Why and How Afterlife Belief Occurs

I know there is a Walgreens at the corner; I went there to get some toothpaste and a gift card just minutes ago, and I enjoyed a rather tasty strawberry milk from there as well. But when it comes to belief in God, or life after death, how do people maintain such beliefs? It isn't as if people can go to the "Heaven on the corner" to validate them.

Before starting, let me make it clear that I am in no way criticizing these beliefs, or arguing that they are silly or foolish. I merely am stating that, compared to things we can observe and see and test scientifically, afterlife belief cannot be obtained or arrived at.

Being raised in a very religious home, I have been interested in the maintanence and development of afterlife belief for some time. So when I became a PhD student in experimental social psychology, I naturally wanted to see if I could get at some of the "roots" of this belief, and specifically, what causes and maintains it. With help from my colleagues (Joshua Hart of Union College, and Jamie Goldenberg of The University of South Florida), several studies were designed to test two factors: body-self dualism and death salience.

The basic reasoning was that belief in life after death requires the ability to percieve part of the self (e.g., the soul) as capable of existing independently of the physical body. Thus, priming the physical body should reduce afterlife belief (even if only minimally) by making people feel like more of a body. We also reasoned that death salience should increase the desire to believe in life after death, but should not necessarily increase actual afterlife belief.

In 2 studies, we found that death salience leads spiritual individuals to see themselves as more "soul-like" by distancing their self-worth from their body. For non-spiritual individuals, this did not occur, and they even clung more to their bodies. In 2 follow up studies, we found that death salience reduced afterlife belief when people completed materials while getting a foot massage or first wrote about their physical experiences and attributes (hence priming a lack of dualism).

Another study showed that thinking about your body growing old, but not changing who you are (dualism), resulted in more belief when death was salient. But death salience had no effect when thinking about how a deteriorating body would change who you are (non dualism).

Interestingly, in all these studies, desire to believe in life after death increased when death was salient even when dualism was hindered.

For a final study, we were joined by researchers (Siri Maria Kamp and Emmanuel Donchin of The University of South Florida) of the Brain Computer Interface. This machine, basically, enables people to type using their brain waves, through a cap hooked up to it (i.e. it reads their attentional focus on certain letters on a computer screen). We reasoned that using this machine would prime dualism if people percieved it as accurate. (the machine is accurate and well-established, but we blocked the feedback and told participants that we weren't sure about its accuracy, because it is new).

Participants who placed high accuracy on their ability to use this machine (and hence were dualistic) had higher afterlife belief when they also typed death related words using the machine. However, participants who did not believe they were accurate (and hence were not dualistic) had less belief when they typed in death related words.

In sum, across 6 studies, it appears that death drives most people to WANT to believe in life after death, but, to the extent they cannot distance their sense of self from their physical body, ACTUAL belief can be hindered. Ironically, death salience can actually hurt actual belief in these cases, all the while increasing DESIRE to believe.

(note: This is not saying that there are not a whole host of other reasons that increase or decrease belief. We do not argue that suddenly a strong believer will stop believing because of our experiments. They will simply score, on average, slightly lower in their certainty. Likewise, an atheist will not all of a sudden believe wholly when primed with dualism and death. But they will, on average, believe that it is slightly more possible. Further, we have no data on if our effects impact belief beyond the 30 or so minutes the participant completes the study).