Believing

by Michael McGuire

  When his frustration about his colleague’s research passes his threshold and he is on the verge of voicing his irritations, he often drops by my office to vent and chat. It was one of those days, and he was in his usual dress, a baseball hat, suspenders, a mussed shirt, and a crooked bowtie. And, as usual, he leaned back in a chair and put his feet on my desk.

  He began with a critique of the irrelevance of much research conducted by members of his department. Half an hour later, he’d exhausted the topic for the day and our conversation took a turn: “What are you up to?” he asked. I told him of my interest in belief and my plan to find out what psychologists have to say.

  “Psychology? Why?” he asked.

  “They’ve studied belief for decades,” I replied.

  “I’m dubious you’ll find anything interesting.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No. I’ve read their stuff. It’s interesting. But . . . but they’re not addressing how the brain as a biological tissue generates and uses beliefs.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s like this, like what psychoanalysts do. They take what people say and then speculate about how imaginary systems in the brain such as repression make them say what they do. It’s like trying to divine the machine code of a computer using only the information on its screen or looking at the surface of the earth and guessing what’s inside. At times, what they say is ingenious. But it’s still just speculation. Nothing about how the brain really works is revealed. Any breakthrough will have to address that.”

  “Are you telling me that there is nothing to be gained by looking at psychology?”

  “No, but it will be necessary to be very precise about its limitations.”

  I sensed Howard had a point. But, for the moment, I wasn’t prepared to bypass psychology and jump straight to the brain. For at least a half century, psychologists have studied belief, and their studies have been highly inventive in identifying ways in which the brain creates beliefs, which often defy conventional reason and how divides develop, persist, and go unrecognized. There is also a clear message in their work: how and what people believe is frequently riddled with information-processing quirks, logically suspect, and strongly biased in favor of perpetuating beliefs. These quirks hint at how the brain works. There would be far more to their work than Howard acknowledged.

  A SAMPLING

  In How We Know What Isn’t So (1991),1 Thomas Gilovich spells out reasons for the fallibility of human belief in everyday life. We misperceive and misinterpret random data when we assess things on the basis of superficial features or seeming similarity. We misinterpret incomplete and unrepresentative data when we address only a subset of relevant facts. We develop biased evaluations of ambiguous and inconsistent data when we disregard inconsistencies in findings. Our motivations often determine what we believe because it is personally rewarding. We accept uncritically the biasing effects of secondhand information when we believe rumors or unsubstantiated facts. We harbor exaggerated impressions of social support when we mistakenly assume that others share our views. We believe in the effectiveness of questionable interpersonal strategies.

  A decade later, in Why People Believe Weird Things,2 Michael Shermer offered a list of twenty-five ways in which the brain contributes to people believing weird things—that is, ways that narrow divides, irrespective of evidence. A sampling includes the following: Theory influences observation. Bold statements do not make claims true. Failures are rationalized to obscure errors. After-the-fact reasoning. Coincidence. Hasty generalization. Over-reliance on authority. Circular reasoning. And the need for certainty, control, and simplicity. He sums up his findings this way: “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”3

  In 2006, Thomas Kida, in Don’t Believe Everything You Think,4 lists six basic mistakes characteristic of belief: (1) We prefer stories to statistics. (2) We seek to confirm our beliefs and reasoning. (3) We rarely appreciate the role of chance or coincidence in the interpretation of events. (4) We often misperceive our world. (5) We oversimplify. (6) We have faulty memories.

  In the same year, Cordelia Fine’s A Mind of Its Own: How the Brain Distorts and Deceives (2006)5 provides a lively description of ways the brain biases perceptions and beliefs. The following is a sample therefrom: The vain brain—the brain manipulates perceptions. The emotional brain—­emotions are not necessarily matched with the right thoughts. The immoral brain—the brain maintains our sense of moral superiority. The pigheaded brain—our brains are loyal to our beliefs. The weak-willed brain—the brain that fails to carry out good plans. The bigoted brain—the brain that doesn’t acknowledge its bigotry. The deluded brain—the brain that allows all kinds of biases to enter thinking.

  In 2011, Shermer’s third book on belief appeared, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths.6 Three themes are at the heart of his analysis of belief. The first is patternicity: the brain has evolved to perceive patterns even in response to random stimuli. The second is agenticity: the brain is strongly biased toward attributing intentional action as the cause of events. And third, we form beliefs first and then look for supporting evidence.

  For beliefs dealing with ghosts, politics, religion, much of morality, and extraterrestrial life, Shermer may be largely right: beliefs often precede the search for evidence or, at times, there is no search at all. But such beliefs differ from many that occur in daily life. For example, we often acquire evidence first and only later attempt to make some sense of it. Say you note that a plant in your garden is failing to grow. On first pass, it’s an observation, not a belief about a possible cause of the failure. Now suppose that the next day you observe a mound of dirt next to the plant. A belief is likely to follow: a gopher is the cause of the plant’s condition.

