Luke Ford

When people most need to feel special, they are most likely to adopt special beliefs such as Holocaust denial or 9-11 truthism. Childless people are more likely to adopt exciting beliefs because their ordinary life does not provide sufficient excitement. If I had children, my beliefs would likely be less exciting because I would find that my kids provided me with all the excitement I needed.

I think the below analysis is more right than wrong, more frequently valid and useful for understanding reality than not.

Psychologist and political scientist Robert P. Abelson writes in 1986:

One finds or adopts beliefs with personal or social appeal. Other beliefs were received in childhood before one had much say in the matter. One shows off one’s beliefs to people one thinks will appreciate them, but not to those who are likely to be critical. One is inclined to ornament beliefs from time to time, especially when communicating them to others (Tetlock, 1983). If anyone is critical of them, one feels attacked and responds defensively, as though one’s appearance, taste, or judgment had been called into question. One occasionally adds new beliefs to one’s collection, if they do not glaringly clash with those one already has. It is something like the accumulation of furniture. One is reluctant to change any of one’s major beliefs. They are familiar and comfortable, and a big change would upset the whole collection. Beliefs that have been handed down from parents might constitute an exception. If one is young and trying to establish an independent identity, one might want to chuck out inherited beliefs and everything that goes with them, and start all over again on one’s own. Also, if fashions in certain beliefs change, and one is the kind of person who likes to keep up with fashions, one may change one’s unfashionable beliefs.

* Bem’s (1967; 1972) self-perception theory, at its extreme, can be taken to assert that people never have attitudes or beliefs; they merely invent appropriate things to say to suit the circumstances surrounding the occasions on which they are asked about them.

* Circumstances Inducing Possession of a Belief

Public commitment to a belief
Suffering for a belief
Explaining a belief
Elaborating a belief, or tracing its origins
Defending a belief
Attributing longevity to a belief
Becoming aware of the value of a belief

* Psychological Sources of Belief Value

Functionality

Instrumental (What the belief promises, via mediation or wishfully)
Expressive (Who the belief says you are: your groups, experiences and feelings)

Attributes

Sharedness (Is the belief in favour with other people?)
Uniqueness (Does the belief imply unusual taste?)
Defensibility (Can the belief be justified as sound?)
Extremity (Is the belief sharp, intense, “the most”?)
Centrality (Does the belief fit with other beliefs?)

* Believers are motivated to act in such a way as to increase the values of their beliefs, from whatever sources these arise. In general, then, belief value will tend to increase during time of possession.

* When threatened, beliefs tend to increase in value, via whatever sources are most malleable and useful.

* There are at least two kinds of costs associated with the adoption of a belief: opportunity costs and sunk costs. By an “opportunity cost,” economists refer to an alternative benefit which is given up by virtue of a particular action. If you pursue an attractive but time-consuming avocation, for example, you sacrifice time which might be used to earn money. In the belief context, there is the possibility that the adoption of one belief might forestall the opportunity to possess other beliefs.

* More common is the situation in which present beliefs must be abandoned in order to adopt new ones. Since the present beliefs have some value, their abandonment is costly. I refer to this as the “sunk cost” attaching to the loss of present beliefs. Presumably an individual would not abandon present beliefs if their sunk cost exceeded the apparent value of the beliefs which would replace them.

* For the art and practice of persuasion, the moral of the theory would seem to be that to give someone a new belief, you’ve got to “sell” it to them as something they would find of value, and you have to get them to exercise it a bit and make some commitment. This is analogous to an automobile salesman pointing out the attractive features of a new car and letting the customer experience them with a trial spin.

* Beliefs are objects which provide values to their owners. The bases for these values have little to do with the probable truth of the beliefs. This is a crucial fact both psychologically and sociopolitically. Competitions between ideologies depend substantially upon which belief system provides greater value to its proponents.

* Among academics, there is in principle more of a skill component in the act of believing, with greater attention to the logical consistency between arguments, and more emphasis on the desirability of reality tests, difficult though they may be. There is also a norm of openness to belief challenge, and (hopefully) a respect for the potential validity of such challenges. Ideally, in such an environment beliefs are treated as products of an openly shared skill.

Are friends like possessions? Do we make friends or lose friends in similar ways to how we make our beliefs and accumulate possessions? We might build friends that have social and personal appeal. We make friends in childhood because they are there. We might show off our friends. Sometimes we adopt new friends at the cost of old friends.