Deconversion stories: The investment trap

One of the factors that keeps people in a belief system is the amount of investment that goes into it. No one likes to think that they’ve wasted their time or done something wrong.

Call it an artifact of the sunk-cost fallacy. The more effort you’ve invested in a thing, the harder it is to look objectively at it. And abandoning the thing becomes unthinkable. If you can just hang in there a little longer and invest a little more, perhaps you’ll get the payoff! And if you stop now, you’ll lose all you’ve worked for.

You may recall the story of a Parisian couple who wanted to buy an condominium. They found a property owned by an elderly woman, and (as is customary) they paid her a bit every month for the right to buy the property upon her death. It looked like a good deal. She was ninety years old. What were the odds of her living to 100? But she did.

Time passed. She lived on to the astonishing age of 110. She sent Christmas cards to the couple, adding her apologies for still being alive. The elderly woman, Jeanne Calment, became the oldest living person at 122 years of age, even surviving the husband. The couple paid many times the value of the property. Talk about rotten luck!

When I first heard this story, I wondered how the couple could have gone on so long in such a rotten deal. They must have wondered whether they should pull out and abandon their investment. But the sunk-cost fallacy helps us undertand why they didn’t: the longer they went, the less likely they’d be to pull the plug. Imagine their thinking when Ms. Calment turned 100: Why get out now? She’s a hundred years old! If she’d been likely to die soon ten years ago, surely it would be even sooner now! And then at 110: Well, I’m certainly not getting out now, after paying for twenty years! And every day holds out the tantalising possibility that your investment will be rewarded.

Joseph Smith once said

A religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation.

What he described is simple to understand if we consider the effect of investment in belief systems. High-commitment belief systems attract low numbers of converts because, honestly, most people don’t want to do all that stuff. But the ones who do join will be fiercely loyal, in large part (I think) to the sunk-cost fallacy. Many religious people feel their investment in faith is worth it, and I have no doubt that to them it is. But being invested in a point of view is a sure way to prevent yourself from being able to examine it clearly. And the greater the investment, the harder it is to re-evaluate the belief.

For my part, my deconversion required me to invest less in the Church emotionally. I identified strongly as a Mormon. It was part of who I was. But recently, whereas I’d always thought that allegiance to the Church was an ultimate good of itself (‘Faith of our fathers, holy faith, we will be true to thee till death’, as the hymn goes), I began to realise that I wanted my highest allegiance to be with truth. Not that I thought there was a difference between the two. I’d always easily glossed over conflicts between doctrine and facts, partly because I could think of clever ways of harmonising them, and partly because my investment in the Church allowed me to stop thinking about them a bit sooner than I should have. Blackout.

At some point, these conflicts became more troubling because I was torn between being faithful and being honest. The one idea that was most influential during this time was this: I don’t have to be afraid of knowledge because if there is a God, he doesn’t want me to believe anything that’s wrong. That phrase seemed true enough to work with. Ironically, it was this idea that allowed me to feel safe enough to notice the glaring flaws of LDS and Christian doctrine, and finally to reject theism altogether.

Now the tricky bit: not becoming attached to atheism! I realise I still need to stay open to new facts. But my understanding of science has given me better tools to evaluate them.