Why do people believe such radically different things?
by Samantha Koretsky
Every person’s mind is unique. We each have a rich internal life with a unique worldview and sense of reality. We have learned to communicate and relate to one another through language and other modes of communication, but all communication requires the externalization of our internal lives. To make matters even more difficult, none of us can ever know what it is like to experience life as another being does. We are each trapped in our own worldview. Still, our ability to communicate is impressive, and humans have the great ability to empathize, to imagine how another might feel in a given situation. But empathy can be limited. Communication can go wrong. We can often find ourselves completely confused at another person’s actions or beliefs, wondering how they could possibly think or feel the way they do.
When it comes to political beliefs, especially in today’s polarized world, we may find ourselves completely at odds with others. It seems like they live in a different reality. We might find that people don’t even agree on simple facts anymore. Many of us are frustrated, and particularly during arguments, it can be infuriating to communicate with a person whose beliefs seem outlandish and plainly incorrect to us. How could someone, maybe even someone we respect and find intelligent, hold such radically different, seemingly incorrect beliefs? How can we understand those with such different beliefs from ourselves? Is there a way for us to empathize and move past frustration and anger?
In this essay, I aim to explore the deeper ways that we form beliefs and our overall understanding of the world. By examining the roots of how we build up our worldviews, I hope to clarify how and why different people’s senses of reality can vary so widely.
Plausibility Structures: How much do our beliefs depend on our society?
No matter how certain we are about any belief we hold, assumptions lie beneath every piece of knowledge. Everything that we know, and everything we believe, is built on systems of knowledge that necessarily take some things for granted. British theologian Lesslie Newbigin in his 1989 work The Gospel in a Pluralist Society explains, “No coherent thought is possible without taking some things as given, […] without presuppositions.” It is hard to grasp, but everything we’ve ever known rests on some assumption. For example, walking down the street one day, I may say that I know that a school bus is driving by me. Just this simple fact assumes that my eyes, and the part of the brain that deals with visual perception, are telling me the truth, and that this yellow bus passing by is a school bus according to my prior knowledge of what school buses look like. Of course, we don’t navigate the world questioning every single thing we think we know, but for the sake of understanding others’ beliefs, it is important to remember that knowledge does not lie in some objective, factual place. Assumptions are inherently part of the system—and they can lead us astray.
Newbigin goes on to describe the place of knowledge in society, explaining that “every society depends for its coherence upon a set of what Peter Berger calls ‘plausibility structures,’ patterns of belief and practice accepted within a given society, which determine which beliefs are plausible to its members and which are not. These plausibility structures are of course different at different times and places.” Because we live in close society with other people, we generally agree on the big assumptions behind our shared knowledge. With a plausibility structure, we are able to communicate and create new knowledge starting from a place we all agree on, rather than building up from base assumptions every time. Because we operate on a daily basis within our society’s plausibility structure, “It is obvious that for most of our time we take for granted the assumptions which the society of which we are a part takes for granted” (Newbigin). The concept of plausibility structures helps place our knowledge and belief in a more relative context than we are used to, allowing us to recognize that even in our most firm beliefs, assumptions and things we cannot know for certain lie underneath.
Plausibility structures demonstrate that our entire worldview is enormously dependent on the society around us. Our language, our ability to learn and reason, and countless other factors are defined by our surroundings, outside of our control, and shape our knowledge. Imagine now, within a society’s dominant plausibility structure, each person has their own unique upbringing and set of experiences that shape their core assumptions and how they learn new things. These concepts can give us more humility as we relate to people we disagree with, helping us understand that all of us rely on assumptions largely formed by our surroundings, which can differ widely between people.
Web of Beliefs: How much do our beliefs depend on each other?
Another key part that can help our understanding of how a person forms their worldview involves a concept called the “web of beliefs.” This is well exemplified in American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine’s text The Web of Belief, which outlines his philosophy on belief and how beliefs change. The web of belief is exactly as it sounds, an interconnected web of all our different beliefs, meant to demonstrate that all of our beliefs are tied up with one another. This means that when we learn new information or form a new belief, it must be compared and assessed in relation to our current web. In the second chapter “Belief and Change of Belief,” Quine gives a short example explaining why “often in assessing beliefs we do best to assess several in combination”: upon learning new information and gaining a belief that contradicts with current beliefs in our web, we must take all these beliefs together and decide which ones to keep, and which to drop. Julia Galef in her recent book The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t makes a similar claim, explaining that “our beliefs are interdependent—changing one requires changing the others.” With these concepts, it becomes apparent that belief is not so simple, and it is not always clear cut what to do with new information.
Some consequences of this web of belief are succinctly described in Alexander Klein’s article “In Defense of Wishful Thinking: James, Quine, Emotions, and the Web of Belief.” He explains that the web of belief suggests a kind of “confirmation holism,” meaning that “the confirmation or refutation of any belief depends in some way on the web in which it is embedded.” Upon learning some new fact that contradicts with current belief, “we must choose how to redistribute truth values in our existing web.” Clearly, there is an element of subjectivity, and our beliefs are not updated according to objective fact. New information that a person learns must interact with their existing web.
