre just theoretical constructs. Intuitively, your theory of mind kicks in, and probably frantically in this case, with you trying to infer whatâs going on in that head of his. Essentially, this social cognitive capacity allows you to think about what others are thinking. (In case youâre wondering, Iâve no idea why this man was naked in the bushes and is making a beeline in your direction; Iâll leave that mystery to you.) Hopefully you get the idea. With a theory of mind, weâre better able to explain and predict other peopleâs actions because weâre putting ourselves in their shoes (or bare feet) and trying to see the world from their perspective. We may get it wrongâwe might assume heâs a pervert when in fact heâs the subject of a cruel prankâbut the fact that, all day long, weâre busily trying to decipher unobservable mental states such as emotions, intentions, and beliefs is why the evolutionary scholar Nicholas Humphrey referred to our species as the animal kingdomâs ânatural psychologistsâ (Humphrey 1976).
What does all of this have to do with the human habit of seeing meaningful signs in natural events? Becky and I suspected that theory of mind strikes at the heart of it. Itâs perhaps not a sine qua non, but a common feature of most supernatural agents, be they God or ghosts, is the presumed presence of a consciousness without a physical body. And since they lack bodies, we canât reason about whatâs on their mind by inferring things from their overt behaviors, facial expressions, or words. Instead, we perceive them as communicating with us through symbolic events. In the absence of a theory of mind, wind chimes are just wind chimes, and the rude cacophony of glass suddenly breaking is, well, just that. But with it, when the emotional climate is just right, these types of things can take on special significance. They seem to be about the communicative intent of an immaterial being. They jumpstart our psychological theorizing. âWhat is she trying to tell me?â we may find ourselves asking. âWhat does she mean by this?â
To investigate, we decided to take a developmental approach to the issue, building on previous research showing that theory of mind emerges cumulatively over the course of childhood (see Newman et al. 2010). Whereas children younger than about four years of age struggle to understand that others have beliefs differing from their own, older kids are increasingly able to take opposing, and often complex, recursive perspectives (Perner & Howes 1992). At what age, then, are children cognitively advanced enough to be superstitious in the ways Iâve been referring to, attributing deeper meaning to anomalous occurrences that trigger their theory of mind?
In an attempt to map out these unknown age patterns, I decided to invite my motherâs âghostâ into my research lab at Arkansas and introduce her to a bunch of kids.
Methodology
We didnât refer to her as a ghost, of course. Our intention certainly wasnât to scare small children. The whole thing was quite innocuous. Iâll get to that shortly. For now, let me explain the basics of how it all worked. After getting ethics approval, we used advertisements in the local newspapers and parental word of mouth and recruiting from nearby schools to rustle up about 150 kids ranging from three to nine years of age.
Based on what we knew going in about the development of theory-of-mind skills (that they get increasingly sophisticated), we divided the sample into three distinct age groups. The âyoungestâ group consisted of the three- to four-year-olds, the âmiddleâ group was represented by the five- to six-year-olds, and the âoldestâ group was the seven- to nine-year-olds.
Each child was tested separately in a kid-friendly lab, typically while their mom or dad watched the session live on CCTV from an adjacent room. After a brief warm-up period in which the friendly experimenter (Becky) got to know the childâchatting about family or pets, playing together with blocks, drawing pictures on the blackboardâthey were asked if theyâd like to play a fun game. If they said âyes,â and of course they all did, they were led to the front of the room, where on a table before them sat two large blue boxes side by side. The tops of the boxes were hinged, such that they could be flipped open front to back, revealing the contents by looking down into them. Becky stood on the side of the table facing the front of the boxes, and the child on the opposite side.
Playing the game
âNow,â Becky said. âTwo rules, OK? First, you have to stay on that side of the table. And second, only I can open the boxes.â Once the child agreed, she went on. âSee this?â Becky asked while holding up a red plastic ball. âIâm going to hide this ball inside one of these two boxes. While Iâm hiding it, youâre going to go to the corner and face the wall so that you donât see where I put it. Then youâre going to come back and guess where the ball is by placing your hand on top of the box that you think itâs insideâlike this.â Becky demonstrated by placing a flattened palm on the top of one of the two closed boxes. âNow, if you change your mind,â she added, âyou can move your hand to the other box. So, letâs say at first you think the ball is in this box, and then you think, no, maybe itâs in this other box, then you can move your hand, like this.â Again, she demonstrated accordingly, moving her hand from the top of one closed box to the other. âYou can change your mind as many times as you want. But wherever your hand is when I say âTimeâs up!â is your final choice. If you get it right, then you get to pick a cool sticker. [Every experimenter worth their salt knows that stickers are basically heroin for grade-schoolers.] But if you get it wrong, you donât get a sticker that time.â
Each kid then got a practice run at the game, just to make sure they understood the ground rules. âNow go hide in the corner,â Becky would say. âAnd remember, no peeking!â While they were doing that, and after a few seconds of loudly opening and closing both of the lidsâjust to throw off some of the cleverer little ones who might try to localize the soundâsheâd say, âOkay, pick whichever box you think the ballâs in!â Once the child put their hand on one of the boxes, Becky started her timer and stared down at the ticking clock for fifteen seconds, offering them no help. âTimeâs up!â sheâd announce. âLetâs see where the ball is!â Sheâd then ceremoniously open the box that they didnât pick. âAw, it was in here this time, look,â sheâd say, inviting them to have a peek inside. All the while, she kept the other boxâthe one theyâd actually selectedâclosed.
A rigged system
Hereâs the secret. There were in fact two identical balls, so that each of the boxes contained a ball at all times. The kids didnât know it, but the game was totally rigged. After the practice trial, each child got a total of four tries at the game, but weâd decided in advance whether theyâd get each attempt ârightâ or âwrong.â Furthermore, on a random half of the test trials, something unexpected or surprising (from the childâs perspective, at least) happened in the room as soon as their hand first made contact with one of the boxes.
There were two varieties of these âunexpected events,â as we referred to them in the study. In one case, a desk lamp behind Becky would switch on and off a few times. We didnât need Industrial Light & Magic to pull this off, just a remote control operated by a research assistant in that adjacent room with the parents. In the other case, a picture hanging on the back of the door to the lab would come crashing to the floor. This was made possible by the research assistant simply lifting a magnet on the other side. By contrast, for the other two trialsâthe ânonevent trialsâânothing surprising happened.
To keep up morale, everyone was told they guessed correctly on these two nonevent trials. But to win that coveted sticker prize for the two unexpected-event trials, the childâs hand had to end up on the opposite box from the one theyâd first chosen.
Introducing Princess Alice
That was the basic setup. Now comes the interesting part. Each child had also been randomly assigned to either the control condition or the experimental condition. The former played the game just as Iâve described. Those in the latter condition, however, got some additional information: someone very special, they were told, would be helping them.
âSee this picture?â we asked half of the kids, pointing at a portrait hanging from the back of the door (the same one I mentioned before) of a friendly, smiling woman bedecked in jewels and a crown. If youâre trying to visualize the scene, she bore an uncanny resemblance to a certain Disney character, including being two-dimensional. So, not exactly the stuff of nightmares. âThis is a picture of Princess Alice,â said Becky. âIsnât she pretty? Princess Alice is a magic princess. Do you know what she can do? She can make herself invisible. Do you know what invisible means? It means you canât see her, even though sheâs there.â For those who needed a bit of clarification on the matter, Becky would ...