Cognitive Mechanisms of Belief Change

By Aaron C. T. Smith

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. Cognitive Mechanisms of Belief Change is relevant to anyone interested in the machinations of how this occurs. It explains how certain ideas and concepts steal a place in the mind because they latch on to hardwired ways of thinking, experiencing, and behaving. Concepts throw light upon the mind’s 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. Beliefs infiltrate our minds, and this book shows how they arrive and change in ways critical to our sense of meaning and identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: May 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781137578952

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Aaron C. T. Smith

Cognitive Mechanisms of Belief Change

A386288_1_En_BookFrontmatter_Figa_HTML.png

Aaron C. T. Smith

RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

ISBN 978-1-137-57894-5e-ISBN 978-1-137-57895-2

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57895-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016938779

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

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Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London

Contents

1 Converts 1

2 Concepts 61

3 Computation 105

4 Commitment 201

5 Consequences 217

6 Conclusion 241

Index261

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Aaron C. T. SmithCognitive Mechanisms of Belief Change10.1057/978-1-137-57895-2_1

1. Converts

Aaron C. T. Smith¹ 

(1)

RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Introduction

One evening, towards the end of my research with a group committed to humanitarian and spiritual development, I channelled 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 medium. Afterwards, over coffee, another group member confessed that there had been no spirit involved in her channelling either. ‘Do you think any of this is real?’ 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 meaning—that productive state of satisfaction where an individual’s delusions intersect with those collectively held within a social context. I argue that beliefs are the mind’s 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 ideas—or concepts—steal a place in the mind because they latch on to hardwired ways of thinking, experiencing, and behaving. Concepts throw light upon the mind’s 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 change and conversion, 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 conversion 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 the central problem in the analysis of mind (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 evil 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 acquiring—whether consciously or unconsciously—irrespective 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 making rigid statements defining beliefs. To me we should start with the first premise that beliefs are pre-existing notions (Halligan 2007). But unlike other sources of knowledge or information, beliefs are tied up in strong personal convictions; rigid endorsements of propositions that are viewed as right and true, irrespective of further evidence or critical inquiry.

Beliefs do not come in a single flavour or colour, which makes their definition troublesome because any attempt to conflate beliefs to a uniform statement will inevitably lead to a radical oversimplification. Instead, I prefer to account for beliefs more on the basis of what they do. For example, beliefs provide an operating system for the mind by sorting, coding, organising and processing inputs, and delivering in response intuitive inferences and reflective judgements about relevance and value.

Our minds cannot function without beliefs, so fundamental they are to the way we think and function in the world. Like a computer without software, the mind would be incapable of working properly without a belief algorithm upon which to evaluate information. Given that beliefs occupy an entrenched place within the mind’s computations, we hold beliefs about every aspect of the world’s content. Yet, software does receive upgrades, so our entire belief suite remains in constant flux. Sometimes, to continue the analogy, we seek to install the upgrade ourselves with the conscious intention of changing our minds about something. Most of the time, however, our beliefs move fluidly, subject to the currents of environmental variables ranging from mild eddies to raging torrents.

A belief arrives in the form of a commitment to a concept, notion, or idea about something. At the risk of sounding vague, that something could be literally anything. To make matters even more complicated, the ideas we possess about all of these incalculable somethings can be either consciously available or unconsciously imprinted. This means that the consequences of a belief commitment may be accessible for our thoughtful consideration. At the same time, the majority of our belief commitments stay hidden, or largely hidden, from our conscious awareness. We do not subject them to reflective interrogation simply because their delivery arrives automatically, deeply engrained through predisposed hardwiring and sociocultural learning.

While our belief commitments reveal themselves to us in part when we think about them, we never get the whole picture. Not only is genuine objectivity about our beliefs impossible, but often large chunks of how we arrived at a belief are not available to us because the process of acquiring it came from an untraceable combination of the mind’s natural inclinations, deeply held intuitions, automatic inferences, and both subtle and clumsy social conditioning. Even when we can allocate a cause to a belief, it can still be extremely difficult to work out when it arrived or why it persists. The lifetime supporter of a sporting club offers an example. While she might be aware of a childhood filled with parental reinforcement about the importance of supporting a particular club, she will not change her allegiance even despite severe disappointment from long-standing on-field failure.

Beliefs and Isms

Just because I am not a fan of hard and fast definitions of what constitutes a belief does not mean others have shied away from this tricky business. However, as with most academic work, the need for specialisation goes hand in hand with a reductionist approach, which means that certain beliefs are broken into constituent dimensions. Perhaps the most common examples can be found in the analysis of political attitudes, beliefs, and ideologies. It is possible to nail down the personality characteristics common to holders of a given political position. For example, when tested on personality scales, conservatives cluster around authoritarianism, dogmatism, and aversion to change (Jost et al. 2003). While interesting, especially for political pundits, the research also demonstrates that conservatism, like all belief systems, is adopted to satisfy personal psychological needs. We justify these beliefs in other ways, rarely connected to their deeper psychological foundations.

One adventurous psychologist specialising in the study of personality, Gerard Saucier, thinks that ideas, social attitudes, and beliefs all constitute critical elements in making up personality. In fact, he claims that social attitudes and beliefs inform our intentional actions, including everything from social interaction and self-regulation to aggression and violence (Saucier 2000). Going a step further, Saucier’s research has delivered three major features portending any individual’s beliefs, not only shaping behaviour but also explaining its origin too. These are conservatism, authoritarianism, and dogmatism. Perhaps, Saucier thinks, religiousness constitutes a fourth dimension. Together, the four dimensions help to distinguish one person’s beliefs from another person’s beliefs.

