Why we believe what we believe

I found a comment on someone else's blog which I thought was pretty interesting. The post was about how a study of identical twins showed that some political and social attitudes had a high degree of hereditability.

The commenter, who calls himself Andrew Edwards, wrote:

[W]e should recognize that many of our beliefs are held for reasons other than their truth-quality. For instance, they may be held for genetic reasons, social reasons, or ego reasons. This should cause us to re-examine our beliefs and be sure that we're testing them on truthfulness, rather than on intuition.

I think that Mr. Edwards has pinned down the three major reasons for why we believe what we believe.

Genetic reasons: I've written several blog posts on the idea that genetic predisposition towards feeling guilty leads to leftist political positions. Whether one favors distributive justice or procedural justice seems to me to be a strongly genetic trait. Religiosity also seems to be a genetic trait.

Social reasons: if your friends, family, or peer group believes something, you will likely adopt their beliefs. Adoption of group values is a basic part of human behavior. A person who attends Democratic Party meetings will tend to adopt all the positions of the Democratic Party, even if he started out believing in only most of them. A person who goes to church every week will be brainwashed into believing the philosophies of the church, which usually extend to the secular world. Because religiosity is a genetic trait, it may appear that commonly preached church values (like being opposed to abortion) are also genetically influenced.

Ego reasons: people believe what makes them feel good about themselves. People who make lots of money are more likely to believe that making money is the result of hard work, while people who are poor are more likely to believe that making money is the result of luck. Ego reasons also impose high "switching" costs. If someone has devoted his whole life to doing what his Church told him, changing hs mind and deciding that his religion was bogus means that he wasted his whole life doing bogus stuff. Much emotional pain is avoided by continuing to believe what you've believed in the past.

Perhaps 90% of most people's beliefs are based on the above three emotional and irrational reasons, while only 10% are based on logical thought processes. Or maybe the breakdown is 95/5.

Comments

[Agnostic]

That's why most popular non-fiction books that deal with themes that the average person is even remotely emotionally invested in are not worth reading: most of them simply supply the high-demand service of telling people what they want to hear, with different pundits catering to different niche markets.

Math, physics, engineering -- probably a safe bet for neutral books. Social science, biological science, etc. -- then you have to do some heavy-duty sifting to find the signal in all the noise.

In fact, most recent *fiction* appears this way too -- different authors tell different target demographics that they're better than they get credit for. _How Stella Got Her Groove Back_ caters to disgruntled, highish-status Black women, for example. No one wants to be told they're to blame for even a single personal flaw.

[bbartlog]

90% of most people's beliefs

This only works out if you predefine a certain set of beliefs as 'opinions' or otherwise not amenable to easy proof, and then restrict your statement to that set. Most people correctly believe that gasoline will burn, that they can't lift a car, that if their head is cut off they will die, and so on ad infinitum. In other words, people have a host of everyday beliefs not covered by this statement. More to the point, there is no bright dividing line between the religious or psychologically based beliefs and the everyday evidentiary ones.

[michael vassar]

bbartlog: The evidentiary ones are the ones that the people believe that virtually everyone else shares or that they feel virtuous about believing. They are the beliefs that people assert as facts, not as beliefs.

Halfsigma: Is it reasonable to suggest that the emotion you are calling "guilt" might be only one side of a "guilt/sanctity" axis, and the push towards leftism results from causing people to care about their location on that axis rather than just caring about avoiding guilt/blame?
I think that the above interpretation basically matches the observations that cause you to blame guilt, while being less of a judgement and more of a hypothesis.

[Chris]

What reproductive advantage would a tendency toward guilt confer?

[SFG]

Sociopaths have no guilt. Their lack of concern for others gives them a competitive advantage...unless they get caught. The less repetitive interaction present, the greater the advantage to the sociopath.

[Fred]

"Our need to believe what we want to believe is much stronger than our need to know the truth."

[beepbeepitsme]

Great article!
Not many people will mention why they believe what they believe. They seem to just reiterate what they believe rather than examining why they believe it.

[The Engineer]

>>A person who attends Democratic Party meetings will tend to adopt all the positions of the Democratic Party, even if he started out believing in only most of them.

That's a perceptive point. I see that with myself. My parents are libs, I started out a lib. Then I went to college and took economics, and I accepted fiscal conservatism. I became a "New Democrat". But, of course, New Democrats are just Republicans who can't admit it. Slowly but surely, I became conservative on issue after issue. Now I'm pretty much to the right of Attila the Hun.

I don't know about the genetic thing, though. Nobody in my family is a Republican but me. But on the other hand, their lifestyles are pretty conservative (no divorces, no children out of wedlock, etc.). These days, culture drives politics more than anything, and by their lifestyle they should be politically conservative.

[bbartlog]

Your family sounds sort of like typical midwesterners - liberal out of niceness, personally conservative because that sort of behavior is socially unacceptable. Minnesota democrats... anyway, as Steve Sailer pointed out, those values work well if everyone else is on the same page, but once you add outsiders who don't give a damn about the social norms then a more conservative approach is needed.
As an aside, you shouldn't underestimate the degree to which the tone and delivery of someone like Rush Limbaugh undermines his ability to reach out to midwesterners. He's simply too goddamn nasty and full of himself. Conservatives should try to find someone with the presentation of Michael Feldman or Garrison Keillor if they want to make further inroads in that demographic...

[The Engineer]

>>Your family sounds sort of like typical midwesterners

Actually, they're from Long Island. They are typical Levittowners, though. The Levittown of my parents generation was no different than the Midwest.

>>anyway, as Steve Sailer pointed out, those values work well if everyone else is on the same page, but once you add outsiders who don't give a damn about the social norms then a more conservative approach is needed.

Totally agree with that. Scandinavian style socialism only works in a totally racially homogenous society.

>>As an aside, you shouldn't underestimate the degree to which the tone and delivery of someone like Rush Limbaugh undermines his ability to reach out to midwesterners. He's simply too goddamn nasty and full of himself.

I agree with that too. I love Rush, I totally share his sense of humor as well as his agressiveness, but I do see the downside you note. People in my family loathe the guy, and knowing that I love him, get on my case about it. Especially the Vicadin thing.

>>Conservatives should try to find someone with the presentation of Michael Feldman or Garrison Keillor if they want to make further inroads in that demographic...

I'd like to think that the conservative movement is wau larger than Rush. Liberalism is bigger than anybody on National Communist Radio.

[Kirk]

Agnostic: That's why most popular non-fiction books that deal with themes that the average person is even remotely emotionally invested in are not worth reading: most of them simply supply the high-demand service of telling people what they want to hear, with different pundits catering to different niche markets.

I figure this is the real bias of the media. For example, we fear sending our kids to Iraq..., so the media will portray that war as being unwinnable, unwarranted, etc., thus giving us every excuse to bail.

Another example: young people are a prime demographic. They drive small cars. Is it any wonder that the media overwhelmingly support the notion of global warming? Instantly, the media get to praise young people as being heroes. These "heroes" then watch the network, feeding the machine that praises them.

The media aren't biased leftwards; they're biased easy.