BELIEF: AN OWNER’S MANUAL
ARTICLE 3
THREE MORE HABITS OF THOUGHT THAT SUPPRESS
CRITICAL EVALUATION OF BELIEF
AND AN APPROACH THAT OVERCOMES THOSE HABITS
As noted in the previous article, one habit of thought that suppresses critical evaluation of beliefs is the customary definition of that term. This article briefly describes three more habits of thought that make it hard to be objective about beliefs and introduces a strategy to overcome those habits.
THE SECOND OF FOUR HABITS THAT SUPPRESS CRITICAL THOUGHT ABOUT BELIEFS: THE VIEW OF BELIEFS AS SENTIENT BEINGS
If we wish to think clearly about beliefs, we need to stop treating them with the sort of reverence we generally reserve for persons we cherish. That reverence is evident in the ways we describe beliefs – particularly beliefs we share with family members, friends, associates, and others who agree with our political, religious, or cultural views and values.
We describe ourselves as loyal to our shared beliefs. We accept their guidance. We commit ourselves to them. We declare, proudly, that we live for those beliefs.
We treat our shared beliefs as if they embodied the spirits those who love(d) and nurture(d) us – parents, teachers, beloved relatives, leaders of our communities, role models, peers, treasured friends, and transcendent beings.
Our behavior reflects the passion with which we relate to the beliefs we share. We defend those beliefs. Many of us are willing to die for them. And many are willing to kill for them.
We honor those who sacrifice themselves to defend such beliefs or, in some cases, to impose them on others. Our language includes honorifics for those who sacrifice or risk their lives for their shared beliefs. We refer to such persons as heroes, martyrs, or saints.
Heroes, martyrs, and saints: these are not terms we use to describe those who risk their lives for mere tools – regardless how useful those tools may be. We are not committed to even the finest monkey wrenches or rolling pins. We don’t honor them. We don’t defend them. We wouldn’t die for their honor, and we view those who would as incomprehensibly foolish.
Our beliefs, regardless how widely and passionately shared, are not sentient beings. When we treat them as such, we render ourselves incapable of assessing them fairly. Overcoming this barrier to objectivity requires an existential commitment: to treat beliefs as tools and nothing more. This website will help you bring that mindset to bear when evaluating beliefs.
THE THIRD OF FOUR HABITS THAT SUPPRESS OBJECTIVE CONSIDERATION OF BELIEFS: ATTACHMENT TO CERTAINTY
The third barrier to viewing beliefs objectively is our attachment to certainty. All humans enjoy the feelings associated with being certain. David Rock, author of the Psychology Today column, “Your Brain at Work” (Rock, 2009), said that the brain “. . . craves certainty [in much the same way that it crave[s]] food, sex and other primary rewards . . . a sense of uncertainty about the future generates a strong threat or ‘alert’ response . . . uncertainty [is] . . . a type of pain, something to be avoided. Certainty on the other hand feels rewarding, and we tend to steer toward it, even when it might be better for us to remain uncertain.”
Predictably, our brains resist whatever reduces certainty. In a study at Emory University using functional magnetic resonance imaging to reveal the activity of subjects’ brains, Drew Westen and his colleagues (Westen, Blagnov, Harenski, Kilts, & Hamann, 2006) discovered that potentially troubling political information activated a network of distress-producing neurons. Subjects eliminated their distress by employing faulty reasoning and reassuring beliefs. Westen and his colleagues noted that subjects’ brains didn’t just eliminate the uncomfortable contradictions; they rewarded elimination of those contradictions by “[activating] reward circuits that [gave] partisans a jolt of positive reinforcement for their biased ‘reasoning.’”
The neural circuits Westen identified as having roles in rewarding being unquestionably right are the same as those activated when a junkie gets a fix. Unfortunately, it’s often the case that the exhilaration associated with being unquestionably right desensitizes us to the damage our beliefs do, much as the exhilaration associated with addictive drugs desensitizes addicts to the havoc their addictions create. This website will provide you with tools that can help you resist the Siren song of certainty while enhancing your capacities for insight, wonder, and surprise.
