When Jane D. sent her conscience letter to the Petrified Forest National Park administration in Arizona, US, it was a load off her mind. She sent it together with a piece of stone that she took from the park a year earlier. It wasn’t a regular stone, it was a “petrified stone”, originally from wood that had been growing there 200 million years ago.
Those special stones are meant to stay in the park as natural heritage and there are warning signs for tourists not to take them home. The legend says that Native Americans who lived there laid a curse on those stones which would punish everyone who’d take one from this holy place.
And it looks like this is true. The park administration has been receiving many conscience letters. People admit to have stolen a piece of stone and elaborate on all the bad things that have happened to them after their committed theft. They feel sorry, apologize and return the object of sorrow in the hope that this will end the series of malicious events in their life.
Reading in those letters – well illustrated in the book “Bad Luck, Hot Rocks” from Ryan Thompson – you find the remorseful thieves faced things like: “Burglary in my home”, “my dog died”, “my mother in law is in hospital”, “someone stole my briefcase” etc.. While those are clearly bad things they’re not worse than what people are facing everywhere, even without stealing cursed stones.
Plagued by the bad conscience and the knowledge that the object of desire was cursed, they associate all bad luck to their theft of those stones. They really believe that all negativity in their lives is caused by the curse that they took with them and now punishes them for the theft.
Humans unconsciously create causal relations between random events in order to create a logical sounding, coherent story. We want to make sense of our lives and generally don’t accept the fact that things are happening without a specific reason. Most of us don’t believe that many bad things just randomly happen and that their appearance is nobody’s fault.
The example story of the stolen stones illustrates how multiple independent events are knotted together:
- “I’m a good person and usually never steal.”
- “When I visited the park I desired to have something really special and took a piece of stone although it wasn’t allowed.”
- The stones were cursed by Native Americans some decades ago.
- Bad things happen to me.
→ Now those events are put unconsciously into one coherent story:
“I’m living under a curse because I stole a holy stone and that is why bad things happen to me.”
Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman explained the human creation of coherent stories with his famous mental image of “System 1” and “System 2”. Our brain has a conscious part (System 2) that processes information in active, conscious thoughts. But as we’re naturally lazy we mostly rely on our System 1, the subconscious part of our brain to drive us through the day on auto-pilot. This is the part of our brain that delivers explanations from pieces of information. The automated causal linking of independent events in a story that makes sense keeps us from thinking in System 2, the conscious part of the brain that needs more energy.
In his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” Kahneman writes: “Finding such causal connections is part of understanding a story and is an automatic operation of System 1. System 2, your conscious self, was offered the causal interpretation and accepted it.”
So it’s easier and less effortful to believe that bad things happen to us for a specific reason – in the examples above as a punishment for a theft – than to accept their randomness. Our system 1 delivers the story and System 2 can save the energy for other tasks. In order to explain the world without much effort people see causes and intentions where there are none.
Robert Cialdini, a psychology professor and author, gives us a related explanation. Unconscious associations between independent events, objects or subjects happen very often and are probably linked to our associative memory in our brains. We associate traits of one object to another one just by having them in one visual experience.
Marketing professionals have been using this phenomenon for decades. When designing an advertisement, products are usually placed in an environment that transfers the right positive attributes to the product.
You probably know them all: A new cake in the middle of a family table with happy family members, A picture of Brad Pitt behind a perfume bottle, an attractive young man drinking a coke in front of an office window etc…
People make a mental causal connection between elements in the same visual experience, e.g. in a certain advertising creative. We see it everywhere and we all fall for it. We buy the perfume because we unconsciously want to get some of the attractiveness of a famous actor. We buy the new cake but also a piece of family happiness.
We seem to think and act on associations.
A third theory piece explaining the moral response of sending back stolen petrified stones is the so-called “Just World Fallacy”: Humans generally believe in the assumption that evil behavior of people at some point gets punished. Some sort of universal fairness will judge us at some point – either good or bad depending on our deeds.
Such a belief can serve us mostly well in general as this helps us to do more good than bad things. But the reverse effect tends to be dangerous. In extreme but true scenarios people have denied their help to a person in need because they believed that the person who was suffering or facing bad events to some degree deserved them. The unconscious mind looks for a causal explanation for that bad event and in some cases imputes morally wrong behavior to the suffering person. A wrong deed and random suffering belong to the same story for the inactive bystander. This creates the “just world” for the observer and justifies the denial of help.
Jane D. really believed that her family’s suffering could be ended by sending back the stolen piece of petrified rock. I wish that she found the peace she was looking for.