“Natural selection doesn’t have time to wander through all the variations that might just randomly emerge, looking for the perfect solution to a survival problem. Instead it makes do with the first quick and dirty solution that comes along. In the time it would take to find a perfect solution, our ancestors would have all died out. In this case, natural selection hit on a solution that is imperfect in two different ways. On the one hand, the theory of mind it endowed our species with has profound limitations: Too often we are completely floored by the behavior of others. Our theory of mind fails in its job of enabling us to predict behavior. Our theory of mind also reflects another of natural selection’s imperfections: To ensure survival, Mother Nature overshoots. Instead of building the exact solution to the problem of figuring out other people’s motives, Mother Nature selected for people who see plots everywhere: conspiracy theorists. The simplest way to create someone who is good at reading motives from other people’s behavior is to overdo it: endow them with a penchant for seeing motives everywhere—in human behavior and animal behavior, but also in the seasons, the weather, health and illness, the sunrise, lightning storms, earthquakes, droughts, beavers coming out of their lodges in the spring—everything.
“Humans tend to see everything in nature as organized by agents with motives, often malevolent ones. We are all natural-born conspiracy theorists. That’s why we don’t need to be taught how to suss out other people’s motives. That’s why the same grand conspiracy theory operates in all cultures and why we can often appreciate stories from other cultures almost as much as our own. That’s why we remember narratives and think of them as naturally easy to understand without any special knowledge or information. We all have a strong incentive to force anything we need to remember into a story with a plot. Once we make sense of a chain of events—by finding the motives of agents behind the events that make it into a story—we get that familiar feeling of relief from curiosity or anxiety about how the story turned out.
“People have been making a sport of our insistence on seeing everything this way for a long time now. There is a famous joke about Talleyrand, the sinister foreign minister who managed to serve Louis XVI, then Napoleon, and then the restored French kings who followed him. When he died in 1838, the story goes that the Austrian foreign minister, Prince Metternich, asked himself, ‘I wonder what he meant by that.’”
—Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist's Guide to Reality
