How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  By the end of the seventeenth century Newton’s mechanical astronomy had replaced astrology; the mathematical understanding of chance and probability displaced luck and fortune; chemistry succeeded alchemy; banking and insurance decreased human misfortune and its attendant anxiety; city planning and social hygiene greatly attenuated the power of plagues; and medicine began its long road toward a germ theory of disease. Cumulatively, these events pushed us into the Age of Science, reducing the number of thinking errors and attenuating the power of superstition. Nevertheless, magical thinking is still with us, rearing its head wherever uncertainties arise.

  THE MODERN BELIEF ENGINE

  Ancestral and medieval superstitions survive in the modern high-tech world because the Belief Engine is a part of human nature. We see instances of this in everything from gambling (lucky streaks, cards, and dice) to athletic performances. In baseball, for example, where players are expected to hit a small, white ball traveling at nearly 100 miles per hour, superstition leads to all sorts of bizarre behaviors on the part of fully modern, educated human beings. Wade Boggs was famous for his superstitions, insisting on running his wind sprints at precisely 7:17 P.M., ending his grounder drill by stepping on the bases in backward order, never stepping on the foul line when taking the field but always stepping on it returning to the dugout, and eating chicken before every game. It is worth noting, however, that such superstitions are not at all uncommon among hitters where connecting with the baseball is so difficult and so fraught with uncertainties that the very best in the business fail a full seven out of every ten times at bat. Fielders, by contrast, typically succeed in excess of nine out of every ten times a ball is hit to them (the best succeed better than 95 percent of the time), and they have correspondingly fewer superstitions associated with fielding. But as soon as these same fielders pick up a bat, magical thinking goes into full swing.

  Psychologist Stuart Vyse has documented such modern superstitions in an attempt to provide a psychological explanation for believing in magic. In addition to Boggs’s bizarre behavior, he notes that mega-author Michael Crichton (a medical doctor and a writer who specializes in using science in such novels as Jurassic Park) eats the same thing for lunch every day while working on a new novel; and New York Giants football coach Bill Parcells, during his years in which the Giants were Superbowl champs in 1986 and 1991, would stop and purchase coffee at two different coffee shops on his way to the stadium before every game. Of course, many people have triskaidekaphobia, fear of the number 13 (in France there is even a company that provides emergency guests for dinner parties to make certain that thirteen people never sit at one table); others still shun black cats and avoid walking under a ladder. And chain letters are routinely distributed, even by intelligent, educated journalists such as Gene Forman of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who explained: “You understand that I am not doing this because I’m superstitious. I just want to avoid bad luck.” We understand perfectly.

  The Medieval belief engine. Robert Fludd’s “Mystery of the Human Head” from his Ultrisque Cosmic Maioris Scilicet Et Minoris Metaphysica, published in 1617, is an early attempt to understand the workings of the mind through science. Fludd’s work is in the tradition of making correspondences between the macrocosm and the microcosm, between the universe and man. Here the celestial world, composed of God and angels, penetrates through the skull and into the soul. The four elements (left concentric circles—earth, water, air, and fire) communicate with the five senses. The “imaginable world” (middle concentric circles) corresponds to the metaphysical sensations, “as in dreams, by non-existent objects and, consequently, by the shadows of elements.” The Mundus Intellectualis—the world of the intellect—is linked to the imagination through a series of spheres. At the back of the skull is the sphere of “memorative, or pertaining to remembrance,” which Fludd shows connected to the intellect.

  In his gripping tale of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer shows this relationship between uncertainty and superstition in the Belief Engines of the normally libertine and morally free-spirited Sherpas. When nearing the top of the mountain the Sherpas were overwhelmed by magical thinking. One action in particular was “forbidden by the mountain”—“sauce-making” (sexual liaisons between unmarried couples) in the tents above Base Camp. “Whenever the weather would turn nasty, one or another Sherpa was apt to point up at the clouds boiling heavenward and earnestly declare, ‘Somebody has been sauce-making. Make bad luck. Now storm is coming.’” Sandy Pittman, the New York socialite who nearly lost her life during the 1996 expedition, posted the following diary entry on her Everest Web page about the superstitious Sherpas:

  … a mail runner had arrived that afternoon with letters from home for everyone and a girlie magazine which had been sent by a caring climber buddy back home as a joke … . Half of the Sherpas had taken it to a tent for closer inspection, while the others fretted over the disaster they were certain that any examination of it would bring. The goddess Chomolungma, they claimed, doesn’t tolerate “jiggy jiggy”—anything unclean—on her sacred mountain.

  The Belief Engine is real. It is normal. It is in all of us. Stuart Vyse shows, for example, that superstition is not a form of psychopathology or abnormal behavior; it is not limited to traditional cultures; it is not restricted to race, religion, or nationality; nor is it only a product of people of low intelligence or lacking in education. There is variance in magical thinking among individuals, of course, but all humans possess it because it is part of our nature, built into our neuronal mainframe. We do not live in a Pleistocene environment, but our minds were built there and often function as if we do. Witness a recent craze for mediums who say they can talk to the dead. It is a classic case of the Belief Engine at work. Because of the remarkable popularity of this particular claim, and the belief by millions of people that this alleged ability to speak with the dearly departed is evidence of a bridge to God and heaven, it is worth exploring it in detail. The phenomenon at work here tells us much about the very human need to believe, particularly when it is tethered to the tragedy of death.

