Prayers and Thoughts: To Pray Is to Signal With Sincerity

one-handed zen prayer

Source: J. Krueger

Prayer works for people .its called faith. - Ronnie, a reader

An unscientific reasoner will be guided by a confused recollection of crude experience. –F. Galton (1872)

The "Prayers and Thoughts" portion of the title of this post can be read in two ways. One reading is that there are prayers and there are thoughts, as in the conventional phrase thoughts and prayers, handily invoked after tragedy by those who would rather not deal with it. Another reading is that there are prayers and there are thoughts we might have about these prayers. I envisaged the latter reading when I titled this post, and I found the inverted order, as noted by the first reading, to be of sufficient rhetorical interest to include it.

Intercessory prayer

The epigraph points us to a psychological explanation of why it is that prayer, and intercessory prayer in particular, remains popular. Believers, failing to think scientifically, conclude from “crude experience” that intercessory prayer works—so Galton. Reams of research on confirmation bias confirm the soundness of this psychological explanation (Nickerson, 1998).

Intercessory prayer does not work, according to the empirical evidence; indeed, it should not work lest we allow for the suspension of natural law by divine intervention. Masters et al. (2006) meta-analyzed the findings of 14 studies (which is, granted, a small number for a meta-analysis) with double-blind designs. Neither the intended beneficiaries nor the providers of prayer knew of each other.

The standardized effect of g = .011 does not pass the statistical not-nothing threshold. “Further,” the authors note, “there was no evidence to suggest that these results were influenced by potential moderators such as method of allocation of research participants to groups (random vs. nonrandom), prayer dosage, that is, whether prayers were offered at least daily or less often, or how long the prayer intervention lasted” (p. 24).

One might object that while the blindness of the patients (the receivers) is a desirable design feature guarding against interesting but beside-the-point placebo effects, the blindness of the providers is trickier. Providers might say they need to know about the receivers in order to make their prayers effective. Be that as it may, the data give no comfort to believers, and I know of no evidence that would undo this conclusion.

Sir Francis Galton, who wrote a “memoir” on the matter in 1872 shortly after addressing the issue in his 1869 master work Hereditary Genius, already thought there was enough absence of evidence to lay the issue to rest. Reporting data first presented by a certain Dr. Guy in the Journal of the Statistical Society, volume xxii, p. 355, Galton showed that mortality rates did not vary across classes of people; those people who were prayed for heavily at the time, such as royalty, did not live longer than the populace praying for them.

Instead, there was a trend in the opposite direction. Aristocrats and clerics had shorter lifespans than other Britons. Would anyone now conclude that intercessory prayer does have a causal effect, an effect that just happens to be a negative one? Certainly not. There are too many hypotheses left on the table that do not require divine intervention, such as the idea that aristocrats and clergy back in the England of the day had gotten fat and lazy, and that’s why they passed on earlyish.

The will to believe

If Galton attributed the stickiness of the folk belief in intercessory prayer to crude experience, what else might be said about the survival of this ancient idea? An obvious interpretation is that intercessory prayer is a cultural tradition (perhaps a “meme,” a “trope,” or a “script”) that self-replicatorily rolls on from generation to generation. To the praying person, prayer is a low-cost, cheap-talk technique that signals goodwill, compassion, and, more insidiously, moral superiority (“I will pray for you, but would you pray for me?”).

How people with and without faith perceive and value intercessory prayer is an illuminating question. Asking respondents how much they would pay to be prayed for by a well-intentioned Catholic, Thunström & Noy (2022) found a crisp polarization effect. Believers welcome intercessory prayer and are willing to put up money. By contrast, atheists, skeptics, and anti-theists are willing to pay for the privilege of not being prayed for. The latter finding is oddly ironic because if these atheists firmly—and correctly—believed in the nullity of intercessory prayer, they should be indifferent; as good materialists they should keep the money.

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We may speculate that the atheists resent being prayed for because they intuit that the prayer providers bask in a glow of their own moral rectitude—at the expense of the ill atheists. The atheists are willing to pay for this self-serving arrangement to be blocked. By contrast, willing providers might pay for the privilege to pray because it allows them to feel good about themselves. Receivers might be willing to pay in order to harvest the sense of compassion and caring that a low-cost prayer provides. [Note 1]

Believers believe that prayer works; they believe their efforts reach the ear of the deity, who will intervene to make well those that nature would otherwise cull. Psychologically, this amounts to an ambiguity as deep as the Grand Canyon. On the one hand, prayer providers signal humility by suggesting they can merely put in a good word with the deity to whose free will it is then left to make the ill well. It is understood that no deity would make the ill iller because of the prayer; there is either no effect or a positive one, that is, there is a positive effect with p > 0.

On the other hand, for prayer providers to say—or to imply—that they can nudge the deity to suspend the laws of nature is a power claim of fantastical proportions, particularly as it is implied that the ill cannot achieve the goal on their own. Prayer providers of true faith are then - one would think - required to seek divine intervention. If they refuse to do so, while believing that prayer would have worked, they are invited to contemplate the ethical implications.

The prayer myopia

The interpretation I have suggested here will sound off-putting to many, especially to people of faith, who would sincerely ask, “What would you have us do? We would feel terrible if we didn’t pray for the sick, only to then see them die.” [Note 2] This is the final psychological piece of the puzzle. Once a cultural habit has formed and has been passed down the generations, its suspension (even if there is no good evidence to compel its continuation) smacks of betrayal. Moreover, the question “What if it had worked—Jonathan would still be with us” is difficult to banish from the mind.

Most psychological activity is myopic, it is focused on the most immediate sensations and intuitions (Kahneman, 2011). Believers will settle for noting the association between the goodwill and caring signaled by prayer without contemplating its various dark subtexts. It falls to the scientist and the blogger to peer into this darkness, if only for a moment. This dredging work remains necessary; otherwise, we could just pray to the Good Lord to make people understand that prayer does not work as advertised.

What will the non-believer, having seen the futility of prayer, do instead? He might put some skin in the game and do what Maimonides of Córdoba considered the premier mitzvah (an act to meet a divine commandment): visit the sick! The farther he travels and the more time he spends, the more credible is the signal of good will. A visit from a friend may indeed have nonplacebic healing properties.

And finally: Baruch Spinoza, another Sephardi Jew who thought deeply about religious questions, moved form theism to pantheism or the idea that God is not an external actor to whom one may appeal in protest of what is. He therefore denied the value of intercessory prayer a priori. In his master work, Ethics, he wrote “Whosoever loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return” (cited in The School of Life: Spinoza).

Note [1]. A sly auctioneer could get rich drawing believers and atheists into a bidding war.

Note [2]. Would believers feel better if they prayed and then saw the receivers die. Is an “at least we tried” conclusion sufficiently consoling?