Introduction
One evening, towards the end of my research with a group committed to âhumanitarian and spiritualâ development, I âchannelledâ a spirit. Our group sat encircled by candlelight and discussed spiritual issues before conducting rituals to initiate contact with the departed. When finished, as on previous occasions, I tried to convince the group that there had been no spirit involved. However, the group leader insisted that I had not only channelled a spirit who had provided poignant insights, but also demonstrated remarkable talent as a spiritual âmedium.â Afterwards, over coffee, another group member confessed that there had been no spirit involved in her âchannellingâ either. âDo you think any of this is real?â she asked.
Minds did not evolve to evaluate what is the truth. Our minds were equipped through evolution with an impulsion to create, transmit, and defend beliefs that have utility, whether true or not.
This book is about how we change our beliefs. And how, sometimes, these changes sneak up on us without our really knowing when or why they occurred. Beliefs determine personal meaningâthat productive state of satisfaction where an individualâs delusions intersect with those collectively held within a social context. I argue that beliefs are the mindâs software prescribing our behaviours, decision-making, and emotions. But they also morph over time, recoded through Belief 2.0 upgrade patches and filtered by protective firewalls shielding ideas critical to our sense of meaning and identity.
Some ideasâor conceptsâsteal a place in the mind because they latch on to hardwired ways of thinking, experiencing, and behaving. Concepts throw light upon the mindâs desires, which in turn casts a kaleidoscope of silhouettes against the walls of thought, with those taking distinct shape forging the outlines for beliefs to inhabit. Ideas infiltrate our minds, and in this book, I explain how certain combinations convert by stealth.
In using the terms âchangeâ and âconversion,â I am referring to a shift in the ways we think and consequently believe. In turn, beliefs affect how we behave and then experience our decisions through emotions and reflective contemplation. By âconversionâ I mean a wholesale change in a specific belief set. Although the term implies a change embracing a serious religious commitment, conversion can describe belief changes about anything.
My position revolves around a cognitive explanation, which means that I explain how thinking changes. The important implication is that when thinking changes, so too do beliefs, emotional experiences, and behaviours. However, the relationships between these variables remain complex and contentious, and as I shall propose, one of the reasons ideas can seed in our minds is because our feelings or actions change first. It may be intuitive to assume that beliefs change first, leading to new behaviours later, but the reality is far more subversive.
The mechanisms behind belief change should resonate with all of us for more reasons than curiosity or for the purposes of academic debate. As the eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell observed, belief constitutes âthe central problem in the analysis of mindâ (Russell 1921, p. 231). Belief change lies at the heart of all human aspirations. From career progression, weight loss, spiritual commitment, and ideological passion to love, grief, war, identity, and sport, beliefs guide our lives and, to a great extent, determine our success, satisfaction, and happiness. The content of this book holds relevance to anyone interested in the machinations of personal, family, community, organisational, or social change.
Just remember that powerful beliefs serve us well; they secure a place in our thoughts because they fall upon fertile mental soil. For this reason the most pervasive and ubiquitous concepts have much in common irrespective of whether they appear in religion, sport, politics, tribalism, family, fiction, or consumerism.
The questions to be answered are first, how do beliefs get there in the first place, and second, how are they passed on so successfully from mind to mind? In this chapter I briefly introduce what we know and do not know about belief change. Included will be some acknowledgement of knowledge sources given that different research traditions tend to offer different spins on the same problems. I also make use of a relatively unappreciated approach to beliefs, that of conversion theory, which has been previously applied only to religion. But first some background concerning the role and function of beliefs is warranted.
Why Have Beliefs?
This book is primarily about how and why beliefs change. Along the way I will also explain why we hold beliefs in the first place, from their evolutionary arrival to their personal and social advantages. Here, some early comments will be instructive about the divergent assumptions that are typically advanced for why beliefs exist.
