Why Do People Believe in Souls?

Who Believes in a Soul?

A recent survey found that about 74% of people believe in an immortal soul that contains a person’s consciousness and separates from the body at death. Whether the soul travels to heaven, is reincarnated into a new body, or lingers as an ancestral spirit, it is a feature of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Shinto, Bahá’í, and Zoroastrianism.

There are even some religions where people have multiple souls, only some of which are immortal. This belief features in several indigenous, shamanistic, and ancient religions (e.g., Ancient Egypt), including people who are Native American, African Kongo, Chinese, and Austronesian.

A minority of groups do not believe in immortal souls. For example, Buddhists do not believe in an eternal “self,” while the Maasai (from Kenya) believe that death is when consciousness ends (sometimes called “extinctivism”). Atheists and other skeptics are also likely to hold extinctivist beliefs, while some early forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Greek religion regarded the soul as inseparable from the body.

What Causes People to Believe in Souls? 

Widespread belief in souls is unsurprising when you think about the mechanics of death, the body that remains, and the absence of some invisible "thing" that once animated them. Anyone would ask: where did this invisible "soul" go? In our world, matter changes state rather than vanishing. Rocks become tools, trees become dwellings, and animal fur becomes clothing. Intuitively, we might wonder where the souls of our loved ones have gone, and sadness might motivate a belief that they just went somewhere else, such as an afterlife or ancestral plane.

The extent to which soul beliefs are motivated by sadness is debatable, but there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that people have intuitions that make the idea of a soul seem especially plausible.

Intuitions are things that we expect or understand without being taught. For example, we intuitively expect objects to be solid, to move in a continuous path when pushed, and to fall when dropped. We also expect mindful beings to move in accordance with their goals and to cooperate with friends rather than foes. These intuitions may be innate, which is why babies and young children are surprised when expectations are violated.

Intuitions also govern the attitudes of adults when there is less time to think. We sometimes call these instincts or “trusting your gut,” and they can represent a conflict between the conscious and unconscious mind. The following sections describe five intuitions that make soul belief difficult to avoid. This does not mean that souls are real. It just means that our unconscious minds can trick us into believing.

How Did We Evolve to Believe in Souls?

What follows are five intuitions that probably evolved, but not necessarily to give us a belief in souls. They may have evolved for other reasons and soul belief was a byproduct. These intuitions have been described by Paul Bloom and by Jesse Bering in his paper The Folk Psychology of Souls.

The “Dualism” Intuition

Dualism is the belief that the mind is immaterial and independent of the body, which might imply that it is separable from the body. There are several reasons to think that dualism is intuitive. First, we habitually refer to our bodies like possessions that we inhabit rather than identify with (e.g., “my body,” “my brain”).

Second, it is surprisingly easy to make sense of narratives in which minds leave or switch bodies (e.g., the film Big), and several indigenous societies have independently developed beliefs about spirit possession. Third, the intuitions that we apply to mindless objects (e.g., they move in continuous lines) differ from those we apply to mindful objects (e.g., they move to achieve goals), suggesting that we can't help but treat minds differently.

Although dualism could be learned through religious training or colloquialized by experiences such as dreaming and involuntary bodily functions, the fact that so many religions and cultures endorse dualism suggests that our evolved, innate psychology is to blame.

Consistent with this view, a study found that five-month-old babies became surprised when a physical object moved behind one barrier and re-emerged from behind another, but they were not surprised when a person did the same. The results suggested that we are born with the intuition that people are more than their physical form.

A further study involved telling children about a mouse that was eaten by an alligator. When questioned, most of the children said that the mouse's biological states had ceased (hunger, growth, brain function, etc.) but far fewer said the same about its psychological states (emotions, desires, knowledge, etc.). Older and more educated children were less likely to attribute psychological states to the mouse, suggesting that we start out as dualists.

More recent studies have found evidence for intuitive dualism in adults and non-Western populations, and for an association between dualism and afterlife beliefs (although see here for an opposing view).

