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Socially Adaptive Belief

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Abstract

I outline and defend the hypothesis that human belief formation is sensitive to social rewards and punishments, such that beliefs are sometimes formed based on unconscious expectations of their likely effects on other agents - agents who frequently reward us when we hold ungrounded beliefs and punish us when we hold reasonable ones. After clarifying this phenomenon and distinguishing it from other sources of bias in the psychological literature, I argue that the hypothesis is plausible on theoretical grounds: in a species with substantial social scrutiny of beliefs, forming beliefs in a way that is sensitive to their likely effects on other agents leads to practical success. I then show how the hypothesis accommodates and unifies a range of psychological phenomena, including confabulation and rationalisation, positive illusions, and identity protective cognition.
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Forthcoming in
Mind and Language
. Do not cite from this version.
Socially Adaptive Belief
Daniel Williams
Research Fellow, Corpus Christi, University of Cambridge
Abstract. I outline and defend the hypothesis that human belief formation is sensitive to
social rewards and punishments, such that beliefs are sometimes formed based on
unconscious expectations of their likely effects on other agentsagents who frequently
reward us when we hold ungrounded beliefs and punish us when we hold reasonable
ones. After clarifying this phenomenon and distinguishing it from other sources of bias in
the psychological literature, I argue that the hypothesis is plausible on theoretical
grounds: in a species with substantial social scrutiny of beliefs, forming beliefs in a way
that is sensitive to their likely effects on other agents leads to practical success. I then
show how the hypothesis accommodates and unifies a range of psychological phenomena,
including confabulation and rationalisation, positive illusions, and identity protective
cognition.
1. Introduction
Many animals navigate their environments with the use of internal representations. For
such animals, it is plausible to think that the utility of these internal representations is
dependent on their accuracy. For rats making their way back to their nests, it pays to
exploit cognitive maps that accurately represent the spatial layout of their environments.
For chimpanzees living complex social lives, it pays to accurately represent the relative
positions of other chimpanzees in the local dominance hierarchy. And for humans
choosing where to go on holiday, it pays to command a whole body of accurate
information: about the relative prices and climates of different destinations, the travel
time, which period in the year different destinations are busiest, and so on.
From this perspective, human beliefs fall into place as a highly complex species of
a broader genus: internal representations whose job is to provide accurate information
that an agent can exploit in guiding his or her inferences and actions (Fodor 1975;
Millikan 1984; Papineau 1984). In a popular metaphor, beliefs thus function as “maps by
which we steer” (Ramsey 1990). Like maps, their practical value is dependent on their
accuracy: if your map of London misrepresents its spatial layout, you will get lost; if your
beliefs are false, you will not be able to effectively satisfy your desires or achieve your
goals. Given this, it is natural to concludeand many psychologists and philosophers
have concluded—that “the proper function of cognition is… the fixation of true beliefs”
(Fodor 2001, p.68; see also Millikan 1984).
In this paper I argue that this perspective on beliefs and belief formation neglects
an important feature of human social life: in our species, our beliefs are objects of intense
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social scrutiny. Because other agents have reliable access to what we believe and
frequently reward us when we hold ungrounded beliefs and punish us when we hold
reasonable ones, this creates powerful incentives for otherwise rational individuals to
form beliefs in ways that are sensitive to such social rewards and punishments. I contend
that we frequently capitulate to such incentives, such that the way in which we form
beliefs is highly sensitive to the actual or anticipated effects of candidate beliefs on other
agents. Given this, many of our systematic departures from epistemic rationality are
driven not by
irrationality
or the use of cost-effective heuristics but rather by well-
calibrated rational self-interest: when the demands of truth conflict with social
expedience, it can be practically advantageous to jettison the former in favour of the
latter.
Importantly, the hypothesis that belief formation is sensitive to social rewards and
punishments is not original. In fact, variations on it appear in a multitude of disparate
theoretical contexts and projects, many of which I will touch on below.
1
Nevertheless, to
the best of my knowledge the hypothesis has never been clearly explicated or explored in
the manner that I will do here. Further, many of its manifestations in the scientific
literature either focus on narrow exemplifications of the more general phenomenon or
else burden the hypothesis with additional commitments that are more controversial and
less plausible. For these reasons, perhaps, it has been largely ignored throughout much of
contemporary philosophy, despite its many important philosophical implications.
2
My
central aim in this paper is to rectify this state of affairs. The hypothesis that human belief
formation is sensitive to social rewards and punishments warrants much greater attention
in philosophy than it currently enjoys.
I structure the paper as follows. In Section 2 I relate the phenomenon of socially
adaptive belief formation to other sources of epistemic irrationality identified in the
psychological and philosophical literature, and I argue that it consists of a highly
neglected example of motivated cognition. In Section 3 I argue that the hypothesis is
plausible on theoretical grounds: in a species with substantial social scrutiny of beliefs,
forming beliefs in a way that is sensitive to their effects on other agents leads to practical
success. I also clarify the hypothesis and address several likely confusions and objections.
In Section 4 I identify plausible manifestations of socially adaptive belief formation,
focusing especially on confabulation and rationalisation (S4.1), positive illusions (S4.2),
and identity protective cognition (S4.3). I conclude in Section 5 by identifying important
areas for future research.
2. Sources of Epistemic Rationality
1
This includes Trivers’ hypothesis that self-deception is socially strategic (Trivers 2000; Pinker 2005), the hypothesis
that beliefs function as “signals” or “displays” (Funkhouser 2017; Sterelny 2015; Simler and Hanson 2017), the
hypothesis that reasoning evolved to facilitate social functions of persuasion and reputation management (Haidt 2013;
Mercier and Sperber 2011; 2017), and research in social science on the relationship between beliefs and group identity
(especially Kahan 2013; 2017a). I have been especially influenced by Kurzban (2012), Simler and Hanson (2017), and
Trivers (2011).
2
Recent counterexamples to this claim include Sterelny’s (2015) work on beliefs as “displays” and Funkhouser’s (2017)
hypothesis that beliefs function as signals (see Section 3.1) (see also Williams 2018).