  The year 2011 also saw the publication of Thinking Fast and Slow7 by Nobel Prize recipient Daniel Kahneman. For Kahneman, two systems serve as the backbone of his book and characterize the ways our brain handles information. System 1 is intuition, our fast, automatic, and unconscious system that makes instant judgments and leads to instant beliefs and action. System 2 is our far slower analytic system—think “rational” or “logical”—that reasons and often corrects judgments made by system 1. He stops short of saying that the brain is fundamentally irrational, but it is hard not to draw this conclusion from his examples.

  Kahneman’s two systems map much of what we experience, although as some authors have pointed out there is no reason to assume that there are only two systems.8 We frequently make instantaneous judgments and develop beliefs based on minimal or questionable evidence. We also think things through and revise our instantaneous judgments. But as I will discuss presently, these systems are far from independent or separate. Rather, they are closely intertwined and highly susceptible to each other’s influence. As to whether the brain is fundamentally irrational, that too is a topic that will be discussed.

  A SURMISE

  There is a very long list of other findings and publications by psychologists. Nonetheless, those cited above capture much of the essence of what they have identified. And who would disagree with much of what they have said? Daily we find our own brain, and certainly those of others, misinterpreting events, developing and harboring questionable beliefs, and narrowing divides without consideration of evidence.

  Given their findings, an obvious implication is that we are stuck with a brain that often processes information in ways that result in beliefs that have minimal regard for supporting evidence—in effect, the brain can be irrational. Still, it is wise to view this possibility cautiously. Highly questionable beliefs may serve personal and social uses, such as assuring group memberships that have higher priority than worrying about the irrational features of such beliefs. But the most critical point is that studies by psychologists are primarily descriptive. That is, they describe the products of the brain�
��s workings. From these descriptions, possible brain systems are inferred but not identified biologically. It is the identification of these biological systems that is critical if beliefs and divides are to be explained—Howard is right on this point.

  From another perspective, to adopt rationality as the benchmark for assessing how the brain works has an obvious limitation. It shifts inquiry away from viewing the brain as it is. That is, the optimal way of viewing the brain’s ways of processing information may not be as either rational or irrational any more than the workings of the spleen or the liver might be viewed as rational or irrational. They are what they are and do what they do. Fundamental facts about the brain appear to be that it is made up of multiple systems that process information, create beliefs, and alter divides. These systems appear to have their own priorities and agendas, which often work independently of each other and outside the perceived control of their owners. It is these systems and their workings that are of primary interest in the following pages.

  With the findings of psychologists under my belt, I next chose history to see what light it might cast on belief.

  Why history? Because it just made sense. Beliefs have been around since the beginning of recorded history and certainly long before. Some change; for example, new evidence and its interpretation were responsible for the gradual disappearance of certainty that the sun revolved around the earth. In other instances, beliefs such as the existence of higher powers have a remarkable durability despite their lack of evidence. Yet despite the difficulties of encapsulating its contribution to knowledge on believing, history might serve up a gold mine of examples of how beliefs are or are not tied to evidence, what alters divides, and the time frame of change.

  It was not easy to contact one of my American history professors from college. He had retired and moved to another state. At first, I didn’t recognize his voice. It had lost much of its vibrancy from earlier years. Clearly he had aged, but it soon became apparent that his memory and reasoning were as sharp as ever.

  We talked several times, perhaps three hours in all. His comments ran something like this: “History lacks precision and definition. It’s revised continually. Which version is to be believed? There are cultural and ideological consequences. FDR is an example. There are historians who view him as a savior in his time, the man who guided us through the Great Depression. There are others who view him as the initiator of socialism in America, an enemy to free enterprise. Or take the peopling of the Americas. Each year there is a new interpretation. Archeological facts are disputed and historians fight with each other over their interpretation—it’s not pretty. And who knows what the story will be tomorrow? Or, for another example, look at the change in interpretation of America’s founders. Fifty years ago, they were heroes. Today, for many, they were villains of the people, arrogant upper-class individuals who carved out a society in which they primarily would benefit.”

  Then he reminded me of the first book I had written, Reconstructions in Psychoanalysis. It questioned whether persons undergoing psychoanalysis could accurately recall their past. Accurate recall isn’t simply a problem of memory. It is also about the implications of supposed unconscious systems such as repression that are thought to suppress memories: if some memories are suppressed, reconstructions will be incomplete. “If so,” he asked, “how will you deal with personal testimonies about past events?”

  I was not overjoyed with our discussions. Several days later, I telephoned him again.

  “Are you suggesting that I skip history?” I asked.

  “I’ve mixed feelings,” he replied. “No doubt there are highly accurate histories that would be valuable to you. These deal with events that can be cleanly documented, such as the signing of the United States Constitution—we know who wrote and signed it. Or take the Panama Canal. There is extensive documentation about when and how it was built. But personal testimonies are another matter. The trick will be to identify those that reasonably, accurately describe events. If you plan to build your book entirely around what people tell you, it’s a dangerous strategy.”

