Hypnotic Power of Charismatic Religion Proved Imaginary
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Whatever else you think about charismatic preachers, they have a dramatic power over their audience. While their followers believe them to have special powers, a new brain imaging study by Uffe Schjødt at Aarhus University in Denmark suggests that it's all just a product of their imagination.
In fact, the brain imaging study is only part of the story. What's even more remarkable is what it says about how some people come to fall under the spell of these charismatics.
What they did was to take a small group of pentecostal Christians and a matched group of non-believers. Both were chosen so as to represent the extreme ends of the belief scale.
They were asked to listen to prayers being read by three different people who, they were told, were a non-Christian, an ordinary Christian, and a Christian 'known for his healing powers'. In fact, they were all ordinary Christians...
So there was no real difference between the prayers (the speakers were mixed up to make sure differences in speaking style could not affect the experiment). The only difference was what the listener was told, but what a dramatic effect it had!
When asked, the pentecostalists rated the one they were told was a healer as the most charismatic, and the person they thought was non-religious as much less charismatic (see the graph). For the non-believers, there was a slight trend in the same direction, but it was small and insignificant. Basically, they weren't taken in by the deception.
But the pentecostalists were. Just telling a pentecostalists that someone has healing powers makes them think that they are highly charismatic. What's more, they didn't feel God's presence in the prayers read by the person they were told was a non-Christian.
So where does the hypnotism come in? Well, specific regions of the pentecostalist's brains became somewhat activated when listening to the prayer from the 'non-believer', but highly deactivated when listening to the prayer from the 'charismatic healer'. The prayer from the ordinary Christian resulted in deactivation too, but on a small scale.
And the regions that were deactivated by the 'charismatic healer' were all associated with 'executive function' - the part of the mind that evaluates, monitors, and makes decisions. A similar response has been seen in the brains of people undergoing hypnosis - as well as meditation.
In other words, the believers went into a trance.
What Schjødt thinks is happening here is that, when we listen someone we trust implicitly, we switch off our critical faculties, and just let what they are saying wash over us. In the words of the researchers, "subjects suspend or 'hand over' their critical faculty to the trusted person."
Important too, the people who described themselves as atheists were immune to the powers of the charismatic preacher.
Note: Stage hypnosis shows that you that you can see similar effects in secular situations - and Milgram's scary experiments in authority also spring to mind.
This article at: http://news.psydir.com/Psychology-Articles/the-hypnotic-power-of-charismatic-religion/
Original research paper at: http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/03/12/scan.nsq023.abstract
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
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Well, in the social sciences (yah, I know... but that is what pays my bills), this is one of those things that has been generally accepted for at least 25 years. Basically, there is no special magical power that charismatics hold over over the people whom they control. Rather, what is going on is something that people do to themselves.
It is nice to see something like real medical evidence on the matter though.
A big part of how this entered general knowledge was from the cultish churches of the 70's. Note that professionally, we tend to avoid the term “cult” due to the negative associations that come with the word. Professionally, we use terms such as “new religious movement” although I am disposed to consider that all religions are movements in the same sense that movements tend to happen on the toilet. [/rimshot]
Anyway, back in the 70's, there were a bunch of charlatans running around branding themselves as “deprogrammers” who could return rescued loved ones from the grip of whatever cult they had fallen into (presumably to get them back to believing in “right thinking” religion). For the most part, they would track down a wayward relative, kidnap them and hold them in a motel room while they forced the person to change their ways.
How that was actually any better than what a possible cult may have done to them was never gone into. The long and short of the matter was that if it worked at all, the best that ever came out of it was that the victim ended up with two concurrent cases of post traumatic stress to deal with.
Today, it is mostly in general acceptance that nobody has the magical power to do things to other people. Rather, the radical fundies are considered to have what is known as “influence” over people. As such, a preacher man can say stuff but that is roughly analogous to putting a plate of food in front of someone. The individual still has to decide to swallow it.
Along those lines, I suppose that the magical type of power to bend men's minds would be analogous to force feeding the victims whatever was on the table.
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and a realm of consideration most atheists must have traversed, even if simply asking themselves: "How is it theists can believe what makes no sense to me?"
For me this apparent willingness to believe the improbable is a road and rubber issue. If theists do disengage their executive minds when faced with a trusted figure (and the research implies we all do it to some extent in all areas of our lives) then my inability to let go of my doubts is not a sin but an underlying construct of mind and that's important to all those who grew up being told their lack of belief was the great sin against the holy spriggot. It also goes some way to explaining to former christians why and how they once could have entirely believed and why and how their beliefs were slowly undone.
