An Epidemic

The false consensus effect causes one's own beliefs, values, and habits to influence his estimates of how widely such views and habits are shared by others (Gilovich, 1991). For example, a person who abstains from consuming illicit drugs may believe the majority of individuals in his school to do the same, while one who often experiments with drugs will be under the impression that most of his classmates do the same. All the while, for the sake of the argument, both may be wrong and the actual statistic is exactly half and half.

Considering my myth, this reasoning error affects individuals in different ways. For a priest who believes this myth and who in fact lives a truly altruistic life, his estimation of other truly altruistic religious people may be severely skewed. First, he overestimates the religious population and then overestimates the number of those religious people who are actually altruistic. Another consequence of this error arises when applied to a religious individual who inaccurately believes himself to be altruistic. He inaccurately estimates the magnitude of religiously influenced altruism based on his erroneous idea of altruism and his overestimation of religiously-like-minded folks.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc identifies the error of coming to a conclusion based solely on order of events, rather than taking into account other factors that might explain a connection (Gilovich, 1991). Concluding that college was the sole cause of a student's attempted suicide only because the suicide attempt occurred after his first quarter of college represents an example of this reasoning error. In reality, the student may have attempted suicide because of the death of a family member, a failed relationship, or long-standing depression.

Applied directly to my myth, the reasoning error could look like this: “I have known Edward for 20 years and he has always been a nice guy, but ever since he began going to church more regularly he has become so much more selfless! I know he recently received a promotion and now has more money than he could ever spend, but it simply must be the church that is putting him up to all this charity!”

America's population is largely religious, making up something like 75% of the entire population (Wikipedia, 2010). It is no surprise to me that a myth so heavily invested in religious superiority has been preserved in our country. Making up three quarters of the United States, the religious are easily capable of perpetuating this self-serving assessment of themselves. By adopting self-serving beliefs about [themselves] and comforting beliefs about the world, [they allow their personal] motivations to influence their beliefs through the ways they choose a comforting [illusory] pattern from the fabric of available evidence (Gilovich, 1991). Thus, just as a warlord assesses the morality of his line of work and determines his actions justified because he believes war to be necessary and, technically, he is not personally killing any of his victims, but in fact entirely ignoring the magnificently gruesome reality of what he is enabling, religious people assess the morality of their lives and actions as well as the organizations with which they identify themselves. By positively assessing the religions that they adhere to, upholding the notion that religious people tend to be more altruistic than others, and then adopting said notion as a truth for themselves as well, they are able to, I suppose, sleep better at night.

Sources:
Gilovich, T. (1991). How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason In Everyday Life. New York, NY: The Free Press
Religion In The United States. (2010) In Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion in the United States