The Error of God?
Posted 28 July 2009 by DominicThe study of cooperation in humans and other animals has been hugely influenced by game theory, an analytical approach to strategic behavior that began life at Princeton with John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior”, published at the height of World War II in 1944.
On the 50th anniversary of von Neumann’s death in 2008, a symposium sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation was held at Princeton University to examine the state of the field in cooperation research, and especially the role of moral systems and public goods—issues of particular importance in an age of increasing interest in the origins and functions of religion, and the need to achieve collective action to mitigate global climate change.
The products of that symposium have now been published in a new book “Games, Groups, and the Global Good” (Springer 2009), edited by Simon Levin. The book features a foreword by Lord Robert May, and chapters by such figures as Elinor Ostrom, Martin Nowak and Eric Maskin. The authors address the still vexing questions of how groups form, how institutions come into being, when moral norms and practices emerge, and how game theoretic approaches can be used to examine the interactions between individuals and the collectives they form. The concept of cooperation is examined at a higher level than that usually addressed by game theory, especially focusing on the formation of groups and the role of social norms in maintaining their integrity, with positive and negative implications. The authors suggest that conventional analyses need to be broadened to explain how heuristics, like concepts of fairness arise and become formalized into the ethical principles embraced by a society.
Dominic Johnson’s chapter explores the possible role of “Error Management Theory” in the evolution of beliefs in supernatural punishment. Error Management Theory (hereafter EMT) suggests that if the costs of false positive and false negative decision-making errors have been asymmetric over human evolutionary history, then natural selection would favor a bias towards the least costly error over time (in order to avoid whichever was the worse error). So, for example, we have a bias to sometimes think that sticks are snakes (which is harmless), but never that snakes are sticks (which may be deadly).
Applied to religious beliefs and behaviors, he derives the hypothesis from EMT that humans may gain a fitness advantage from a bias in which they tend to assume that their every move (and thought) is being watched, judged, and potentially punished by supernatural agents. Although such a belief would be costly because it constrains freedom of action and self-interested behaviors, it may nevertheless be favored by natural selection if it helps to avoid an error that is even worse: committing selfish actions or violations of social norms when there is a high probability of real-world detection and punishment by victims or other group members. Simply put, supernatural beliefs may have been an effective mindguard against excessively selfish behavior – behavior that became especially risky and costly as our social transgressions became increasingly transparent due to the evolution of language and theory of mind (people could much more easily discover and retaliate against selfishness). If belief in God is an error, it may at least be an adaptive one. The chapter presents some preliminary theoretical and empirical support for the hypothesis.