A first explanation presumes that beliefs offer explanations or, at least, a framework for assessing the world and its contents in a consistent and productive way. From the moment we begin to explore and comprehend the world around us, we work furiously to puzzle out why things are the way they are. Beliefs provide a scaffold for building an incremental knowledge base for understanding. More importantly, they provide ways of remembering patterns so that we can respond swiftly when we need to, whether in the face of danger to predict essential next decisions or simply in order to categorise our experiences for the future.
With an organising framework for interpreting the world and its agents, we assemble mental shortcuts that make life less complicated. Of course most beliefs fit into a kind of mental architecture where a relationship can be understood between them all. This is why I tend to refer to change in belief sets rather than just the concepts that make up a single belief. Some belief sets offer simple, practical explanations for aspects of life, like how gravity works. Others reflect more esoteric or abstract ideas, like mystifying natural phenomena and experiences, the origins of things, and why âevilâ and suffering exist.
A second explanation, which in many ways builds on the previous, is that belief sets offer comfort by attenuating anxiety. A robust set of beliefs allows its owner to feel more secure and grasp on to certainty, despite the myriad of choices, decisions, and unknowns that must be constantly navigated. While religion provides the prototypical example, almost all belief sets can help mitigate indecision. If, for example, we waited to obtain all the possible information available about every possible course of action, we would hover in a constant state of paralysis. As a result, we cultivate our belief sets around the functions and practicalities of life. From the best toothpaste to the best place to consistently find a car park, we rely on beliefs in order to feel more confident in an immensely complex environment.
No need to spend 10 minutes sorting through the vast range of toothpastes on the shelf. Studies have shown, for example, that when trying to solve challenging problems, beliefs narrow the cognitive tools available (Schoenfeld 1983). Some people became preoccupied by a fear of failure or of looking appropriately studious while being watched, rendering their best efforts unavailable or at least inconsistent. At the other end of the spectrum of belief importance, choices about family, sporting teams, friendships, or spiritual matters become easier when relying on a suite of fundamental beliefs.
With structure comes order. A third explanation suggests that belief sets deliver social order through consistent and uniform prescriptions for thinking as well as behaviour (Sperber 1997). For example, beliefs around moral principles lead to standardised value judgements, whether ethical, political, or any other. Since generally as adults we have already arrived at a belief system about most familiar things like, say, government, we tend to respond favourably or unfavourably to ideas according to our fixed predispositions. As a result, the ideology underlying a belief tends to be more important than the specific contents of the proposition itself.
Beliefs also infuse common law and in many societies are expressed in a basic manifesto like a constitution. Social order and beliefs go hand in hand; order is a necessity in every social practice and institution, from queues and clubs to schools and companies.
Less obvious, a fourth explanation for at least some beliefs is that they came about by accident, a kind of mental illusion or side effect from another cognitive function. Some beliefs do seem hard to trace back to a specific commencement. Perhaps some of our beliefs do not really offer us any advantages and just emerged without much, if any, choice or reason? Once established as part of our mental model of the world, some researchers think that discarding already established beliefs demands more effort than just living with them. For example, cognitive scientists like Atran (2002) cannot reconcile why so many people cling to irrational beliefs that defy factual evidence.
Many cognitive scientists like Atran, myself included, propose that the answer has to do with our unique cognitive architecture; the way our minds work based on adaptations that occurred in our distant evolutionary past. This cognitive psychological perspective seeks to address the mental systems underpinning beliefs, including the features associated with its formation and maintenance (Bell et al. 2006). At times the cognitive perspective intersects with a more social viewpoint where beliefs reflect what groups of people consider culturally important and meaningful (Trope et al. 2007). This interpretation stretches into so-called social representation theories where beliefs are used to help frame how a person comes to understand his or her world through social indoctrination and cultural forces (Duveen 2002). While my model connects with social theories, it launches from a cognitive platform.
