JESSE BERING is a reader in the School of History and Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen's University, Belfast. His postgraduate studies focused on the psychological differences between human beings and chimpanzees, and this early exposure to comparative psychology, combined with his PhD in developmental psychology, led to his work studying how the evolved human mind plays a part in religious thinking. He is the author of numerous scientific articles on topics ranging from the afterlife to university students' conceptions of destiny. His popular writings have appeared in American Scientist, Scientific American and New Statesman, and he has had several essays published in John Brockman's Edge-derived books. He also contributes a regular blog called Bering in Mind to Scientific American Mind. Born in the United States in 1975, he currently lives in a small village in Northern Ireland.

Links
Jesse Bering's website
Bering in Mind

THE BELIEF INSTINCT
The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life

What are the psychological foundations of supernatural belief? In this book, Jesse Bering does not attempt to solve the question of whether God exists; rather he provides a fresh examination of whether belief in God is more a matter of nature than nurture.

The author is one of the lead investigators on a €2-million project funded by the European Commission that aims to unravel the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general. Called 'Explaining Religion', it is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began in September 2007, will run for three years, and involves academics from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics.

Jesse's own research provides some of the first evidence for the 'naturalness’ of belief in the afterlife. In THE BELIEF INSTINCT, he argues that because we can never know what it feels like to be without emotions, desires and other mental states, we are unable to reason about what it will be 'like' after death. As a result, even atheists inevitably get ensnared by the illusion of a continued consciousness.

He also looks at people’s attributions of symbolic meaning to the occurrence of natural events (e.g. signs or omens), the psychological mechanisms by which strategic social information is adaptively managed within human groups (e.g. confession and gossip) and the extent to which human social evolution was influenced by adaptive problems fundamentally unique to our species (e.g. natural language and theory of mind).

His own experiments have revealed that the perceived presence of a supernatural being can affect a person's behaviour -- although in this case the being was not God, but the ghost of a dead person. He has also conducted studies that indicate that religion promotes fitness by promoting collaboration within groups. A sense of being watched by a supernatural being might be useful, he says: it might encourage cheats to detect and police themselves.

Jesse writes with great style and panache – much in the tradition of Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. And like them, he has much to say that is novel, important and stimulating. But unlike many other books on science and religion, THE BELIEF INSTINCT provides a timely, thoughtful, controversial counterpoint to the type of commonsense atheism that has swept the market in recent years. In fact Jesse pays very little attention to specific religious beliefs (and even less to the truth-value of religious beliefs). Instead, he concentrates on how people’s everyday thoughts, behaviours and emotions betray a default tendency to reason as though God were deeply invested in their public lives and secret affairs.

In some sense, the book may antagonize both believers and nonbelievers, because its arguments insinuate that although there is probably no God, neither are there any genuine atheists. 'I'm not optimistic that we’ll ever get over God', Jesse says. 'Nature’s played too good a trick on us. Or, then again, perhaps God designed the human mind to work precisely this way... '

Publisher: Nicholas Brealey (UK)*/Norton (US)
Pub date: 4 Nov 2010 (UK)/7 Feb 2011 (US)
Status: Manuscript
Length: 70,000 words

All rights available excluding:
UK & Commonwealth, US & Canada, Germany (Piper), Italy (Rizzoli), Japan (Kagaku-Dojin ), Netherlands (Nieuw Amsterdam), Portugal (Temas e Debates), Spain (Paidós)

*Published in the UK as THE GOD INSTINCT