Dozens of evolutionists have observed that insofar as beliefs are products of natural selection, either proximally or distally, then they should be designed to enhance fitness, not to perceive the world as it really is. One of us (Wilson Reference Wilson1995; Reference Wilson2002; Reference Wilson, David, Lynn and Ellis2010) has used the terms practical realism and factual realism to contrast these two criteria for evaluating beliefs. At the most foundational level, an evolutionary approach to epistemology predicts that the mind is designed to apprehend reality only to the extent that factual realism contributes to practical realism (Wilson Reference Wilson1990).
The gist of McKay & Dennett's (M&D's) argument is that a positive tradeoff between factual and practical realism usually does exist, with the exception of positive illusions. We admire the way that M&D interpret various categories of belief from an evolutionary perspective (e.g., by-products vs. adaptations) but we disagree with their conclusions. We think that negative tradeoffs are pervasive but that, ironically, the case for positive illusions is weak.
To begin with genetic evolution, when it comes to misbeliefs, deception begins with perception. All organisms perceive only the environmental stimuli that matter to their fitness. Our species can see only a narrow slice of the sound and light spectrum, cannot sense electrical and gravitational fields at all, and so on. We also distort what we can perceive, for example, by turning the continuous light spectrum into discrete colors. Perception might not qualify as belief, but if the former is so prone to adaptive distortions, it would be surprising if the latter was not prone as well.
Proceeding to cultural evolution, we disagree with M&D's assessment that by-product explanations of religion are prevailing over adaptation explanations. The actual emerging consensus is that the two interpretations are more compatible than previously thought. In particular, when we examine by-products versus adaptations separately for genetic and cultural evolution, the by-product proponents could be largely right for genetic evolution and the adaptationists could be largely right for cultural evolution. All adaptations begin as exaptations, so it is possible that cultural evolution has produced highly adaptive religions – and other cultural systems – out of genetic adaptations that evolved for other purposes (Wilson Reference Wilson2005; Reference Wilson, David, Lynn and Ellis2010).
Cultural evolution at the group level leads to a view of cultures as highly adaptive systems that are designed to orchestrate action for members of the culture. If most behaviors come directly from one's culture and only more distally from one's genes, then cultural systems must approach the sophistication of genomes as far as the replication and expression of traits is concerned (Wilson Reference Wilson2002; Reference Wilson, Carruthers, Laurence and Stich2006).
Regardless of how plausible one regards this view of culture, let's explore its implications for adaptive misbeliefs. Somehow, a culture must provide an elaborate guide for how to behave in the many situations encountered by members of the culture. When it comes to motivating behavior, there is nothing like a putative fact. If I disapprove of what you are doing, I can call you sick or immature. If I think that a woman's place is in the home, I can believe that women are mentally inferior and that it is abnormal for them to become sexually aroused. If I despise my enemy, I might think that an enemy lacks compassion even among its members.
We trust that we don't need to belabor the point. Cultures are awash in putative facts that can be easily explained in terms of the behaviors they motivate and clearly depart from factual reality. People fight to establish adaptive misbeliefs.
Some of the candidate misbeliefs considered by M&D are self-limiting; for example, when lies are effective only when rare. Useful fictions as cultural instructions are different. They are often in everyone's interest, they are taught to young children who have no basis for rejecting them, and disbelievers are punished. Even those who try their best to disbelieve can be overwhelmed by constant repetition and pressure to conform. As Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues have shown (reviewed in Gilbert Reference Gilbert1991), the default assumption is to believe what one hears, and disbelieving requires effort. Propaganda works because the mind's capacity to disbelieve can be overwhelmed if you shovel in falsehoods fast enough.