I do not argue that beliefs all arrived by accident or through social conditioning. That our minds seek out and safeguard certain kinds of beliefs reflects anything but an accident. In fact, the evidence suggests that each of the four possibilities above should feature in a comprehensive belief theory. For me, though, in order to explain belief change, we must account for why some belief sets persist while others flutter around only momentarily.
Beliefs as an Explanatory Framework
Beliefs help us see the world in a consistent way. They deliver us a unifying explanatory framework for understanding the world around us, and for subsequently taking action (Connors and Halligan 2015). Not only do beliefs help us to interpret the world, they also provide a mirror for seeing ourselves. According to neuroscientist Damasio (2000), the purpose of beliefs is to deliver meaning about the notions we hold about ourselves. In this respect, beliefs provide the structure around which we construct social and personal understandings. They consequently influence identity, social relationships, group dynamics, attitudes, behaviours, and even happiness.
In practice, beliefs act as the sergeant major marshalling a divergent suite of cognitive systems like memory, perception, language, and attention into an orderly parade. Without them, no cognitive system would march in time and our minds would succumb to a chaotic cavalcade of unconnected thoughts and senses. Because beliefs filter out the relevant environmental cues from the sensory dross, they allow us to construct an image of what is going on without collapsing under the sheer volume of irrelevant information. These critical functions form the basis of our evolutionary inheritance. We are social animals, evolved with pronounced social skills that rely on a coordinated and shared repository of understandings. And nothing is understandable without beliefs as the architecture of thought. Beliefs are the pillars of our elaborate social constructions.
Minds do not begin open. The mental belief gatekeeper relaxes under certain conditions, allowing certain ideas to sneak in and climb into bed. In this book I am trying to explain what makes human minds so selective in determining which beliefs seem worthy of acquiringâwhether consciously or unconsciouslyâirrespective of background knowledge, factual evidence, and cultural conditioning. We also have to keep in mind that although it might sometimes seem obvious what people believe, the actual concepts they cling to may not turn out to be all that transparent, or as studies have shown, are not easily articulated by even the most vehement advocate. So much of our thinking operates under our own radar of awareness. Not only does a complex assembly of mental machinery work overtime behind the scenes, but also its very ordinariness often precludes a conscious awareness of what is happening. We consequently respond automatically to circumstances because of the beliefs we hold yet remain oblivious to their manifest importance. Few of us ever contemplate the regularity with which these beliefs orchestrate our behaviours and prime our emotional reactions.
Social attitudes underpinned by beliefs stand out as strong predictors of behaviour, as evidenced by research investigating the correlation between the two (Kraus 1995). Since so many beliefs hover ambiguously between conscious awareness and intuitive instinct, we can clearly distinguish beliefs from other cognitive processes and content such as memory and knowledge, respectively. We might hold a belief about a memory or aspects of knowledge. However, beliefs incorporate a substantive amount of self-referential content, whereas a memory or a piece of information remains neutral until a belief value is levied upon it. In addition, beliefs typically contain attitudinal content emanating from a valuation or an evaluation. Again, beliefs offer a fixed point of comparison that might be used in making an evaluation; a framework for working out whether a piece of information needs assessment and in what way. Of course all of these elements blend together seamlessly in the mind, so our best recourse is to focus on what beliefs do rather than what they are.
The importance of beliefs can hardly be overestimated given their axiomatic role in guiding our actions on the basis of what we consider to be true and right. In this respect, systems of beliefs tend to integrate in order to provide the psychological scaffolding we need to assess a situation, evaluate alternatives, make choices, explain the outcomes, and form a workable mental model for making meaning in a world that defies sense without some kind of reference map (Halligan 2007). Beliefs intertwine, blend, meld, and morph. They cannot be reliably mapped beyond a superficial web of interconnected concepts that cohere into more or less structured systems of order. As a result, discussions about the cognitive foundations of beliefs have secured little attention (Bell and Halligan 2013).
What Are Beliefs?
I have so far tried to avoid ma...