Offline Social Reasoning

Humans are social creatures to such an extent that when a friend is not around, we intuitively imagine what they are doing, thinking, and feeling (e.g., “Sarah is at the library. She is enjoying her books”). This tendency to think about people who are not around is called offline social reasoning.

Given that we expect friends and family to sometimes be physically absent, we may erroneously apply this reasoning when they are absent for other reasons, such as death. For example, as those who have lost loved ones know, you can forget that they are not in their bedroom, or coming home from work, or a phone call away, and this state of mind may only change with their prolonged absence.

Creationist Thinking

The idea that clouds are “for” raining and rocks are pointy “to stop elephants from stepping on them” might seem unusual to adults, but not to children. Young children often treat natural objects and phenomena as if they were made for something and “that is why they are here.” Scholars call this thinking teleofunctional (i.e., designed for a purpose) but many know it as creationism.

Creationist thinking extends to unknown phenomena as well, such as a picture falling off the wall or a light flickering. Young children are disposed to think it is a sign from some entity (God, gremlins, etc.) that performed the action for a purpose, such as to send them a message. As people age, a scientific education appears to reduce creationist thinking. Still, adults and even scientists struggle to avoid creationist answers under time pressure.

Intuitive creationism may have evolved because of its utility. Human evolution was dominated by the use of tools and man-made objects. Knowing how these objects functioned was crucial for survival, and a disposition to ask “what is this for” may have been the most efficient path for natural selection.

According to most religions, souls are also assigned a purpose (e.g., “to find God and uphold divine law”). Yet, even nonreligious people ask questions like “why am I here?” and answer with sentiments such as “this is what I was meant for” or “born to do,” suggesting that creationist thinking applies to our conception of self and soul.

The "Just World" Intuition

An intuition that may add a moral component to soul beliefs is the expectation of a just world:—that people get what they deserve. Karma is a religious example, but the expectation emerges in nonreligious contexts too. Young children appear to believe in immanent justice, which involves thinking that a person experienced misfortune because they previously did something morally wrong.

Similarly, many indigenous cultures interpret personal difficulties, illnesses, and calamities (e.g., a miscarriage) as evidence that the unfortunate person did something wrong (e.g., committed adultery). The just world intuition may therefore determine some of the creationist thinking that people wrongly attach to natural phenomena.

The expectation of a just world facilitates the belief that souls are judged after death because, if justice is not administered in life, there is no other time for it. Such a belief might be self-reinforcing: if a society fears afterlife judgment and behaves more morally, it should prosper, grow, and spread its beliefs, thereby entrenching its intuitive thinking within the species.

Thus, it may be no coincidence that soul beliefs and just-world beliefs are intertwined. Indeed, a remarkable study found that good or evil people are perceived to be more immortal than people who are neither, suggesting that soul belief is reinforced by the "just world" intuition. 

The Simulation Constraint

This final “intuition” actually concerns the absence of any intuition that helps us to understand death. People have a tough time imagining what it is like to be dead. We cannot mentally simulate it. For example, we say, “he is dead,” “she is dead,” and “they are dead,” but there is no “he,” “she,” or “they” anymore. There is no state of being dead.

Consequently, people discuss the dead as if they were still alive. When discussing burial objects, even extinctivists say that they want objects “with me” as if there is still a “me” in the grave. And, when quizzed about a deceased person, some extinctivists say the person “knows they are dead.” Consistent with the study about the mouse and the alligator, these studies suggest that psychological states (knowing, feeling, etc.) are the most difficult states to simulate being without.

The simulation constraint may be a consequence of the intuitions listed above and/or of how we have evolved to simulate the future, plan for it, and order our memories episodically. That is to say, evolution does not create perfection; it takes shortcuts, and carving out an exception for death as a future event that we do not experience appears to bestow no evolutionary advantage.

Conclusion 

So how did a belief in souls evolve? Did the belief emerge indirectly because of intuitions that might have evolved for other reasons, or did it become necessary because of the evolutionary benefits of believing in moralistic afterlives? There is evidence for both, and the story might go something like this:

The result was the situation we have today, with about three-quarters of the world’s population believing in souls and several human cultures believing in moralistic afterlives.