By Neil Levy, Rob Ross and Ryan McKa. Cross-posted from Human Behaviour and Society.
Anthropology must steer a narrow course between twin dangers. On the one hand, there is the perennial risk of exoticizing other peoples. On the other hand, there is a danger of a failure to recognize genuine difference, rendering somewhat alien worldviews mere variants of our own. Nowhere do these risks loom larger than when it comes to understanding the attitudes of other cultures to magic.
On the one hand, if we interpret magic as an instrumental technology, we are faced with the problem of understanding how rational people could genuinely believe in its efficacy, given the evidence against it. On the other hand, if we deny that they are genuine believers, we risk obscuring their genuine differences from us. The same problem arises closer to home, at least for those of us who accept a squarely secular worldview: how can our neighbors or our families genuinely believe in the supernatural agents of religions?
Non-instrumental accounts of magic (and religion) focus on its roles in fostering a sense of belonging, community, and in satisfying existential needs, without postulating a wholehearted belief in it as an instrumental technology. These accounts are today powerfully challenged by instrumentalist accounts, that maintain that people are, in the main, genuine believers, and suggest that (nevertheless) universal cognitive biases and heuristics can explain a diversity of attitudes to magic, including genuine belief in its efficacy.
We take our inspiration from recent work in political science and psychology (some of it by us) that provides evidence that belief reports are not always sincere. People sometimes insincerely report believing bizarre claims (like some conspiracy theories) or politically relevant claims for a variety of reasons.
One motivation for insincere belief reports is to express an attitude. Political scientists call this expressive responding or partisan cheerleading. For example, people may report believing that the crowd at the first Trump inauguration was bigger than at Obama’s to express support for Trump, just as someone might report believing the Browns are the greatest team to express support for their side, rather than because one genuinely believes.
People may also report believing a conspiracy theory or engaging in a strange behavior (like drinking bleach to prevent COVID-19) for a different reason: to ‘troll’ experimenters or because they think it’s funny.
People may also sincerely but wrongly report their own beliefs. Asked to report what they believe about some question they’ve never explicitly considered before (“will Donald Trump invade Canada?”), people may sample a range of considerations that come to mind and construct a narrative. This report may not reflect their true attitude. The tendency to misreport an attitude may be particularly strong when the attitude is one that is fun to maintain and receives community support.
Most of the evidence, at least from political science and psychology, concerns the belief reports of people in WEIRD societies. We see no reason to think that the reports of people in non-WEIRD society are more likely to be sincere, and (when sincere) accurate. While the accusation that Margaret Mead’s informants were hoaxing them is sharply contested, there’s evidence that informants may troll anthropologists. Salamone quotes one Tiv informant’s ridicule: “When I read what the white man has written of our customs, I laugh, for it is the custom of our people to lie as a matter of course to outsiders, especially the white man.”
The evidence concerning expressive responding, trolling, and the construction of attitudes among WEIRD participants does not suggest that everyone is insincere or mistakenly reporting a belief. Rather, it supports what we call a motley of attitudes: some people are genuine believers, some are trolls, some are sincere but mistaken. The proportion of genuine believers varies from topic to topic, and a single individual may take a variety of attitudes across topics. We think that exactly the same is true of people in non-WEIRD societies when it comes to belief in magic. Some may understand magic symbolically, some may be sincere believers (or disbelievers) in it, and some may have no stable attitude at all.
Instrumentalist accounts offer compelling evidence that some people are really true believers. However, we point to evidence in the anthropological literature to argue that other attitudes exist alongside belief. We suggest that postulating a heterogeneity of attitudes is needed to make sense of many ethnographic reports without attributing a lack of rationality to informants. In his study of Burmese animism, Spiro notes that the beliefs of his informants are “marked by inconsistency, contradiction, and by what might be called cognitive looseness,” with different informants manifesting different degrees of belief ranging from wholehearted acceptance to outright skepticism. We suspect this sort of heterogeneity is widespread across many societies, including our own.
When Evans-Pritchard attributes inconsistent beliefs among the Azande and a blatant failure to “perceive the contradiction” between their beliefs, he risks not only making them alien, but failing to recognize their rationality. While we acknowledge the risk we run of the reverse mistake — of assuming that people from “exotic” societies are entirely like ourselves — we think our suggestion that people of all societies take a motley of attitudes is both more respectful of our shared humanity and more faithful to the evidence.