  TALKING TWADDLE WITH THE DEAD

  Throughout much of 1998 and 1999, the bestselling book in America was by a man who says he can talk to the dead (and so can you, if you buy his book). It turns out that our loved ones who have passed over are not really dead, just on another spiritual plane. All you have to do is fine-tune your frequencies and, like Sri Leachim Remresh, you too can turn off the Here and Now and tune into that Something Else.

  I am referring to James Van Praagh, the world’s most famous medium … for now anyway. He appeared three times, unopposed, on Larry King Live. He was featured on NBC’s Dateline, and The Today Show and on ABC’s 20/20. He made the talk-show rounds, including Oprah (who was mildly skeptical) and Charles Grodin (who was not skeptical at all), and even had Charles Gibson on ABC’s Good Morning America talking to his dead dad. Cher met with him to talk one last time with Sonny. Denise Brown received a reading to make a final connection with her sister, Nicole Brown Simpson. What is going on here? Who is James Van Praagh, and why do so many people believe in him?

  An Actor in Search of a Role

  A brief glance at Van Praagh’s biography is revealing. According to Alex Witchel of the New York Times (February 22, 1998), Van Praagh is the third of four children, born and raised Roman Catholic in Bayside, Queens, New York. At one point, he considered becoming a priest. He served as an altar boy and even entered a Catholic preparatory seminary—the Blessed Sacrament Fathers and Brothers in Hyde Park. His father is Allan Van Praagh, the head carpenter at the Royale Theater on Broadway (where his brother still works). His mother was Irish-Catholic and one of his sisters is a eucharistic minister. While attending college he found part-time work at the theater where, says Witchel, while the other stagehands were playing cards during the shows, Van Praagh “was out front watching, picking up pointers he still uses for his numerous television appearances.” The lessons were we
ll learned.

  His college career was checkered, including enrollments at Queensboro Community College, State University of New York at Genesee, Hunter College, and, finally, San Francisco State University where he graduated with a degree in broadcasting and communications. Subsequently he moved to Los Angeles and began working in the entertainment industry, including Paramount Studios and a stint with the famed William Morris agency in Hollywood. He confesses in his book, Talking to Heaven: “I dreamed of a career as a screenwriter. As luck would have it, while coordinating a conference with the creative staff of Hill Street Blues, I became friendly with one of the show’s producers. When I told him I would be graduating soon, he offered what I thought was my first big break.” After graduation, Van Praagh moved to Hollywood where “I vowed that I would not leave Tinsel Town until I realized my dream and became a writer.” Through a job at William Morris, Van Praagh met a medium who told him: “You know, James, you are very mediumistic. The spirit people are telling me that one day you will give readings like this to other people. The spirits are planning to use you.” Van Praagh had found his role in Hollywood. He would act the part of a spirit medium.

  In 1994 he was discovered by NBC’s The Other Side, for whom Van Praagh made numerous appearances in their exploration of the paranormal. This, and other media appearances, generated countless personal and group readings, pushing him above the psychic crowd and eventually leading to his status as a bestselling author.

  Who does James Van Praagh say he is? According to his own Web page, “Van Praagh is a survival evidence medium, meaning that he is able to bridge the gap between two planes of existence, that of the living and that of the dead, by providing evidential proof of life after death via detailed messages.” Van Praagh calls himself a “clairsentient,” or “clear feeling,” where he can allegedly “feel the emotions and personalities of the deceased.” His analogue, he says, is “Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost.” He claims that the “spirits communicate by their emotions,” and even though they do not speak English or any other language, they can tell you, for example, “that you changed your pants because of a hole in the left seam or that you couldn’t mail letters today because the stamps weren’t in the bottom right desk drawer.” He readily admits that he makes mistakes in his readings (there are so many he could hardly deny it), rationalizing it this way: “If I convey recognizable evidence along with even a fraction of the loving energy behind the message, I consider the reading successful.” In other words, if he can just get a few hits, then “convey” the all-important emotional stroking that your loved one still loves you and is happy in heaven, he has done his job. From the feedback of his clients, this is all most people need.

  The forty-year-old medium’s message cuts to the core of most people’s deepest fear and loftiest desire, as he told the New York Times: “When a reunion between the living and the dead takes place it may be the first time the living understand that death has not robbed them of the love they once experienced with family and friends on the earth plane. With the knowledge of no death, they are free to live life.” No one has explained the attraction of this message better than Alexander Pope did over two and a half centuries ago, in his 1733 Essay on Man:

  Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

  Man never Is, but always To be blest.

  The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home,

  Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

  By itself, however, this does not explain precisely how our Belief Engine drives us to be compelled to believe such claims. Why are we so willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to the afterlife?