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When it comes to rational agency, there is a traditional distinction between epistemic and
pragmatic criteria for success (Harman 2004). As Bortolotti (2015, p.7) puts it, “The
rational agent is either the one
who gets things right
(e.g., the one with true beliefs), or
the one
for whom things go well
(e.g., the one with beliefs that are conducive to
happiness or flourishing).” Nevertheless, it is both intuitive and widely held that these
two forms of rationality are closely connected, such that an agent’s practical success is
dependent on epistemic rationality. One form of this argument, for example, stresses the
dependence of
instrumental rationality
on epistemic rationality: because an individual
will be better able to satisfy her desires if her beliefs are true than if they are false, it is
instrumentally rational to form and evaluate beliefs in a way that is most likely to lead to
true beliefs (Cowie 2014). A similar argument focuses on
evolutionary success
and “the
prevailing assumption… that beliefs that maximize the survival of the believer will be
those that best approximate reality” (McKay and Dennett 2009, p.493). Because epistemic
rationality describes the norms conducive to forming true beliefs, many cognitive
scientists therefore assume that a useful starting point for modelling human cognition is
that it conforms to norms of logic (Fodor 1975) or probability theory (Anderson 1990).
Notoriously, these perspectives on the relationship between practical success and
epistemic rationality generate a puzzle. Recent decades of psychological research have
generated an enormous body of experimental results documenting systematic deviations
from epistemic rationality in human cognition (Kahneman 2011; Mercier and Sperber
2011). As Bortolotti (2015, p.67) puts it, “Psychologists have repeatedly and convincingly
argued that people make basic mistakes in deductive and inductive reasoning and violate
basic rules of statistics, probability theory and decision theory.” Given the foregoing
perspective, these and other systematic deviations from epistemic rationality can seem
strange (Mercier and Sperber 2011; Trivers 2011). Why would we frequently thwart our
practical success by reasoning in irrational ways? And why would evolution have given
rise to a systematically irrational organism?
My aim in this paper is to address a part of this puzzle. Specifically, I will argue
that distinctive characteristics of human social life routinely put practical success into
direct conflict with epistemic rationality. This is by no means the only source of
epistemic irrationality in our species, however. Given this, it will be useful to briefly
relate the phenomenon of socially adaptive belief formation that I intend to describe in
later sections to other more well-known explanations of biased belief formation. As will
be clear, these explanations are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive, but they have
been the focus of the most influential research on epistemic irrationality in the
psychological and philosophical literature. Although it is something of a simplification,
these explanations can be divided into those that appeal to
constraints
of various kinds
and those that appeal to
motivational influences
on belief formation.
2.1. Constraints
The most influential explanation of epistemic irrationality in the psychological literature
points to constraints on
time, resources,
and
computational power
in human cognition
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(Gigerenzer and Selten 2002; Kahneman 2003). As it is often put, our rationality is not
absolute but
bounded
; we
satisfice
rather than optimise (Simon 1956). Such practical
constraints on cognition entail that we must often rely on “fast and frugal” heuristics and
approximations that sacrifice reliability across all contexts for reliability across most
important contexts at a reduced processing cost (Gigerenzer and Selten 2002).
A related but distinct explanation of epistemic irrationality points to constraints
on the evolutionary process. Due to phenomena such as evolutionary inertia and the
problem of local maxima in optimization procedures such as natural selection, for
example, evolution does not reliably give rise to optimal systems, even once one factors in
resource limitations. Just as the injury-prone human spinal column is arguably not the
optimal solution for supporting the weight of a biped but rather a “kluge” arrived at via
tinkering with previous designs, many aspects of human cognition might be suboptimal
for similar reasons (Marcus 2009). Relatedly, evolution lacks foresight. Evolved systems
adapted to one environment can become suboptimal when environments rapidly change.
For example, proponents of evolutionary psychology have argued that the human
susceptibility to the “gambler’s fallacy,” in which individuals treat independent trials of a
random process as dependent, reflects the fact that truly random processes would have
been absent in our ancestral environment (Pinker 1999).
Finally, some constraints are intrinsic to certain tasks
(Stich 1990). For example,
there are some tasks in which the only way to reliably reduce one kind of error is to be
biased towards another kind of error. If these errors are associated with different costs,
this can lead to outcomes in which biased systems are more adaptive than unbiased ones.
To take the most famous example, false positives and false negatives in the task of
predator detection both constitute errors, but “the cost of getting killed even once is
enormously higher than the cost of responding to a hundred false alarms” (Nesse and
Williams 1995, p.213). Under such conditions, evolution can therefore favour systems
biased towards the less costly error over unbiased systems if the former systems are better
at avoiding the costlier error.
2.2. Motivational Influences
A second major source of epistemic irrationality involves
motivational influences
on
belief formation (Kunda 1990; Sharot and Garrett 2016). Such motivational influences
arise when individuals sample or process information to arrive at conclusions that they
want
to arrive at for reasons independent of their truth, and they are encapsulated in
expressions of contemporary folk psychology such as “wishful thinking,” “denial,”
“burying your head in the sand,” and “drinking your own Kool-Aid.”
Motivational influences on belief formation are standardly understood as forms of
motivated cognition
in contemporary psychology (Kunda 1990) and in terms of
belief-
based utility
in the social sciences (Loewenstein and Molnar 2018). These two ideas relate
to one another directly, however. “Belief-based utility” refers to the fact that beliefs do
not merely inform our efforts to satisfy our preferences; they are important targets
of our
preferences. This therefore creates an incentive to sample and process information in
ways intended to satisfy these belief-based preferencesto arrive at beliefs that one
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wants to arrive at and avoid forming beliefs that one wants to avoid. When individuals
capitulate to this incentive, they engage in motivated cognition.
Why would individuals assign value to beliefs for reasons independent of their
truth? The simplest answer is that beliefs generate what I will call “non-epistemic
effects.” Epistemic effects can be thought of as the purely content-based effects that
enable beliefs to inform us concerning the state of the world. As McKay and Dennett
(2009, p.508) put it, however, “Belief states have complex effects
beyond simply
informing our deliberations
” (my emphasis). For example, beliefs can have a powerful
emotional impact, rendering us happy, proud, ashamed, depressed, and so on. When
individuals engage in motivated cognition, they consciously or unconsciously factor in
the relative value of these non-epistemic effects into the way in which they seek out and
process information.
In most accounts of motivated cognition, the relevant non-epistemic effects
associated with beliefs arise from the individual’s attitudes towards the states of affairs
represented by those beliefs, such that the motive to believe that
P
arises from the desire
that
P
. Importantly, however, the concepts of belief-based utility and motivated
cognition are more general than this, and apply whenever an individual is motivated to
form (or avoid forming) certain beliefs for reasons independent of their truth (or falsity)
(Bénabou and Tirole 2016). In this paper I therefore want to focus on a very different
form of motivated cognitionone that arises when the motivation to form or avoid
forming certain beliefs is driven by their actual or anticipated effects
on other agents
.