In looking back at research on beliefs, isms tend to enjoy a prominent position as descriptors, although there are a lot of blurred boundaries between what might be personality and what might be its belief contents. For example, personality seems to be more a reflection of consistent patterns of behaviour, whereas beliefs map against consistent patterns of thought (and, for my money, feelings too). The obvious overlap helps to explain why I think that academic constructions of beliefs are not as helpful as they first appear, although it is clear that isms can offer neatly pre-packaged adjectives describing belief categories. Adjectives usefully distinguish qualities through language, which can help when those very qualities remain covert, nebulous, fluid, or vague, as in the case of many beliefs. Similarly, ists and ics help out as well when it comes to communicating the spirit of a belief set. Most of us can get a general sense of what it means to hold a belief set described by terms such as communist, fundamentalist, democratic, or autocratic. All of these terms have in common a direct reference to a belief or its elements in the form of opinions, ideas, concepts, principles, views, or convictions.

My own conviction is that summarising beliefs using a handful of standardised measures like authoritarianism or religiousness is clever academically but limited in practice, especially when it comes to explaining belief acquisition, maintenance, and transfer. I admire the work of psychologists like Saucier, capable of conflating the immensely complicated belief concoctions into a handful of key features. My objective here simply does not need to go down this path.

Instead, I spend more time on the mind rather than on the specific contents of its beliefs. That is, I am more interested in the gun than in the bullet.

In a recent follow-up, Saucier (2013) updated his ism-based belief construct, refining the original four dimensions and adding a fifth and sixth. Along with conservatism, authoritarianism, dogmatism, and religiousness, social dominance orientation and inequality aversion rounded out the list. Without getting into further definitions of each dimension, the takeaway point is that the psychologist’s approach aims to break down the boundaries between political, economic, and religion-oriented domains of belief. It turns out that isms are particularly useful for accessing beliefs via ideology. For example, we can say that people who believe in climate change, as well as the sceptics, can be described on the basis of common demographic and motivational ideologies (Milfont et al. 2015). Climate change believers score higher in scales of altruism than sceptics, for instance.

A reasonable question arising from Saucier’s approach to beliefs would be to ask how we distinguish between the myriad of terms being thrown around, including values, attitudes, worldviews, ideologies, opinions, and convictions.

My answer reflects a cognitive position where beliefs depict a mental state of acceptance and confidence, sometimes to the point of faith, in a series of connected concepts. The key here is trust. We believe in something when we accept it as true, right, good, or real, with or without any independent confirmation in the correctness of this commitment. As a result, we use beliefs to guide our behaviours because we trust in them.

I think that the remainder of the terms refer to aspects of the overarching belief commitment. For example, ideology references a certain group of ideas in which we might find values, principles, and worldviews. All of these other terms are subservient to the greater belief sets held by an individual; they simply help us to categorise the domains of life, society, and the world. As Saucier (2013) observed, we have no choice but to adapt within environments characterised by uncertainty, and adaptation requires some shortcuts about what is right, true, important, and good. Enter the need for beliefs.

Beliefs as Questions and Answers

Another way of looking at beliefs—without getting bogged down in definitions—is to think of them as answers to the most basic questions guiding our decisions. They provide the platforms for establishing our behaviours, knowledge, and values about what is important. Our beliefs offer answers to questions about what we take to be true and how we know. Belief sets deliver ready answers to life’s vagaries and exigencies, as well as about which sources of knowledge we should place our confidence in.

Taking a more creative approach some time ago, psychologist Abelson (1986) made the case that beliefs are like possessions, spurred by his observations from research focused on persuasion. Abelson noticed that classical assumptions about what constitutes a successful argument fail to hold up in practice. To put it crudely, reasoned argument just does not work.

The bad news comes from two directions. On the one side, attitudes do not tend to change even when supported by weak arguments, to a person’s point that even disconfirmed beliefs linger. On the other side, the attractiveness, sympathy, and confidence and the use of intuitively appealing but biased and non-representative examples, all magnify the effects of an argument. In short, we cling to our beliefs like a child grips a stuffed toy and will only relinquish them with the delivery of a larger, fluffier, and cuddlier bear.

Although writing three decades ago, the early commentaries by psychologists like Abelson have proven prescient and insightful. Consider the attitudes–behaviour disjunction, a conundrum still present in contemporary writing about decision-making: despite the expectation that attitudes and behaviours should be definitively correlated, researchers have uncovered quite a low correspondence between them. Since I would view attitudes as a sub-component of a person’s beliefs, trying to explain the divergence remains relevant. Attitudes display an evaluative belief in the form of a position about its correctness along with a suitcase full of emotional baggage.

As it turns out, as Abelson (1986) predicted, part of the problem can be traced to an absence of opportunity. Bigger, macro beliefs involving a worldview perspective are actually hard to test out in practice, like a political ideology or conviction about a nation’s superiority. At the same time, we also tend to invent new attitudes to supplement our belief systems in order to retrospectively justify our actions. Oddly though, not only are opportunities for acting in accordance with beliefs and attitudes somewhat unusual, but they are often missed when they do arise. Abelson’s (1986, p. 228) comments hit the mark: "We are very good at finding reasons for