[E] - GODS/SPIRITS AS PARTNERS: IMAGINARY COMPANIONS/FRIENDS
Although we are not aware of it, the inference systems that manage our
interaction with other people are full-time workers. We constantly use
intuitions delivered by these systems. Indeed, we also use them when
we are not actually interacting with people. All inference systems can
run in a decoupled mode, that is, disengaged from actual external
inputs from the environment or external output in behavior. A crucial
human capacity is to imagine counterfactuals-What would happen if I
had less meat than I actually have? What would happen if I chose this
path rather than that one?-and this applies to interaction too. Before
we make a particular move in any social interaction, we automatically
consider several scenarios. This capacity allows us, for instance, to
choose this rather than that course of action because we can imagine
other people's reactions to what we would do.
In fact, we can run such decoupled inferences not only about persons
who are not around but also about purely imaginary characters. It is
striking that this capacity seems to appear very early in children's
development. From an early age (between three and ten years) many
children engage in durable and complex relationships with "imaginary
companions." Psychologist Marjorie Taylor, who has studied this
phenomenon extensively, estimates that about half of the children she
has worked with had some such companions. These imagined persons or
person-like animals, sometimes but not always derived from stories or
cartoons or other cultural folklore, follow the child around, play
with her, converse with her, etc. One girl describes her companions
Nutsy and Nutsy as a couple of birds, one male and one female, who
accompany her as she goes for a walk, goes to school or gets in the
car.
Taylor's studies show that having long-term relationships with
nonexistent characters is not a sign of confusion between fantasy and
reality. Developmental psychologists now use precise tests to
determine how children mark off the real from the fantastic. Those
with companions pass such tests from the age of three and are often
better than other children at differentiating between the real and the
imagined. They know perfectly well that their friends the invisible
lizard, the awkward monkey, or the amazing magician, are not there in
the same sense as real friends and other people. Also, children with
companions are often better than others at tasks that require a subtle
use of intuitive psychology. They seem to have a firmer grasp of the
difference between their own and other people's perspectives on a
given situation and are better at construing other people's mental
states and emotions.
All this led Taylor to the intriguing hypothesis that imaginary
companions may well provide a very useful form of training for the
social mind. The relationship with such a companion is a stable one,
which means that the child computes the companion's reactions by
taking into account not just the imagined friend's personality but
also past events in their relationship. Taylor's studies show that
wishful thinking plays only a minor role in such fantasies. What the
companions do or say is constrained by the persons they are, and this
has to remain consistent and plausible even in this fantastic domain.
A four-year-old has sophisticated skills at representing not only an
agent where there is none but also an agent with a specific history
and personality, with particular tastes and capacities different from
one's own. Companions are often used to provide an alternative
viewpoint on a situation. They may find odd information unsurprising,
or frightening situations manageable.
So it is extremely easy, from an early age, to maintain social
relations in a decoupled mode. From an early age, children have the
social capacities required to maintain coherent representations of
interaction with persons even when these persons are not actually
around and do not in fact exist.
It would be tempting at this point to drift into a not-too-rigorous
parallel between such imagined companions and the supernatural agents
with which people seem to establish long and important relations, such
as guardian angels, spirits and ancestors. (Indeed, the very term
imaginary companion used by modern-day psychologists seems to echo the
phrase invisible friend [aoratos philos] used to describe the saints
in early Christianity.) But the differences are as great as the
similarities. First, for many people spirits and ancestors are
emphatically not fantasies, there is a sense that they are actually
around. Second, believers do not just construct their own decoupled
interaction; they share with others information about who the spirits
are and what they do. Third and most important, the tenor of people's
relations with spirits and gods is special because of one crucial
characteristic of these supernatural agents, as we will see presently.
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
Pascal Boyer
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465006965/