Specifically, I aim to defend the following hypothesis:
Socially Adaptive Belief (henceforth
SAB
):
Belief formation is sensitive to social
rewards and punishments.
It is worth briefly unpacking the various elements of this claim. By “social rewards and
punishments,” I mean social outcomes that we strive to bring about or avoid, where this
includes not just our conscious social goals but also unconscious social motives and the
social outcomes that psychological mechanisms are adapted to bring about. By
“sensitivity,” I mean that such social rewards and punishments causally influence the way
in which we sample and process information. An important question is how this causal
influence works (see Section 5). My principal aim in this paper is to substantiate the claim
that
socially adaptive belief formation occurs, however, not to explore
how
it occurs.
Finally, what do I mean by “belief” in this context? Of course, there is nothing like a
philosophical consensus concerning the nature of belief. For much of this paper, I will
therefore assume a maximally general account, consistent with how the term is
understood throughout much of contemporary psychology and philosophy: A belief is a
functional state of an organism that implements or embodies that organism’s endorsement
of a particular state of affairs as actual” (McKay and Dennett 2009, p.493). I return to this
issue in more depth in Section 5, however.
Insofar as motivated cognition exists in general, there seems to be no
in-principle
reason for denying the possibility of SAB. Nevertheless, is there any positive reason for
endorsing its truth? I will now advance two complementary lines of argument in its
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defence. First, in Section 3 I will argue that the hypothesis is plausible on theoretical
grounds: given distinctive characteristics of human social life, forming beliefs in a way
that is sensitive to social rewards and punishments leads to practical success. I will also
clarify the hypothesis and address several likely objections and confusions. In Section 4 I
will then focus on several plausible examples
of socially adaptive belief formation as
identified in the psychological and social sciences.
Section 3: Socially Adaptive Belief and Practical Success
In this section I argue that SAB is theoretically plausible on the following grounds: given
distinctive characteristics of human social life, forming beliefs in a way that is sensitive to
their effects on other agents leads to practical success. I will not commit to a specific
account of what “practical success” means in this context—for example, whether it should
be understood as desire-satisfaction, physical or psychological wellbeing, or evolutionary
successbecause I think that the argument will likely go through on any of these
interpretations.
There are three characteristics of human social life that undermine the connection
between true belief and practical success. First, other agents have reliable access to what
we believe. Although there are substantial disagreements concerning the mechanisms
that underlie this capacity of mindreading and its presence and sophistication in other
species, there is no doubt that we
can
mindread with a scope and flexibility far beyond
that of other animals. Of course, this capacity is not infallible. We are often wrong about
what others believe. Sometimes they consciously deceive us. At other times we are simply
mistaken. In general, however, we are highly successful at attributing beliefs to other
agents.
Second, other agents do not merely attribute beliefs to us. They
care
what we
believe, responding to us differently as a consequence of which beliefs they attribute to us
in ways that can have dramatic effects on our wellbeing. In general, our practical success
is highly dependent on the impression that we make on others, and the beliefs that we
hold are highly relevant to this impression, providing information to other individuals
about our traits, motivations, trustworthiness, loyalty, and ethical, social, and legal
obligations. The judgements that other agents form concerning such phenomena
influence their assessments of us in myriad ways.
Finally, not only do the social effects of our beliefs have dramatic consequences
for our wellbeing, but the kinds of beliefs that cause desirable social effects in the
complex social environments that we inhabit are different from the kinds of beliefs that
we would have a practical incentive to form in the absence of such social effects.
Specifically, ungrounded beliefs frequently elicit desirable responses from other agents
and grounded beliefs frequently elicit undesirable ones. The most obvious example of this
phenomenon involves cases in which individuals are ostracised or even murdered for
failure to believe in the religious and political myths of their surrounding communities,
but I will return in Section 4 to several other examples.
Given these considerations, I propose that the following claim is
prima facie
plausible: forming beliefs in a way that is sensitive to social rewards and punishments
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leads to practical success, such that individuals who form beliefs in a way that is sensitive
to their effects on other agents will on average achieve greater practical success than
individuals who do not. Of course, this claim clearly needs careful handling. It would
obviously not deliver practical success to wholly capitulate to social incentives when one
forms beliefs, for example. Whether factoring social incentives into the process of belief
formation is conducive to practical success is dependent on the relative costs and benefits
of doing so, which are themselves highly dependent on the social context and contents of
the relevant beliefs.
The
benefits
of socially adaptive belief formation increase in proportion to the
degree of social scrutiny of beliefs. That is, it is only under conditions in which other
agents care
what one believes that one has any incentive to factor them into the way in
which one seeks out and processes information. The
costs
of socially adaptive belief
formation can be understood in terms of the practical costs associated with deviating from
how one would form beliefs in the absence of their social effects. Insofar as other agents
reward epistemic irrationality, these costs in effect reduce to the potential costs associated
with holding false or ungrounded beliefs. Crucially, however, such costs are themselves
highly variable: although in most cases such beliefs frustrate one’s ability to satisfy one’s
desires, there are some cases in which they do not, either because one is unlikely to ever
act on the beliefs over and above asserting one’s commitment to them or because they
concern phenomena that one has little ability to influence. It has long been noted that
individuals are more likely to be swayed by motivated cognition and other biases in such
cases. As Bénabou and Tirole (2016, p.150) put it, “Beliefs for which the individual cost of
being wrong is small are more likely to be distorted by emotions, desires, and goals.”
Given the plausible assumption that there are conditions in which the practical
benefits from socially adaptive belief formation outweigh the costs, then, an individual
could improve her practical success by factoring social incentives into the way in which
she samples and processes information. This, I think, should at least make one take SAB
seriously as a hypothesis. Of course, it should
only
make one take it seriously. So far, I
have not offered any positive evidence for the existence of socially adaptive belief
formation. I take up this challenge in Section 4. First, however, it will be useful to clarify
the hypothesis and address several likely confusions and objections.
3.1. Clarifications and Objections
First, one might object that
pretending
to form socially adaptive beliefs would be more
practically advantageous than actually forming them.
3
Such deception, after all, seems to
deliver the best of both worlds: one reaps all the benefits of socially adaptive belief
without incurring any of the potential costs associated with genuinely forming and thus
potentially acting upon those beliefs. People already have the resources to intentionally
deceive and there is some evidence suggesting that people are in fact bad at detecting
deception (Bond and DePaulo 2006). Further, evidence from political science suggests
that individuals do sometimes express opinions that they do not in fact believe in order to
3
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.
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signal their allegiance to their political coalition (Schaffner and Luks 2018). Taking these
considerations together, one might worry that the theoretical case for SAB just outlined
comes to seem less compelling.
