by COREY L. COOK
A review of Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts to Gods to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. Times Books: New York, 2011, 400 pp., US$28.00, ISBN # 978-0-8050-9125-0 (hardcover).
Introduction
Michael Shermer, one of the world’s most renowned skeptical authorities and the founder and editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine, has built his career around debunking irrational and poorly supported beliefs. Despite his notability as a proponent of skepticism and scientific reasoning, Shermer may not be as well known for his vast knowledge of evolutionary psychology and his ability to clearly explain everyday human behaviors and belief systems from an evolutionary perspective. In his latest book, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts to Gods to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, Shermer seeks to explain the formation of specific beliefs (as the title implies), as well as belief systems in general. In doing so, he brilliantly synthesizes cognitive research and evolutionary theorizing – shedding light on a number of humanity’s most cherished beliefs and their underlying mechanisms along the way.
Shermer’s book is separated into four parts, all of which are tied together by one unifying hypothesis – that humans form beliefs first and then seek evidence consistent with those beliefs. Shermer terms this process “belief-dependent realism” (p.5). It has long been known among those familiar with social cognitive science that people are more rationalizing than rational. For example, Gilbert (Gilbert, 2002; Gilbert and Gill, 2000) has argued that people initially believe their own subjective experiences as an accurate reflection of reality, and will only discount or question these beliefs through effortful cognitive processing. However, Shermer intends to not only disseminate the information on human rationalization to the lay public, but also seeks to explain the evolutionary reasons for why the human brain is a rationalizing machine.
Evolutionary Psychology for more