The need to believe: a neuroscience account of religion as a motivated process

Religious belief has been shown to offer substantial benefits to its adherents, including improved well-being and health. We suggest that these benefits might be explained, at least in part, from a ''motivated meaning-making'' perspective. This model holds that people are motivated to create and sustain meaning (i. e., a sense of coherency between beliefs, goals, and perceptions of the environment, which provides individuals with the feeling that the world is an orderly place), and that religious beliefs buffer the distress associated with disruptions to meaning, thus leading to decreases in distress. We further propose that religion's palliative attributes can be measured at the level of the brain, specifically in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which produces a ''distress signal'' upon the detection of errors, conflict, and expectancy violation. Using a social neuroscience paradigm, we investigate four main predictions that arise from this model: (1) religion should be associated with activation in the ACC; (2) religion should decrease activation in the ACC; (3) this attenuation of ACC activity should be related to religion's ability to buffer bodily states of distress, and not to decreases in motivation, attention, or control; (4) religion should have these effects because it provides meaning and thus buffers people from uncertainty. All predictions were supported, thus providing evidence, at the neural level, for the motivated meaning-making model's account of the salutary properties of religion.