Of course, we do sometimes consciously deceive others about our beliefs.
Nevertheless, conscious deception itself brings its own costs. It typically requires
substantial energy and attention and often elicits strong punishment if it is discovered
(von Hippel and Trivers 2011), and these costs increase in proportion to the degree of
social scrutiny. This is true even if people are bad at detecting deception. The evidence
alleged to demonstrate this fact, however, is highly controversial. For example, most
studies designed to test the detection of deception involve socially atypical conditions,
such as little or no punishment for the deceiver, the inability of the deceived to question
the deceiver, and a lack of familiarity or personal history between the two agents (see
Von Hippel and Trivers 2011, p.3). Further, the relevant question is not the frequency
with which deception is detected, but the
expected costs
of detection, which can of
course be high even if the rate of detection is low. Finally, it is crucial to stress that there
are some cases in which conscious deception itself brings few benefits: if one has little
practical incentive to hold true beliefs anyway, one will also have little practical incentive
to consciously deceive. For these reasons, the claim that there are cases in which the
practical benefits of genuine socially adaptive belief formation outweigh the benefits of
conscious deception is plausible. Of course, its
truth
must ultimately be decided based on
its ability to illuminate concrete psychological phenomenaa task that I take up in
Section 4.
Second, one might worry that SAB is committed to the thesis of doxastic
voluntarism, the highly unpopular view that individuals are capable of forming beliefs at
will. It is not. Specifically, it does not assert that individuals go through a process of
conscious reasoning in forming beliefs of the form, “If I believe that P, this will have
desirable effect E on such and such people; therefore, I should believe that P.” As I have
argued, socially adaptive belief formation is best understood as a form of motivated
cognition, and motivated cognition is generally something that we are unconscious of
engaging in (Kunda 1990). Of course, one might reasonably ask what the psychological
mechanisms and processes underlying socially adaptive belief formation are. As with
motivated cognition in general, there are likely many routes by which social incentives
influence belief formation: for example, through the wilful avoidance of information, the
adjustment of time spent sampling and processing information, the adjustment of the
evidential standards required to accept or reject given propositions, the opportunistic
assignment of trust, and more (Kahan 2017a; Kunda 1990). Nevertheless, a thorough
investigation of this complex question lies beyond the scope of the current paper, and it
constitutes a core task for future work (see Section 5 below).
Finally, it is crucial to reiterate what I stressed in the Introduction: even if SAB is
often neglected in philosophy and psychology, variants and manifestations of the core
idea have surfaced numerous times in the psychology and social sciences. It is worth
briefly relating SAB to two of the most influential of these.
First, the proposal that SAB shares most in common with is Trivers’ (2000; 2006;
2011) famous hypothesis that the capacity for self-deception evolved to facilitate
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interpersonal deception. At the core of Trivers’ evolutionary hypothesis is the following
simple idea:
‘If…deceit is fundamental in animal communication, then there must be strong
selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-
deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray by
the subtle signs of self-knowledge the deception being practiced” (Trivers 2006,
p.xx).
According to Trivers (2011), self-deception is therefore
socially strategic
(“we deceive
ourselves the better to deceive others”), such that it evolved to facilitate interpersonal
deception by allowing people to avoid the cues to conscious deception that might reveal
deceptive intent” (von Hippel and Trivers 2011, p.1).
There is an obvious kinship between this proposal and SAB. Both seek to
illuminate various biases in human information processing by appeal to the way in which
the distinctive character of our social environments sometimes incentivises epistemic
irrationality. Nevertheless, I noted in the Introduction that variants of SAB in the
psychological literature often burden this core insight with additional assumptions or
claims that are more controversial and thus less plausible. This applies to Trivers’
hypothesis, which augments the basic thesis embodied in SAB with additional claims that
are strictly inessential to it.
First, Trivers advances the hypothesis as a specific theory of
self-deception
,
understood “as a variety of different processes that are directly comparable to those
involved in interpersonal deception” (von Hippel and Trivers 2011, p.2). As several
theorists have noted, however, many examples of self-deception do not seem to involve a
socially strategic element, and these might also be adaptive (McKay and Dennett 2009).
More importantly, it is not clear that all examples of socially adaptive belief are best
understood as forms of self-deception. In Section 4.4, for example, I will turn to the
phenomenon of identity protective cognition, which occurs when individuals seek out
and process information to arrive at beliefs that signal their membership of and loyalty to
their respective coalitions. The function of such (often ungrounded) beliefs is not to
enable agents to better persuade other agents of their
truth
, as might be the case when I
turn to confabulations and positive illusions below (Sections 4.2 and 4.3), and it is difficult
to understand them in terms of an intrapersonal analogy to interpersonal deception.
Further, SAB does not require any double bookkeeping among an agent’s beliefs, which is
often held to be necessary for genuine self-deception (see, e.g. Pinker 2011).
4
SAB is thus
less committal than Trivers’ hypothesis: it is a general claim about the tendencies
underlying belief formation, not a specific proposal about self-deception.
Second, Trivers sets his hypothesis in the theoretical context of evolutionary
psychology with a focus on specific genetic adaptations and “unconscious modules
favoured by selection” (Trivers 2000, p.116). Although SAB is consistent with this highly
controversial framework, SAB does not entail it and its specific evolutionary account.
4
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
Page 10 of 25
(The “adaptive” in SAB refers to the fact that such beliefs
adapt
the individual to her
social environment, not that the processes by which they are formed are genetic
adaptations
for that purpose
). Specifically, it might be that SAB emerges as a by-product
or consequence of other adaptations: for example, the intense social motivation exhibited
in our species and the general capacity for motivational influences on belief formation.
This seems to be Heyes’ (2018, pp.57-8) view (although she does not elaborate on it
beyond this brief passage):
“Increased social motivation also makes minds more malleable by the social
environment. Highly attentive to the actions of others, and craving social
approval,
developing humans are inclined to adopt those actions, beliefs, and ways
of thinking that yield social reward
s…” (my emphasis).
SAB is thus intended to strip away the core insight that the presence of other agents often
incentivizes epistemic irrationality without committing to the additionalmore
controversialclaims that Trivers supplements it with.