  Gambling on the Afterlife

  By way of analogy, consider the gambling games of Las Vegas. Gaming is big business, as anyone can see driving down the ever-burgeoning neon-glaring strip. In fact, gambling is the best bet in business, far superior to the stock market, as long as you are the house. With only a tiny advantage on any given game, and heaps of customers playing lots of rounds, the house is guaranteed to win. For the roulette wheel, for example, with eighteen red slots, eighteen black slots, and two green slots (zero and double zero), the take is only 5.26 percent. That is, by betting either black or red, you will win eighteen out of thirty-eight times, or 47.37 percent, whereas the house will win twenty out of thirty-eight times, or 52.63 percent. If you placed one hundred $1.00 bets, you would be out $5.26, on average. This may not sound like a lot, but cumulatively over time, with millions of gamblers betting billions of dollars every year, the house take is significant. Other games are better for gamblers. For straight bets in craps, the house take is a mere 1.4 percent; for blackjack, with the most liberal rules and optimal (non-card-counting) player strategies, the house earns just under 1 percent. These are the best games to play if you are a gambler (that is to say, you will lose more slowly). With other games it is downhill for the gambler. The take for some slot machines, for example, is a staggering 25 percent. That is, you are losing 25 cents on the dollar, or, the house wins 62.5 percent and you win 37.5 percent of the time. Yet people still play. Why?

  As B. F. Skinner showed in rats, pigeons, and humans, organisms do not need steady reinforcement to continue pressing a bar, pecking a plate, or pulling a one-armed bandit (slot machine). Intermittent reinforcement will do just as well, and sometimes even better, at eliciting the desired behavior. A “Variable Ratio Schedule” of reinforcement turns out to be the best for gambling games, where the payoff is unpredictably variable, depending on a varying rate of responses. Payoff comes after ten pulls, then three pulls, then twelve pulls, then seven pulls, then twenty-three pulls, and so on. When I was a graduate student in experimental psychology in the mid-1970s I worked in an operant laboratory where we created these variable schedules of reinforcement for our subjects. It is remarkable how infrequently the payoffs need to come to keep the subjects motivated. And this was for such basic rewards as sugar water (rats), seed (pigeons), and money (humans). Imagine how much more motivating, and, correspondingly, lower the rate of reinforcement can be, when the reward is the belief that your lost loved ones are not really dead and, as an added bonus, you can speak with them through a medium. This renders intelligible, in part, the success of someone like James Van Praagh, whose hit rate is far below that of even the lowest-paying gambling games in Las Vegas. It also helps explain the more general case of how we believe.

  I once sat in on a day of readings with Van Praagh and kept a running tally of his ratio of hits and misses for each of ten subjects (one of whom was me), all filmed for NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries. Being generous with what kind of information counted as a “hit,” Van Praagh averaged five to ten hits for every thirty questions/statements, or 16 to 33 percent—significantly below that of roulette where the player wins almost half the time. But because Van Praagh’s payoff is the hope of life after death and a chance to speak with a lost loved one, people are exceptionally forgiving of his many misses. Like all gamblers, Van Praagh’s clients only need an occasional hit to convince them.

  How to Talk to the Dead

  Watching James Van Praagh work a crowd or do a one-on-one reading is an educational experience in human psychology. Make no mistake about it, this is one clever man. We may see him, at best, as morally reprehensible, but we should not underestimate his genuine theatrical talents and his understanding, gained through years of experience speaking with real people, of what touches off some of the deepest human emotions. Van Praagh masterfully uses his ability and learned skills in three basic techniques he uses to “talk” to the dead:

  1.

  Cold Reading. Most of what Van Praagh does is what is known in the mentalism trade as cold reading, where you literally “read” someone “cold,” knowing nothing about them. He asks lots of questions and makes numerous statements, some general and some specific, and sees what sticks. Most of the time he is wrong. His subjects visibly shake their heads “no.” But he only needs an occasional strike to convince his clientele he is genuine.

  2. />
  Warm Reading. This is utilizing known principles of psychology that apply to nearly everyone. For example, most grieving people will wear a piece of jewelry that has a connection to their loved one. Katie Couric on The Today Show, for example, after her husband died. wore his ring on a necklace when she returned to the show. Van Praagh knows this about mourning people and will say something like “Do you have a ring or a piece of jewelry on you, please?” His subject cannot believe her ears and nods enthusiastically in the affirmative. He says, “Thank you,” and moves on as if he had just divined this from heaven. Most people also keep a photograph of their loved one either on them or near their bed, and Van Praagh will take credit for this specific hit that actually applies to most people.

  Van Praagh is facile at determining the cause of death by focusing either on the chest or head areas, and then exploring whether it was a slow or sudden end. He works his way down through these possibilities as if he were following a computer flowchart and then fills in the blanks. “I’m feeling a pain in the chest.” If he gets a positive nod, he continues. “Did he have cancer, please? Because I’m seeing a slow death here.” If he gets the nod, he takes the hit. If the subject hesitates at all, he will quickly shift to heart attack. If it is the head, he goes for stroke or head injury from an automobile accident or fall. Statistically speaking there are only half a dozen ways most of us die, so with just a little probing, and the verbal and nonverbal cues of his subject, he can appear to get far more hits than he is really getting.