THE FOURTH OF FOUR HABITS THAT INHIBIT OBJECTIVE EVALUATION OF BELIEFS: DEFERENCE TO SECOND-ORDER PRECEPTS
A fourth barrier to objectivity is the tendency to submit to precepts that govern how adherents and deferential outsiders contemplate, assess, discuss, and compare specific beliefs. Attention to this issue was inspired by Karl Popper’s (1963) efforts to identify the factors that distinguished the scientific character of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which he considered undeniable; from the scientific character of Freud’s Psychoanalysis, Adler’s Individual Psychology, and Marx’ Historical Materialism, which he considered questionable. The answer, Popper proposed, lay in the guidelines and standards that determined what each theory’s advocates considered supportive, what they considered challenging, how they interpreted and responded to supportive information, and how they responded to challenging information.
Since Popper was focused on theories and movements in which those guidelines and standards were long-established, he referred to those guidelines and standards as “second-order traditions.” However, since we are concerned with the full range of beliefs – not only those with well-established guidelines and standards – we will be using a more inclusive term, “second-order precepts,” to refer to the guidelines and standards with which adherents and the deferential comply when considering adherents’ beliefs.
Second-order precepts can have powerful effects on how we interpret beliefs. As you may remember if you studied the Protestant Reformation, both the 16th century Roman Catholic Church and those who challenged its authority viewed the Bible as divinely authored. But the Catholic Church and its critics disagreed over precepts affecting interpretation of the Bible.
The most fundamental disagreement was over who was capable of understanding Scripture. The Church, characterizing the formal priesthood as descended from the Aaronic priestly class described in Leviticus, declared itself uniquely qualified to interpret God’s word. However, reformers, citing 1 Peter 2:5 and 1 Timothy 2:5, argued that all believers were priests and that earthly mediators between God and humanity were unnecessary. The second-order precepts endorsed by the Church buttressed their authority, while those advocated by reformers stripped the Church of much of its power (Protestant Reformation, 2017).
Second-order precepts can bias consideration of even the most mundane matters. In all too many cases, such bias can be so powerful that it renders discourse about such matters meaningless.
Imagine, for example, that you’d like to buy a vacuum cleaner that operates quietly, filters the air that passes through it efficiently, and picks up pet hair effectively. Hoping to find the information you need; you go to your favorite product testing website. But you’re disappointed by what you find.
Rather than putting every vacuum cleaner through the same tests, the site now tests each cleaner in accordance with instructions supplied by its manufacturer. Instead of using uniform procedures to measure the results of those tests (as it previously had), it measures results using each manufacturer’s recommended procedures. Instead of using a consistent set of terms to describe the results of those tests, it uses definitions each cleaner’s manufacturer suggests. And instead of reporting all testing results, this site, in compliance with manufacturers’ demands, suppresses results that reveal products’ shortcomings and blacklists engineers and technicians who include such results in the documents they submit for review.
That website’s report would be as useless as watching a collection of advertisements. Yet that’s precisely the situation we create when we comply with precepts that constrain the ways we think and talk about beliefs.
To comply with such second-order precepts – that is, to “respect beliefs” – is to acquiesce to the demand that we evaluate, discuss, and compare beliefs using inconsistent standards and terminology – even when evaluating, discussing, and comparing beliefs that address similar phenomena.
Thus, to respect second-order precepts is to favor those beliefs that most powerfully bias observation, warp language and logic, muzzle discussion, and silence dissent while handicapping beliefs with second-order precepts that encourage honesty, openness, humility, and circumspection. That is, to respect second-order precepts is to favor those beliefs that are most likely to mislead us.