A second and related idea that SAB has a strong affinity with is the proposal that
beliefs sometimes function as social
signals
(Funkhouser 2017; Kurzban and Athena
Aktipis 2007; Simler and Hanson 2017). Although this claim is often made without
elaboration in the context of discussing certain beliefs (e.g. Kahan 2017a), Funkhouser
(2017) has recently advanced a more systematic defence of this idea (see also Simler and
Hanson 2017). Drawing on the resources of signalling theory, Funkhouser argues that
some beliefs are formed not in order to represent the world accurately but rather to signal
specific information about the believer to other agents
in order to manipulate their beliefs
and behaviour. That is, Funkhouser argues not just that our beliefs
do
sometimes convey
information to other agents; he argues that it is at least some of the time their
function
to
convey such informationa function that can take precedence over their primary
representational function, leading to various kinds of biased belief.
Again, there is an obvious kinship between SAB and this proposal, and the current
paper can be understood as building on and complementing Funkhouser’s work.
Nevertheless, it is important to draw a conceptual distinction between SAB and the
signalling hypothesis, even if they are consistent and potentially complementary. This is
for three reasons.
First, it is important to distinguish the loose way in which beliefs are often
described as signals from the technical sense in which Funkhouser intends this claim. In
the former case, there is little explanatory loss in replacing the claim that the belief
functions as a signal with the less controversial claim that forming the relevant belief
allows the agent to signal certain information to other agents
through her outward
behaviour
. This might seem like a trivial distinction, but at the core of Funkhouser’s
theoretical proposal is the claim that we can draw on the resources of signalling theory to
illuminate the nature of beliefs
themselves. To many, this will likely be objectionable:
signals are typically thought of as perceptible traits or behaviours, for example, whereas
beliefs are typically thought of as paradigmatically unobservable mental states (Glazer
2018). At the very least, Funkhouser’s proposal likely requires controversial assumptions
Page 11 of 25
about the nature of beliefs that the hypothesis outlined in this paper does not. The
signalling hypothesis is thus more controversial than SAB.
Second, even if some beliefs
are
fruitfully described as signals (see Section 4.3), it is
doubtful that the signalling hypothesis can account for all of the influences of social
incentives on belief formation. To take only the most obvious example, one way that
social rewards and punishments might influence cognition is by
deterring
agents from
forming certain beliefsfor example, by systematically avoiding certain kinds of
information or avoiding drawing conclusions that they would otherwise infer. Under
such conditions there is no belief to function as the relevant signal. Of course, one might
argue that the absence of a belief itself signals something importantfor example, the
relevant agent’s ignorance. But this returns us to the first issue: it is no longer
beliefs
that
are functioning as the signal, even though the influence of social motivation is still
central.
Finally, Funkhouser (2017) seems to treat the signalling hypothesis as in some
sense
sui generis
, identifying two core functions of belief, a representational function and
a signalling function. By contrast, I have argued that socially adaptive belief formation
should be understood in terms of the more general phenomenon of motivated cognition
in which an individual’s goals and emotions influence the process of belief formation.
Given this, it is consistent with my viewand indeed widely supported by the available
evidencethat there are other forms of motivated cognition that do not involve socially
adaptive belief formation but that also systematically bias belief formation away from
truth and that even sometimes promote practical success (see, e.g., Bortolotti 2015;
McKay and Dennett 2009; Section 4.2 below). SAB thus situates the social functions of
beliefs in the broader context of psychological phenomena already widely recognised in
psychology and philosophy.
For these reasons, I think that one should resist the identification of SAB with the
signalling hypothesis put forward by Funkhouser, even ifas will be clear belowthere
might be some cases in which socially adaptive beliefs are usefully understood as signals.
4. Three Examples of Socially Adaptive Belief Formation
My aim in this section is to identify several plausible examples of socially adaptive belief
formation. As will be clear, these examples are not intended to be exhaustive, and some
are more controversial than others. In conjunction with one another, however, they build
a compelling case for both the existence and importance of socially adaptive belief
formation in human psychology.
4.1. Confabulation and Rationalization
At least since Nietzsche and Freud, it has been common wisdom that we are often
mistaken about the causes of our attitudes and choices. This ignorance has been
extensively confirmed in recent decades of cognitive neuroscience and experimental
psychology. One of the most striking features of this research has been its demonstration
of the human proclivity to
confabulate
(Bortolotti 2017). Rather than admit our
Page 12 of 25
ignorance, we typically advance sincerebut often demonstrably mistaken
explanations of our attitudes and choices. In a common experimental set-up, for example,
subjects are asked to choose from a set of products (e.g. pantyhose, detergent, wine, etc.)
that are identical except for seemingly superficial differences (e.g. position, packaging,
and presentation). When asked to explain their choices, people largely neglect these
superficial differences and instead point to non-existent differences between the
products. For example, individuals choosing between identical pairs of pantyhose showed
a strong bias towards the pantyhose on the right side of the table. When asked to explain
their choice, however, they confabulated, pointing to (non-existent) subtle differences in
features such as their colour or knitting (Nisbett and Wilson 1977).
A defining feature of confabulations is that they are advanced without any
conscious intention to deceive. Further, it is widely assumed that agents believe the
content of their confabulations (Bortolotti 2017). This raises an obvious question:
why
do
people confabulate? According to the standard view in contemporary philosophy and
cognitive science, confabulations constitute attempts to accurately represent the causes of
the agent’s attitudes. These attempts are
unsuccessful
, however, because the agent lacks
relevant information (Strijbos and de Bruin 2015).
A very different answer argues that confabulations are in large part optimised for
social consumption
(Bergamaschi Ganapini 2019; Haidt 2013; Kurzban 2012; Mercier and
Sperber 2011; 2017; Simler and Hanson 2017). On this view, although agents harbour no
conscious
intention to deceive in cases of confabulation, a primary function of
confabulation is
social
, enabling agents to present their attitudes and choices as rational
and morally justifiable (Bergamaschi Ganapini 2019; Haidt 2013). As Mercier and Sperber
(2017, p.186) put it, “The reasons people attribute to themselves… are chosen less for
their accuracy than for their high… value as justifications.” The basic idea goes back
much further, however, with novelists, playwrights, and philosophers long noting that
humans often present themselves in self-serving and socially strategic ways.
