The need to believe: a neuroscience account of religion as a motivated process

Abstract

Religious belief has been shown to offer substantial benefits to its adherents, including improved well-being and health. We suggest that these benefits might be explained, at least in part, from a ''motivated meaning-making'' perspective. This model holds that people are motivated to create and sustain meaning (i.e., a sense of coherency between beliefs, goals, and perceptions of the environment, which provides individuals with the feeling that the world is an orderly place), and that religious beliefs buffer the distress associated with disruptions to meaning, thus leading to decreases in distress. We further propose that religion's palliative attributes can be measured at the level of the brain, specifically in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which produces a ''distress signal'' upon the detection of errors, conflict, and expectancy violation. Using a social neuroscience paradigm, we investigate four main predictions that arise from this model: (1) religion should be associated with activation in the ACC; (2) religion should decrease activation in the ACC; (3) this attenuation of ACC activity should be related to religion's ability to buffer bodily states of distress, and not to decreases in motivation, attention, or control; (4) religion should have these effects because it provides meaning and thus buffers people from uncertainty. All predictions were supported, thus providing evidence, at the neural level, for the motivated meaning-making model's account of the salutary properties of religion.

Why are Religiousness and Spirituality Associated with Externalizing Psychopathology? A Literature Review

“…Similarly, Inzlicht and colleagues (2011) found an association between religiousness (measured separately as religious zeal, belief in God, and religious attendance) and the ACC in a sample of religious undergraduates. Their findings indicated that religiousness buffered against error-related negativity (ERN) in the ACC, thus attenuating bodily states of distress.…”

Toward a Biological Understanding of Mortality Salience (And Other Threat Compensation Processes)

“…TMT has played an invaluable role in illuminating the pervasive effects of mortality salience on human behaviors and some of the deeply rooted psychological functions served by significant aspects of our culture such as religion (e.g., Inzlicht, McGregor, Hirsh, & Nash, 2009;Inzlicht, Tullett, & Good, 2011;Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008), in-group bias/out-group prejudice (e.g., see Greenberg et al, 1990), and the objectification of women (e.g., Goldenberg, Heflick, Vaes, Motyl, & Greenberg, 2009;Goldenberg, Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 2000). Relatively recent developments in the field of social neuroscience, however, are enabling reevaluation-and refinement of theories such as TMT.…”

The Franciscan Prayer Elicits Empathic and Cooperative Intentions in Atheists: A Neurocognitive and Phenomenological Enquiry

“…The typical ERN signals have been observed as low in samples of believers and this low signals correlate with their high religious fervor or conviction. So, these results suggest that religious beliefs guard people against distress when facing uncertainty through controlled and automatic neurocognitive processes [wide explanations of these protocols and experiments can be found in Inzlicht et al (2009), Inzlicht and Tullett (2010), and Inzlicht et al (2013)]. A wide explanation of the Stroop task can be found in Mercadillo et al (2012).…”