Often apparent in cases of ideological extremism, marked by strongly held and sometimes patently false beliefs, is the ubiquitous confirmation bias – the tendency to seek out consistent evidence and to ignore, dismiss, or selectively reinterpret contradictory evidence (Lilienfeld et al. Reference Lilienfeld, Ammirati and Landfield2009). False beliefs can become deeply entrenched when imbued with strong or “hot” affect, reinforced by social interactions (i.e., people seek out others with similar beliefs), and embedded in matrices of affirming consistent beliefs. To compound recalcitrance to challenging false beliefs and allied actions: (a) people often lack both knowledge of how they form beliefs about themselves (T. D. Wilson Reference Wilson2009) and awareness of their own biases (yet they are quick to point out the biases of others: Pronin et al. Reference Pronin, Gilovich and Ross2004); (b) people rationalize their actions in terms of existing beliefs (Kermer et al. Reference Kermer, Driver-Linn, Wilson and Gilbert2006); and (c) people process information automatically, with minimal, if any, conscious introspection or challenge (Kirsch & Lynn Reference Kirsch and Lynn1999). Even memory conspires to fortify the status quo: We tend to remember events (whether conforming to historical facts or false memories) that are plausible; that is, based on our beliefs about ourselves and the world, as well as on our current moods and action tendencies (see Lynn & McConkey Reference Lynn and McConkey1998.
Theoretically, misbeliefs can be subjected to a cost-benefit analysis. The benefits, which might accrue to either individuals or groups, are the actions motivated by the putative facts. The costs are the consequences of ignoring the real facts over the long term. The belief that global warming isn't caused by people, for example, leads to short-term benefits and potentially disastrous long-term costs. The title of Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, says it all.
In a given culture, the costs and benefits can be expected to weigh in favor of apprehending factual reality in some cases and treating fiction as fact in others. According to anthropologists such as Malinowski (Reference Malinowski1948), all cultures have a mode of thought that can be recognized as rational and proto-scientific, but which is expressed only some of the time. That is exactly what we should expect from an evolutionary perspective, which also explains why science has only a toehold in our own culture and is ignored whenever convenient.
Ironically, while we think that M&D have underestimated the importance of adaptive misbeliefs, we also think that the evidence for the adaptive value of positive illusions is weak. For instance, one survey of over 15,000 studies (Baumeister et al. Reference Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger and Vohs2003) revealed that self-esteem is minimally related to interpersonal success, and not consistently related to alcohol abuse, drug abuse, and smoking. A subset of high–self-esteem individuals who are narcissistic, with inflated yet unstable self-esteem, are at highest risk for physical aggression (Baumeister Reference Baumeister2001). Relatedly, bullies have inflated self-perceptions (Baumeister et al. Reference Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger and Vohs2003), and aggressive children overestimate their popularity (relative to peer ratings) more than non-aggressive children, a tendency especially marked among narcissistic children (Barry et al. Reference Barry, Frick and Killian2003). An inflated sense of self can have serious costs.
M&D cite research that denial as a coping strategy decreases the risk of recurrence of breast cancer. Yet it is difficult to comprehend how denial would promote cancer survival if it discouraged treatment-seeking or follow-through. Moreover, the lion's share of findings indicates that positive beliefs have no bearing on cancer survival (Beyerstein et al. Reference Beyerstein, Sampson, Stojanovic, Handel and Dallea Sala2007; Phillips Reference Phillips2008). A nine-year study (Coyne et al. Reference Coyne, Pajak, Harris, Konski, Movsas and Ang2007) of more than a thousand patients with advanced head and neck cancer revealed that hopeful patients were no more likely to live longer than patients who believed they were “losing hope in my fight against my illness.”
The weak evidence for positive illusions notwithstanding, adaptive misbeliefs are so pervasive that we wonder how two smart people such as M&D could have missed them. One reason might be that they take a predominately individual approach to beliefs and say little about culture, much less cultures as something comparable to a genome. We know from Dennett's other work (Dennett Reference Dennett2006a) that he doesn't deny the possibility that memes can form into “memeplexes” in addition to acting on their own, but M&D don't explore the implications in their target article. Our commentary, which points out the obvious in retrospect, demonstrates the utility of thinking about adaptation above the level of the individual.
