Jesus Is My Copilot

You're working on your thesis and your screen goes blank. No! Was it something you pressed? A software bug? An act of God? Causes for events are not always clear, and a study shows how easily fingers can point in the wrong direction.

We've evolved to assume we're responsible for our own actions, but that mechanism can go awry, as in schizophrenia, or bend to other beliefs, as when athletes thank God for a touchdown. In the research, subjects made words disappear from a computer screen by pressing keys, but some words randomly disappeared on their own, sometimes just before a key was pressed. Participants had to judge whether they or the computer were to blame. Before each trial, a subliminal cue flashed on the screen. If the cue was the word I or me, people felt more responsible for deleting the second word. If it was computer, they felt less responsible. And if it was God, they also felt less responsible, but only if they believed in an Almighty.

"Judgments of credit and blame are lightning-quick, and may be based on information that isn't consciously available," says study co-author Jesse Preston, of the University of Western Ontario. Potential causes seem more likely if we happen to be thinking about them during the event. Preston says the experiments might shed the most light on how we think about supernatural forces. "Because God is seen as omnipotent, even some minor event, such as a crack of thunder, can seem to be His doing if the circumstances seem relevant—say, if someone's just cursed God's name."

Just don't blame your dashboard Jesus for that speeding ticket.