Bad at Establishing Cause and Effect

How do religions get started?

People are very superstitious in nature and are very bad at establishing cause and effect. In this episode, Derren Brown recreates Skinner's pigeon experiment using people to show that people form a false conclusion between cause and effect. If you look at basic tribal religions you will find superstitious practices. We can speculate using this experiment as proof of concept that one time they did a dance, they had a great catch, other times, they associate a bad harvest to the actions of an individual. They continue to perform the actions that give good results and ban the actions that they associate with poor results. After all, religion is mostly organized superstition.

This does not even include the formation of religion from the human intent for it to be used as a control mechanism or for personal benefit. If you look at most caste systems, the religious figures tended to be at the top, which would be an incentive to claim divine powers. Even today, people exploit superstitious beliefs for monetary profit.

This is a very good presentation by Michael Shermer that goes more in depth on how people falsely link cause and effect: The pattern behind self-deception.