There are several reasons for favouring the view that a primary function of
confabulation is public relations. First, the standard view that confabulation aims
exclusively at accurate representation confronts several problems. Most fundamentally, it
fails to explain why confabulation is so selective in the reasons that are identified as
causes of the agent’s attitudes, and why confabulators are often positively resistant to
acknowledging the actual causes of those attitudes when they are presented as
possibilities (Mercier and Sperber 2017). As Bergamaschi Ganapini (2019, p.6) puts it, the
standard view “overlooks that confabulations are generally presented as
good
(or proper)
grounds.” That is, confabulations typically consist of post hoc
rationalisations
designed to
show that the relevant attitude or choice was
justified
. In addition, the standard view
does not offer a satisfactory explanation of why individuals confidently confabulate rather
than admit their ignorance. Bortolotti (2017, p.237), for example, argues that “people do
not acknowledge their ignorance because
they do not know that they do not know
some
of the key factors contributing to their attitudes and choices.” This is merely to restate the
problem, however:
why
are individuals ignorant of their ignorance? This is puzzling if the
exclusive function of confabulation is accurate representation. It is not puzzling if
Page 13 of 25
confabulation is designed to cast the agent’s attitudes and choices in a socially attractive
light.
Second, even those who endorse the standard view acknowledge that
confabulation brings social benefits and that the failure to confabulateto simply
acknowledge one’s ignorance or identify the real causes of one’s attitudes (e.g. the
position of a pair of pantyhose)would often result in social costs. Bortolotti and Cox
(2009, p.961), for example, note that “giving a confident answer is socially rewarded and
advantageous as opposed to saying “I don’t know”.” Given this, confabulation is a prime
candidate
for socially adaptive belief: offering ill-grounded explanations of our attitudes
and choices that present them in a socially attractive light leads to practical success.
Finally, the idea that confabulation is socially strategic fits with an increasingly
influential body of research on the social functions of reasoning more generally. Mercier
and Sperber (2011; 2017), for example, have argued that the capacity to produce and
evaluate reasons evolved for social purposes of persuasion, justification, and reputation
management (see also Haidt 2013). On their view, confabulations are not atypical but
rather emerge from the more general fact that “
most
of the reasons we provide to explain
what we think and do are just after-the-fact rationalizations,” such that “the main role of
reasons is not to motivate or guide us in reaching conclusions but to explain and justify
after the fact the conclusions we have reached” (Mercier and Sperber 2017, p.112, my
emphasis). Like many others, they ground this approach to understanding reasoning in
the importance of reputation and impression management to the survival, reproductive
success, and wellbeing of members of our species (see Haidt 2013; Tetlock 2002). Such
considerations have led several theorists to argue that a good metaphor for understanding
the explanations that we provide for our attitudes and choices is a
press secretary
who
cares “a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality” (Haidt 2013,
p.86; see Dennett 1981, p.152; Kurzban and Athena Aktipis 2007; Kurzban 2012; Simler
and Hanson 2017).
For these reasons, the idea that confabulation is a form of socially adaptive belief is
plausible. Nevertheless, it also introduces another puzzle: if confabulation is a form of
impression management, why do agents genuinely
believe
such confabulations rather
than simply pretend to believe them? To understand this, recall from Section 3 that one
should expect to see socially adaptive belief under conditions of high social scrutiny of
beliefs and low personal risk associated with false beliefs. Confabulations seem to satisfy
both conditions. First, they are almost always advanced in interactive contexts in
response to a request for explanation from another agent (Bergamaschi Ganapini 2019).
Second, as per the comments from Mercier and Sperber above, the reasons identified in
confabulations are typically advanced to
explain
our attitudes and choices, not to
guide
them. As Abelson (1986, p.228) remarks, “We are very good at finding reasons for what
we do, but not so good at doing what we have reasons for.” The very fact that
confabulations identify reasons for our attitudes and choices that did not
in fact guide
them thus explains why their epistemic irrationality is less costly.
Of course, none of these considerations is intended to be decisive. The nature of
confabulation and rationalization remain topics of both scientific and philosophical
controversy, and much remains to be understood. Nevertheless, the idea that
Page 14 of 25
confabulation is a form of socially adaptive belief is increasingly influential in philosophy
and the psychological sciences, and there are powerful considerations in its favour.
4.2. Positive Illusions
A second area where socially adaptive belief formation plausibly occurs is the domain of
positive illusions
(see Kurzban and Athena Aktipis 2007; Kurzban 2012; von Hippel and
Trivers 2011). Positive illusions include excessively positive self-appraisals and overly
optimistic beliefs about one’s future and ability to control the environment, and they are
ubiquitous in the general population in Western countries (Taylor and Brown 1988). A
classic example of positive illusions, for example, is the
better-than-average effect
, the
fact that the majority of Westerners believe themselves to be better than average with
respect to most socially desirable traits (Alicke 1985). Indeed, most Westerners believe
themselves to be less prone to such self-serving and self-aggrandizing biases than the
average individual (Friedrich 1996).
Evidence suggests that positive illusions are not just ubiquitous but also
beneficial
,
correlating with greater psychological wellbeing, physical health, and perhaps even
reproductive success, leading McKay and Dennett (2009) to classify them as “adaptive
misbeliefs” (see also Taylor and Brown 1988). In the psychological and philosophical
literature, the standard explanation of both the
cause
and
benefits
of positive illusions
focuses mostly or even exclusively on the individual. For example, it is widely held that
the function of positive illusions is to protect the “self,” the “self-concept,” the “self-
image”, and/or the agent’s self-esteem (Taylor and Brown 1988; see Kurzban 2012 for a
review). A different (and perhaps complementarysee below) explanation of positive
illusions, however, contends that they serve
social functions
that positive illusions
constitute a form of impression management by which we manipulate the beliefs of other
agents.
The logic underlying a conception of positive illusions as socially adaptive beliefs
is straightforward. First, it is strongly in our interests to persuade other people that we
possess socially desirable traits, that we have a rosy future, and that we have greater
control over the environment than we in fact do, especially for positive outcomes.
Second, we are typically better able to persuade other agents of propositions that we
ourselves believe. This creates a powerful practical incentive to genuinely
form
such self-
serving and self-aggrandizing beliefs. This idea is at the core of Trivers’ famous
evolutionary account of self-deception outlined above. As Kurzban and Athena Aktipis
(2007, p.137) summarise the argument in the context of positive illusions,
“Positive illusions… derive from selection pressures associated with persuasion. If
others can be made to believe that one is healthy, in control, and has a bright
future, then one gains in value as a potential mate, exchange partner, and ally
because of one’s ability to generate positive reciprocal benefits in the future.”
As noted above, this social perspective on positive illusions is controversial, with the
dominant explanation of positive illusions largely ignoring their effects on other people.
Page 15 of 25
Indeed, when Taylor and Brown (1988) consider the possibility that the function of
positive illusions is “public posturing” or “self-presentation” in their classic article on the
topic, they reject this explanation on the grounds that individuals genuinely believe
positive illusions. Given this, theyand many othersdo not even consider the
possibility that positive illusions are both genuinely believed
and
socially strategic. That
is, they do not consider the possibility of SAB. Again, however, there are several
considerations that weigh in favour of an interpretation of positive illusions as socially
adaptive beliefs.