Personally, I think the argument that former christians were never christians is false. We often touch on this dilemma in our threads here - Fred is up against it in his "What is a real christian?" thread elsewhere on the boards and it's research like this that provides some broad answers. Whether it's elevated spiritual transcendence or simply a stronger desire to believe and accept than to doubt, there must be explanations for the differences in what I can't help but describe as gullibility that we find across the atheist/theist divide.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
I can't wait to hear Cpt Pineapple's take on this. Gosh... the idea that the content of the meme affects the believer just because they're a believer...
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Yah, AE, you have mentioned your fundie background rather more than I have. However, in this context, I think that I can drop at least part of my story.
I was raised in good public schools where science was the standard. I was a science freak from about the age where it all started to come together for me. Let's say about age 10 or so.
A dozen years later, I managed to stumble into the salvation army. I even went on a retreat to some camp out in the woods. At one point, we were having some kind of a party that slowly slid into a worship service such that nobody unaware of what was going on would have seen what was coming.
Eventually, the guy who was running the show* had us all on our knees thinking about ourselves and unaware that there were other people in the room. Then he asked for people who “feel that they need help with their life” (I forget the exact quote but that is good enough) to raise a hand.
Well, I will be 47 on Sunday and today I don't see how that would not be a hand raiser for pretty much everyone. Even so, it seemed to be a selector for them. They must have had hard core adherents standing at the back because a minute or so later, I had a hand on my shoulder from someone who pulled the move: Brother, come to the front and get what you need.
After that, I was part of the perhaps 5% of the people in the room standing in the front. Of course I got totally sucked in at that point. Later in the evening, I was confronted with the concept of YEC nonsense and I clearly remember thinking on the matter. My thoughts at that point went something along this line:
So yah, I slipped into a toxic meme. The whole thing about being part of a group was a key factor but it was ultimately me deciding to do what I did that made the deal.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
*For anyone who does not know how the Salvation Army works, this is relevant to the concept of individual magical power over people.
The Salvation Army does not really have a concept of a hierarchy, at least for the most part. There are lieutenants, captains, majors and so on. If you are lucky beyond the definition of luck, well, one day you might even meet the General.
However, the real deal is the power of being part of a group. If you are part of the group, then you believe what the group believes. When some idiot asserts YEC, then YEC is part of the meme.
So yah, fundies like Benny Hinn do not have magical power to make people fall over when he hits them with his jacket. People fall over because they expect (are expected?) to fall over.
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I am still trying to figure out how anyone can make a statistical graph out of "Charisma"... Ben Stein is a "1"....and Ric Flair is a "10"?...
www.RichWoodsBlog.com
I'm currently writing a long ass response on your blog entry about how your interpetation of this is wrong and not only that dangerous . I'm putting conserdiable thought into it so may take a while so prepare for a wall of text.
Here's a little preview:
You said that this study shows that dyed in the wool skeptisicm would make you less likely to buy into propoganda [Yes I know you didn't say completely immune].
This is a non-sequitur.
In order to show this, you would have to take a worldview of Mr dyed in the wool skeptic [such as for example Liberal or any of the millions of other worldviews that person could have] and run the same test. I can pretty much tell you the results now.
Yes I know you said they won't totally immune, but to say just because a Skeptic rejects outgroup propoganda and then extend it to the Skeptic will then be more likely to reject other propaganda simply does not follow.
You've missed the point completely. Maybe I didn't say it well.
This study demonstrates why faith is bad. The difference between a faith based worldview and a skeptical worldview is that a faith-based worldview values belief in non-skeptical conclusions. It values credulity, to put it bluntly. As I clearly stated, atheists are not immune from the phenomenon this experiment described. But why didn't they fall for it?
Because they are not predisposed to trust preachers.
Why? Because they don't have faith in God's existence.
Now, suppose you ran this same experiment with another religion. The results would probably be the same. Atheists would be basically immune from having their brain shut down just from being exposed to the meme that someone can work magic.
We can extrapolate, then, that anyone who does not believe in magic is immune from a whole class of propaganda. Sure, they're just as susceptible to other kinds of propaganda, but when you take the class {Religious Propaganda} out of the list of things people believe that are false, you've eliminated a LOT of bad things.
The notion that skeptics are going to be generally less susceptible is simple:
Skeptics, by definition, tend not to adopt worldviews for which there is little or no support. That's because... gee... they are skeptics and tend to demand evidence. (It could be that skeptics really aren't more skeptical about the world than non-skeptics, but I've not seen the proof of that.) Presumably, the class of people who demand evidence before believing are going to be less inclined to buy into ANY worldview which would place high value on credulity. So...
There you go. You've eliminated one class of credulity. So I'm not saying "Skeptics are less susceptible to the hypnotic effect of trust." I'm saying skeptics are less likely to have a worldview which encourages blind trust, and will trust less easily. That much seems to be almost tautological.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
I just revamped my response to your blog and just posted it.
To plug your blog others can find it here
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/news-flash-believers-are-gullible/