Specifically, there is a tendency towards conservatism in the way a person’s web of beliefs is updated. Klein draws from Quine’s writing and quotes his statement that when we are faced with new information that forces us to update our beliefs, “our choice is guided largely by the tendency to dislodge as little of previous doctrine as we can compatibly with the ideal of unity and simplicity.” It makes sense that we aim to preserve our worldview as much as possible when faced with contradictory information. When we go about our daily lives and make decisions, we rely on the relative confidence that we are correct in most of our beliefs, and it is difficult to be faced with the prospect of being wrong. The web of belief is not easily shaken.
The way we shape new beliefs is further affected by a phenomenon called confirmation bias. Rob Brotherton, in his book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, describes confirmation bias succinctly: it happens when “the conclusion comes first, then our brain seeks out and shapes the evidence to fit what it already believes.” Confirmation bias significantly affects the way we learn new things and intake new information, and all of us are susceptible to it, regardless of how intelligent and unbiased we think we are. Brotherton states that “studies have found no relationship between intelligence and susceptibility to confirmation bias.” Not only does new information only shape belief through interaction with a person’s existing web of belief, but we are all also plagued by confirmation bias, which causes the information we seek and find to tend towards matching our current worldview.
Our beliefs depend on one another significantly. They are tangled in a web, and the existing web that determines a person’s entire worldview at any given moment has significant influence on the way they move forward and construct new beliefs. Particularly, the interdependence in this web and the presence of confirmation bias makes it difficult to change existing beliefs, and any change must come slowly—the whole web cannot be dismantled at once.
Group Dynamics: How much do our beliefs depend on other people?
Finally, we can explore how the other people we are surrounded by influence our beliefs. Humans are social animals, and group dynamics provide another insight into the way belief works. Extensive research has been done on the way people divide into social groups and how it affects our treatment of those in our own groups versus those outside. In The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization, social psychologist Peter Coleman explains that people “tend to favor our in-groups (to increase our self-esteem),” and also tend to “disfavor and discriminate against out-groups.” We treat others according to the group identities we share or do not share, often unconsciously.
In fact, groups can have even more power over us than in our understanding and treatment of others; they influence what we believe to be true. Galef states, “All social groups have some beliefs and values that members are implicitly expected to share.” The nature of a group, which places people into some shared category, implies the presence of some preexisting similarities or shared values between people. The classification of people into a shared category then serves to reinforce the qualities that bring them together. Beliefs are often, if not always, part of this. Galef then explains that dissent can “alienate you from the other members,” and since humans are so social by nature, it is difficult to carry a belief that goes against one’s group. Especially knowing that social groups are core to people’s lives, it makes sense that people generally believe what their group believes. We often rely on our groups too much to risk dissent.
This becomes even more complicated when we remember that there is much more information in the world than one person could ever learn on their own. Galef finds that “deferring to the consensus is often a wise heuristic, since you can’t investigate everything for yourself, and other people know things you don’t.” We are part of groups because we share certain qualities with them, so it is natural to follow their beliefs, as well, especially when it is impossible to build up our own knowledge entirely by ourselves. We need something to go off of when building a larger picture of the world, and our social groups are a sensible place to turn to.
It is important to note that these group dynamics affect us largely unconsciously. As is the case with our society’s plausibility structures, we are raised in particular groups and form beliefs over time, accordingly, and we rarely question these beliefs. Often, we don’t need to. We trust our groups, so we trust their beliefs, and they become ingrained as parts of the web of belief, embedded in our understanding of the world and difficult to change.
Conclusion
These three questions explore some of the factors that influence belief—our society and culture, our current web of beliefs, and the groups of people that we are a part of—and there are many more beyond this. Belief is complex. New information may prompt a person to form a new belief, but the new belief will depend on far more than just that information.
This does not change the fact that sometimes people believe things that are incorrect or harmful to other people. Encountering and arguing with others like this can, understandably, be difficult and frustrating. However, diving deeper into belief shows that there is so much behind each person’s worldview. These factors demonstrate how different people can believe extremely different things, even in the same reality. I hope that understanding more about the way people form their sets of beliefs—and realizing how much is unconscious or even outside of our control—can help provide a greater sense of patience and toleration towards those with radically different beliefs from our own, even when we are frustrated with them.
Resources
Brotherton, Rob. Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.
Coleman, Peter T. The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization. Columbia University Press, 2021.
Galef, Julia. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t. Portfolio Penguin, 2021.
Klein, Alexander. “In Defense of Wishful Thinking.” Pragmatism and the European Traditions, ed. Maria Baghramian and Sarin Marchetti, 2017, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315106236-11, pp. 228–250.
Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. W.B. Eerdmans, 1989.
Quine, Willard Van Orman. The Web of Belief. McGraw-Hill Education, 1978.