First, the dominant explanation of positive illusions is difficult to understand.
Holding the social effects of beliefs constant, it is difficult to see how false beliefs would
be more useful or adaptive for an individual than true beliefs (Kurzban 2012). Consider
the dominant explanation of why it is useful to hold false beliefs about one’s ability to
control the environment, for example (see Bandura 1989, p. 1177). According to this
explanation, such illusions of control are useful because they motivate one to undertake
risky actions that one would not take if one’s beliefs were accurate. This is puzzling,
however. In the absence of the social effects of one’s beliefs, an individual who acts on
accurate information would seem to be at an advantage relative to an individual who acts
on inaccurate information. Indeed, there is extensive experimental evidence confirming
that—holding the social effects of one’s beliefs constant—overconfidence in fact hinders
one’s ability to achieve one’s goals (Baumeister et al. 1993; Fenton-O’Creevy et al. 2003;
see Kurzban 2012, pp.113-5).
Second, there are characteristics of positive illusions that seem to support an
interpretation in terms of SAB. Most obviously, the better-than-average effect concerns
“almost any dimension that is both subjective and
socially desirable
” (McKay and Dennett
2009, p.505, my emphasis). Because of this, the content of positive illusions appears to
change according to what is socially desirable (Trivers 2011, p.17; see Endo et al. 2000).
5
Further, people typically only hold positive illusions that they consider
defensible
, such
that “self-presentation is… the result of a trade-off between favorability and plausibility”
(Baumeister 1999; p.8), which is difficult to understand if their function is merely the
protection of one’s self-image or self-esteem (Kurzban 2012).
Finally, it is important to note that the two explanations are not mutually
exclusive: it could be that individuals reap both personal and social benefits from positive
illusions. Indeed, if positive illusions are not in fact personally harmful, this could help to
explain
how
social incentives come to play a role. As I noted in Section 3, socially
adaptive belief is likely to be most pronounced under conditions in which the personal
risks associated with false beliefs are minimal. Insofar as positive illusions have personal
benefits independent
of their effects on other agents, this might provide an explanation of
how
they can end up being recruited for impression management as well.
5
Endo et al. (2000) report findings that in Japan, positive illusions involving self-enhancement that are pervasive in
Western countries vanish; instead, individuals typically show biases towards both self-effacement and unrealistically
positive views of their relationships, which are plausibly driven by cultural differences in the valuation of humility and
interdependence (Trivers 2011, p.17).
Page 16 of 25
Once again, none of this is intended to be decisive. The causes of positive illusions
and the causes of their various benefits are still dimly understood, especially given that an
interpretation in terms of SAB is rarely even considered in the psychological and
philosophical literature. As I have sought to show, however, there are plausible reasons
both theoretical and evidentialfor thinking that positive illusions serve social functions,
and this view has been influential in the cognitive sciences.
4.3. Identity Protective Cognition
The final example of socially adaptive belief formation that I will consider is identity
protective cognition (henceforth IPC), the tendency of individuals to sample and process
information in ways designed to protect their status as members of desirable groups or
subcultures (Kahan 2013; 2017a). IPC arises whenever certain beliefs become strongly
associated with coalitions that individuals want to belong to. In many political and
religious coalitions, for example, holding certain beliefs is effectively part of the
membership criteria, such that dissent from those beliefs leads to various kinds of
exclusion, ostracism, or evenin certain parts of the world, at least, and throughout
much of human historymurder. When such beliefs are not those best licensed by the
evidence, an individual therefore has a practical incentive to seek out and process
information not to arrive at the truth but rather to protect her group membership. As
Kahan (2017b, p.6) puts it,
“When individuals apprehend—largely unconsciouslythat holding one or
another position is critical to conveying who they are and whose side they are on,
they engage information in a manner geared to generating identity-consistent
rather than factually accurate beliefs.”
A large body of recent work on IPC focuses on its role in how members of the general
public form beliefs concerning politically contested matters of societal risk, such as those
associated with climate change, GMOs, fracking, nuclear waste disposal, and gun control
measures. In this context, the explanandum is why “members of the public disagree—
sharply and persistently—about facts on which expert scientists largely agree?” (Kahan et
al. 2010, p.147). An intuitive and widespread explanation of such divergence between
public opinion and scientific consensus points to factors such as ignorance, low numeracy,
a lack of scientific literacy, and the exploitation of unreliable cognitive heuristics when
assessing risk. As Dan Kahan (2013; 2017a; Kahan et al. 2010) and colleagues have pointed
out, however, a large body of data and experimental results are inconsistent with such
explanations. Specifically, those who diverge from expert consensus appear to be no less
informed, scientifically literate, or numerate than those who align with it.
6
In fact,
polarization on such issues is greatest among those who score highest on tests of scientific
literacy, numeracy, and “cognitive reflection” (an individual’s ability to override intuitive
6
Although see Ranney and Clark (2016), who show that climate-specific mechanistic and statistical knowledge does
seem to increase acceptance of the existence of climate change across the political spectrum, at least temporarily. I
thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
Page 17 of 25
judgements and engage in careful deliberative reasoning) (Kahan 2017a). Instead, the only
factor that significantly correlates with the positions that people take on these issues is
their political identity (Kahan 2013; 2017a).
Given this data, Kahan and others speculate that what drives people’s beliefs in
this area is not a dispassionate concern for the truth but rather the desire to protect their
respective group identities. Because issues such as climate change and nuclear waste
disposal have become highly politicised, the positions that one takes on them become
“badges of social membership” (Haidt and Kesebir 2010, p.818):
“Sometimes… positions on a disputed societal risk become conspicuously
identified with membership in competing groups... In those circumstances,
individuals can be expected to attend to information in a manner that promotes
beliefs that signal their commitment to the position associated with their group”
(Kahan 2017a, p.1).
Researchers have demonstrated several mechanisms by which IPC occurs. An especially
important one involves the differential trust assigned to testimony based on its
congruency with one’s group’s position.
7
In one experiment, for example, subjects were
asked to assess whether highly credentialed scientists were experts on various issues such
as climate change, fracking, and gun control. Their judgements were highly dependent on
whether the relevant scientists endorsed the beliefs held within their own political
community (Kahan et al. 2010). In addition, IPC can also interfere with reasoning and
deliberation. In another experiment, Kahan and colleagues demonstrated that highly
numerate individuals capable of judging whether evidence from a controlled experiment
supports a given hypothesis effectively lose this ability if shown an experiment that
supports a hypothesis inconsistent with their respective group’s position on a given issue
(Kahan et al. 2013).
