Scientific Answers to Theoretical, Philosophical Questions About Soul

Newswise — The phrase "don't speak ill of the dead" appears to be more than just good manners. University of Arkansas psychology professor Jesse Bering has been working on a series of experiments that show people tend to upgrade their valuations of another person when they think that person has died.

Bering's work will be highlighted in a 2005 issue of "Human Nature." Bering found that people tend to change their valuations of others after they perceive them as "dead agents," or those who have died. For one experiment, he presented a group of subjects with facial photos of several different people. The subjects made assumptions about the people's personality traits — were they friendly? kind? hardworking? outgoing? — based only on the photos.

At a later date, the subjects were again presented with the photos, but this time they were told that some of the people had died since the first experiment. Bering found the subjects tended to upgrade their guesses about the people who they thought were dead, providing the first scientific evidence that people really don't "speak ill of the dead."

He saw a similar phenomenon when analyzing the content of obituaries. Over and over again, he found references to people being good, kind or just — characteristics specific to the moral domain.

"It's like we want to remind these people who've died how good and nice they are, so they won't hurt us," Bering said. "None of this is conscious, of course, but it doesn't have to be, so long as it works in nature."

Bering uses scientific methods to try to answer questions that traditionally have been theological or philosophical in nature. Specifically, he wants to know how people perceive the soul, and what drives their beliefs.

"I've always been obsessed with the topic of the afterlife. I find it inherently fascinating," Bering said. "As a child, I completely believed in ghosts. Now, intellectually I take a different stance, but emotionally and viscerally I know what that's like, to believe in that."

Bering remembers being five years old, the youngest boy in a Jewish family, and having a pivotal role in the traditional Seder celebration. His job was to open the front door so the spirit of Elijah could come to the dinner table and drink from a glass of wine. Bering was terrified of Elijah's spirit passing through the room, even though his father was actually the one emptying the glass of wine. His fear led to his need to understand people's perceptions of dead agents.

As part of his research, Bering examined how subjects were affected by the perceived presence of a dead agent. He had three separate groups of subjects take a computerized test where the highest score earned a $50 prize. The subjects were told that the computer program had a glitch in it — sometimes the correct answer to a question would pop up on the screen with the question. This presented them with the opportunity to "cheat" at the task. By pressing the space bar, the subjects were told, they could delete the correct answer before they read it so they could respond truthfully.

One of the groups read a made-up memoriam before the test, stating that the fictional graduate student who developed the test had died. Another group also read the memoriam, and were casually told that the graduate student's ghost had been spotted in the very room where they were taking his test. Those assigned to the third group heard nothing about a dead graduate student.

Bering found that the subjects who were told about the ghost were generally less likely to cheat, because the subjects hit the space bar more rapidly than those in the other two groups.

"Cross-culturally, we're seeing evidence of a belief in the absolute causal power of people who've died," Bering said. "If I perceive that someone is evaluating me, whether it be my dead grandmother or God, I'm less likely to commit a transgression, possibly because I'm afraid of the consequences."

Bering's findings led him to one of the questions he'd like to be able to answer: Is that belief an odd byproduct of regular social cognition or an adaptive trait that serves a moral policing function?

His dissertation, published in a 2002 issue of the "Journal of Cognition and Culture," showed how hard it is for people to escape some type of belief in an afterlife. In his research, Bering asked people questions about a man who had been killed in an automobile accident: Can he experience lust? Can he smell? Does he know he's dead?

Bering found that even professed atheists, after answering "no" to other questions about the dead man's abilities, would say that "of course" the man knows he is dead.

"It comes into conflict," Bering said. "We try to put ourselves into the shoes of the people who are dead, and make attributions to them. "¦ We really can't conceive of what it's like to not be here, to not exist, to not know whether we exist or not."

People seem predisposed to ask about their purpose for living and seek reasons for things to happen.

"A natural belief in souls leads us to assume there's a maker behind it all, that there's a reason for everything," Bering said. "The self becomes a supernatural product by design. But if the self is instead created merely by sexual reproduction, then things happen just because they happen. Is this so bad?"