Here’s how beliefs are formed -> we believe in certain things based on our genetic disposition to certain personality traits, our upbringing, our parents’ political leanings, our friends’ opinions, our own experiences, our biases, prejudices, fears, desires, hopes, aspirations, goals, etc. In other words a lot of factors, that are not rational or anasytical. What happens after forming a belief is more interesting. The hippocampus, our brain’s storyteller, connects separate, distant events into a single narrative around the belief and why it is true. The purpose is not accuracy but coherency. This is the reason why we can’t change someone’s mind by presenting them with facts as their mind has already weaved a story that reinforces the belief.
In his book, The Believing Brain, Michael Shermer explains how beliefs are formed and how they are reinforced. In the following sections, I describe the key ideas from the book.
In an experiment conducted to understand the effectiveness of mental health prognosis, Rosenhan, a senior psychologist conducted several studies that showed the hospital environment can modify our understanding of a specific behaviour which can or cannot be considered abnormal. He said to his students he will be sending a faking patient and that they had to spot him. In reality he sent no fakers but still 40 patients were flagged to be faking out of 200. In a similar study he had 7 faking psychology majors go to the hospital who were never found to be faking and were in fact diagnosed with serious mental illnesses. These experiments showed that the underlying belief system manipulates what we see and how we interpret it.
We believe things because we see patterns. Patternicity and Agenticity are our evolutionary abilities to spot patterns in noise and assigning them meanings that aren’t really there. Shermer explains how anecdotal learning comes naturally, while science takes effort. We are the descendents of those who could find patterns to survive the dangers that lurked near them. We don’t have a system that overlooks this pattern recognition. Our brain simply runs a cost heuristic - cost of making a false positive error (the bush moving is a tiger) Vs that of the false negative error (its just wind). This is why we make superstitious beliefs, because we cannot distinguish between bad learning and learning.
People believe weird things because of our ability to believe things.
Superstitions are nothing but a type of B.F. Skinner’s bird box scenario, where we believe a point or a reward comes to us because of something we did but it happened on its own.
There is a just right amount of “open mindedness” that is healthy. There are thin boundaries between Creativity, which is borne out of the perfect use of patternicity and agenticity; and madness, that comes from an extremely active use of both. If we’re too open to capturing patterns, we see one where there is none, if we too little, we miss out on important observations. Scientists also walk this tightrope of spotting patterns. The author talks about Kary Mullis, a scientist who won the Nobel prize for inventing polymerase chain reaction (PCR), in which a small amount of DNA can be copied in large quantities. He was a creative genius but also had some weird beliefs like his belief in astrology and having witnessed an extra terrestrial glowing racoon.
The point the author makes is that Mullis had a wide angle lens for spotting patterns which ensured many weird and creative ideas got through and made its seat in his head but only a small proportion of these ideas were useful (in the modern day sense of the word).
Genetics also indirectly play a role in us believing certain things. While genes dont directly contribute to political leanings or religious beliefs, they do play a role in shaping personality traits that in turn make it easy or hard for us to believe certain things.
It is because of these differences that we all have the potential to believe so many different things and make up stories that explain the same observation entirely differently. A realistic vision of the world involves understanding that there are moral constraints. People have potential to be moral as well as amoral. Believing this is important to understand why people do what they do and then creating policies and systems that work with this reality.
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