The fundamental insight that gave rise to the ideas on this website, “a belief is worth believing if it provides the guidance believers rely on it for,” can be thought of as a second-order precept. But that precept is unique in that it (1) applies to all beliefs, (2) establishes a “level playing field,” and (3) encourages openness and objectivity. I therefore refer to that insight as a “universal second-order precept.”
The techniques described on this website, which sprang from that precept, will help you evaluate, discuss, and compare beliefs in ways that enable you to identify each belief’s promises and pitfalls. In doing so, those techniques will help you evaluate similar beliefs similarly and defy second-order precepts that would otherwise unfairly advantage the beliefs with which they’re associated.
AN APPROACH TO BELIEF ANALYSIS THAT OVERCOMES BARRIERS TO OBJECTIVITY AND FACILITATES PRODUCTIVE DIALOGUE
The belief analysis techniques I have alluded to are straightforward. It is possible to overcome the barriers to fair evaluation and productive discussion of beliefs described above by consistent, systematic attention to three characteristics of beliefs: the fundamental need we look to our beliefs to satisfy, the precision of our beliefs’ predictions, and the viewpoints of our beliefs – that is, the nature of the issues our beliefs address and their relationships with other beliefs.
These characteristics are routinely overlooked. As we’ll see in the next article, they powerfully affect the nature of the guidance our beliefs offer us. And, when overlooked, they often lead us astray.
Awareness of the assumptions you make about the needs your beliefs satisfy, the precision of your beliefs, and their viewpoints – together with a grasp of how each of these characteristics affects the guidance your beliefs provide – will enable you to evaluate how well your beliefs serve you. If others are willing to do the same, you and they will find that you can establish common ground, opening doors to species of mutual understanding and agreement you (and they) may have considered impossible.
We’ll take a closer look at those characteristics in the articles that follow.
EXERCISE 3:
ENHANCING YOUR AWARENESS OF HABITS
THAT SUPPRESS CRITICAL THOUGHT ABOUT BELIEFS
Identify two practice beliefs identified in Exercise 2. At least one of these beliefs should be held by a group to which you belong. If you have not identified such a belief, do so now. Answer the following questions about each belief you’ve chosen to examine:
1. Does believing the belief in question make you feel comfortable? If so, how?
2. Does the prospect of critically examining, doubting, modifying, or rejecting the belief in question make you feel uncomfortable? If so, how?
3. What questions do the second-order precepts associated with the belief in question encourage you to explore? What belief-relevant questions do those precepts discourage you from exploring? How do the questions the precepts encourage differ from those the precepts discourage?
4. How do the second-order precepts of the belief in question encourage believers to respond to apparently supportive statements or data? How do those precepts encourage believers to respond to apparently challenging statements or data?
5. Do the second-order precepts of the belief in question attempt to control the narratives and/or terms employed in discussions of belief-relevant issues? If so, how?
6. How do the second-order precepts of the belief in question encourage believers to treat “insiders” (i.e., nominal believers) who challenge the belief? How do those precepts encourage believers to treat “outsiders” (i.e., skeptics and infidels/unbelievers)? How do those precepts encourage adherents to treat believers who respond respectfully to challenges to the belief?
REFERENCES
Burton, R. A. (2008). On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Johnson, J. J. (2009). What’s So Wrong With Being Absolutely Right. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Popper, K. (1963). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientirfic Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Protestant Reformation. (2017, May 29). Retrieved from Theopedia: An Encyclopedia of Biblical Christianity: http://www.theopedia.com/protestant-reformation
Rock, D. (2009, October 25). Your Brain at Work: A Hunger for Certainty. Retrieved from Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-brain-work/200910/hunger-certainty
Shermer, M. (2011). The Believing Brain. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Tavris, C., & Aronson, E. (2007). Mistakes Were Made (but not by me). New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Westen, D., Blagnov, P., Harenski, K., Kilts, C., & Hamann, S. (2006). The Neurological Basis of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Political Judgment during the U.S. Presidential Election of 2004. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18, no. 11, 1947-1958.