  Depressing as it was, I agreed with much of what he said: there are limits to much of history. Still, history is not all fiction. Events do take place and they have consequences. Moreover, a close look might be informative, provided I exercised interpretative caution. For example, beliefs change over time. Some change rapidly while others remain unchanged often over centuries. Why? When is change based on evidence, when on interpretation, when on other factors, such as emotion or technological change? Then there are the sources of beliefs. Many are acquired socially. But what about other sources? Do we sometimes make them up? Are some selected simply because they are satisfying? Do certain beliefs affect behavior while others don’t? These were questions that were begging for further inquiry.

  Satisfied that history might at least partially inform these questions, books started coming off my library shelf. My challenge would be to forge a path through selected findings and their interpretations in order to begin to nail down answers to lingering questions. Regarding the challenge, it needs to be noted that it’s not the aim of this book to review the histories of belief, beliefs, or divides. Encyclopedists, historians, philosophers, and others already have done much of this work, and they have done it well. My focus here is on recurrent features of belief creation, the management of divides, and factors that hasten or constrain their change.

  MYTHS-BELIEFS

  History can be partitioned into periods during which cultures embrace packages of stories, evidence, imaginings, and rituals.1 Viewed from afar, these packages often seem like little more than idle musings. To adopt this view is a mistake, however, as far, far more is involved. Cultural and religious myths-beliefs serve as overarching emotional-conceptual frameworks in which myths and beliefs acquire meaning and value and are associated with behavior. Tradition and hopes are socialized, given direction, and influence the political and social context of daily life, at times, down to its last detail. Irish and British cultural myths provide an illustration.

  IRISH AND BRITISH CULTURAL MYTHS

  At various moments during their history, the Irish have mythologized their origins in different ways. While their efforts represent attempts to establish cultural roots and uniqueness, they serve other ends. For example, during the 1600s, Irish historians and writers were struggling to rescue ancient Irish mythology from Scythian barbarity.2 At the same time, their rival and often-despised neighbor, the British, mythologized their origins as Roman, thereby establishing a more ancient ancestry than the Irish. The Irish were not to be outdone, however. They quickly identified pre-Roman sources of Irish ancestry as a mixture of Phoenician-Egyptian heritage.3

  Cultural myths often have little to do with historical accuracy. For the Irish during the 1600s, much of the creative energy devoted to changing their historical identity was a response to the politics of British imperialism. Their belief in a longer cultural development bolstered their cultural age, provided them with a superior moral stance, and served as a rational for challenging British colonial policy.4

  Myths, like daily lives, are not static.5 In recent centuries, the British have found ways of revising their myth by incorporating their heroes, such as the Duke of Wellington and his victory in the Waterloo Campaign; Lord Nelson of Trafalgar; the exploits and accomplishments of kings, queens, and statesmen; and the fighting of two world wars in less than half a century. For the Irish, their current revision involves efforts to immortalize their writers such as William Butler Years, George Bernard Shaw, and James Joyce. And at this moment, there is a project to reclaim Samuel Beckett by his homeland—this, despite the fact that Beckett turned his back on his native country for the majority of his adult life.6

  Do the Irish and British believe their myths? No doubt many question the accuracy of the historical details as well as how they are portrayed—many divides are wide. But myths serve other agencies, such as uniting people who are distantly related genetically.
They offer a structure for self-identity, ratcheting up national self-respect and instilling a sense of cultural uniqueness. They justify separate languages and serve as moral guides for the affairs of daily life.7 Thus it is quite possible to covet and even believe myths and use them for multiple purposes irrespective of their historical accuracy. They can provide personal reward and pleasure that are of higher priority than a careful assessment of evidence. Under these circumstances, divides are easily ignored.

  RUSSIAN CULTURAL MYTH

  An equally informative example of creative mythologizing is found in the work of many of today’s Russian historians. Prior to the fall of the USSR, they offered a qualified acceptance of the Communist revolution coupled with derogatory words about European society and values.8 Acceptance evaporated with the implosion of the Communist enterprise, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of a divided Germany, and the ensuing social and economic turmoil that engulfed the Russian economy.

  Much as with their Irish and British counterparts, many Russian historians take as their charge the task of revising history and putting it to cultural uses. Recently they have turned to searching their distant past to identify new origins of the Russian people. A current focus is on the Mongol invasion and conquest during the thirteenth century. Under the Mongol Khans and their successors, Russia developed its own civilization and culture, at least that is a current scenario.9 It may seem like a stretch to suggest that most living Russians would find it rewarding to embrace the belief that, twenty or so generations ago, their relatives were thirteenth-century Mongols. Yet it isn’t unfeasible that in twenty years many Russians will certify such a view, find it attractive, defend it with vigor, and disregard possible divides.