“How God Works” explores psychological benefits of religion

DeSteno’s book, “How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion,” looks at the science behind religious practices and explores how they can be utilized by all individuals, regardless of religious affiliation, to lead their best lives.

“The book is my attempt to kind of look at rituals from lots of religions across the road of life, from birth to death, and to try and understand from a psychological scientific perspective, how and why they may help people,” DeSteno said.

The book identifies several fundamental religious practices that are used to encourage healthier states of mind, before connecting them with scientific studies to illuminate precisely how these rituals are psychologically beneficial. 

“We do a lot of work on gratitude, showing how gratitude makes people more honest, more generous, and more helpful,” DeSteno said. “Lots of prayer practices lead you to experience feelings of gratitude that make people more honest and more generous … What I began to realize is that a lot of things that we had been discovering that help people become more moral and more connected, religions have been using for thousands of years.”

DeSteno spoke to the importance of respecting all religious beliefs and valuing the breadth of knowledge and insight that can be gained through studying religious traditions.

“Everybody’s ‘-ism’ is to be respected; whether that’s Buddhism, Catholicism, Judaism or atheism, everybody is entitled to their own belief — science can’t prove which of those is right, but we can look at the practices in a mutually respectful way and see what we can learn,” he said.

Uniting the old with the new, DeSteno said the modern rise in recreational psychedelic use bears resemblance to traditional religious rituals when it comes to the desired effects on one’s mental state — causing an ethereal experience or alleviating symptoms of depression and PTSD — but unsupervised psychedelic use is not without its risks.

“When you separate the chemicals from the rituals that go with them, you actually increase the frequency of negative outcomes, so about 20% of psychedelic trips are negative experiences and about 8% of them result in people seeking psychiatric care,” DeSteno said. “I think that’s because, in the rituals, you have a shaman there to guide you, to support you, to help you make sense of things, to chant with you, which alters our physiology and makes us more calm when that sense of self-dissolution comes.”

Though the unsupervised use of psychedelics can have unpleasant ramifications, DeSteno said the medical field has begun to implement a similar methodology to that of religious rituals during studies involving psychedelics. 

“At Johns Hopkins, they’re doing experiments with psychedelics where they have a guide sit with the people in the clinical studies, now they don’t sing the same songs or do the things that the shamans do, but in some ways, they fill the same role,” DeSteno said. “They’re there, they give you comfort, they hold your hand, they help you make sense of what’s going on in the same way a shaman would, and the results are much better than if you go and take ayahuasca or psilocybin at your local hipster hangout.”

At the heart of the book is an exploration of how anyone can learn to develop practices that better their own lives, without discriminating between different religious affiliations.

“You can believe that these practices were divinely given by God … or you can believe they result from people trying stuff out over millennia and finding stuff that works,” DeSteno said. “I can’t answer the origin, but if we treat them as technologies that help people thrive in the world, then we can study them in respectful ways and learn from that. That’s the message of the book.”