As per the discussion in Section 3 above, Kahan points out that engaging in IPC is
often perfectly (practically) rational: given that individuals have a negligible impact on
the phenomena that they form beliefs about in this area, they have little practical
incentive to believe what is true; given the high levels of social scrutiny of such beliefs,
they have a strong practical incentive to believe what signals their group membership. As
Kahan (2017b, p.1) puts it,
“Far from evincing irrationality, this pattern of reasoning [i.e. IPC] promotes the
interests of individual members of the public,
who have a bigger personal stake in
fitting in with important affinity groups than in forming correct perceptions of
scientific evidence
” (my emphasis).
Although Kahan’s research is on a very specific topic, the basic logic of IPC generalises to
any case in which beliefs that are not best licensed by the available evidence become
7
In a forthcoming paper, Helen De Cruz (forthcoming) also argues that there are social (in addition to epistemic)
demands when it comes to testimony.
Page 18 of 25
strongly associated with desirable coalitions of various kinds. Under such conditions, an
individual’s group attachments clash with the aim of truth and thereby undermine the
link between practical success and epistemic rationality. This clash between group
identity and epistemic rationality has long been recognised. Writing of his experiences in
the Spanish civil war, for example, Orwell (1968, p.252) famously noted that “everyone
believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without
ever bothering to examine the evidence.” This observation was experimentally vindicated
in the 1950s when one of the earliest studies on motivated cognition demonstrated that
students at Dartmouth and Princeton overwhelmingly reported more infractions by the
other side in a penalty-filled football match between their universities (Hastorf and
Cantril 1954).
Kahan’s research raises the question of how beliefs become strongly associated
with certain coalitions to begin with. There are likely many routes by which this occurs,
including deliberate efforts by those with vested interests in creating the association. One
interesting suggestion in this area, however, is that beliefs that function as badges of
group membership are inherently biased towards implausibility and absurdity precisely
because out-group members have no incentive to hold such beliefs, thereby ensuring that
they function more effectively to differentiate in-group members from outsiders (Tooby
2017; see also Simler and Hanson 2017, p.279).
The relationship between beliefs and loyalty identified by IPC plausibly extends
beyond the examples just described. In totalitarian regimes, for example, people are
harshly punished if evidence comes to light that they do not subscribe to the regimes’
myths, generating a powerful incentive to seek out and process information to jettison the
truth in favour of beliefs that signal their loyalty. As Hannah Arendt (1953, p.474)
remarked, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the
dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true
and false no longer exists.” Ordinary life is replete with more prosaic examples of this
conflict between loyalty and epistemic rationality. We often expect our friends and
family to take our side on factual disputes involving others, for example, even though our
side invariably constitutes a self-serving interpretation of those facts (Simler and Hanson
2017, p.75).
Importantly, IPC does not provide the only explanation of cases in which group
membership leads to ungrounded beliefs. In a recent paper, for example, Levy (2019)
argues that the greater trust we assign to in-group testimony is an adaptation for
acquiring
knowledge
under the plausible assumptions that in-group members evince
greater benevolence than out-group members and that benevolence is a useful cue for
filtering testimony. Given this, misinformation can arise whenever issues become
politicised (i.e. aligned with specific groups) without the influence of anything like
socially adaptive belief formation.
This purely epistemic explanation of the relationship between group identity and
ungrounded beliefs no doubt plays an important role in many cases. Nevertheless, there
are several phenomena that are difficult to reconcile with this hypothesis. Most
obviously, group identity interferes with information processing even in cases that do not
involve trust. As I noted above, for example, otherwise highly numerate individuals have
Page 19 of 25
been shown to lose the ability to understand the results of a controlled experiment when
it supports a hypothesis inconsistent with their group’s position (Kahan et al. 2013).
Similarly, Levy’s account also fails to explain why polarization on politically contested
issues is
greatest
among those who score highest on tests of scientific literacy, numeracy,
and “cognitive reflection.” If political identity is a cue that individuals rely on when they
have to resort to testimony, one would expect those most reliant on testimony to be most
reliant on such cues. In fact, the opposite is true (Lelkes et al. 2018). IPC explains this
phenomenon by appeal to the greater cognitive resources certain individuals have to
rationalize conclusions that they want to believe for reasons of group identity (Kahan
2017a). It is not clear how Levy’s account could explain it. Finally, and most importantly,
purely epistemic explanations fail to explain why individuals are so emotionally
invested
in the relevant beliefs, why they go to great lengths to advertise such beliefs to in-group
members, and more generally the emotional and motivational influences at play when it
comes to such politicised issues (see Kahan et al. 2013; Kahan 2017a; 2017b).
Focusing on the relationship between beliefs, loyalty, and group identity offers an
especially clear-cut example of socially adaptive belief. As these remarks should make
clear, however, this is a topic that warrants substantially more research in the future.
5. Conclusion
The core claim of this paper has been simple: the way in which we form beliefs is
sensitive to their effects on other agents. I have argued that this hypothesis is plausible on
theoretical grounds in light of distinctive characteristics of human social life, and I have
identified several putative examples of this phenomenon in a range of different areas.
These three examples are not supposed to be exhaustive. Collectively, however, they
illustrate important features of human cognition that theorists from a range of different
fields have sought to illuminate by appeal to the influence of social incentives on belief
formation. As I have noted, some of these examples are more controversial than others.
My aim in this paper has not been to conclusively vindicate SAB but to render it plausible
in the hope that this might spur future research on this phenomenon. To that end, I will
conclude by noting three important areas for future research.
First, it would be beneficial in future work to have a more formal taxonomy of the
various ways in which social motives influence belief formation. These motives are
heterogeneous: to be socially and sexually desirable, to build, maintain, and strengthen
relationships and alliances, to attain social dominance and prestige, and so on. It would be
useful to have a more systematic understanding of how this diverse array of complex
social goals guides the way in which we seek out and process information.
Second, I have not addressed in any detail the psychological mechanisms and
processes that underlie socially adaptive belief formation. A more rigorous treatment in
the future should rectify this. As I noted in Section 3.1, motivated cognition in general is
facilitated by a variety of different strategies and there is no reason to think that socially
adaptive belief formation would be different. Nevertheless, the treatment of this topic
here has been shallow. Remedying this defect is a crucial task for future work in both
philosophy and psychology.
Page 20 of 25
Finally, and most importantly, future research should focus on a more rigorous
examination of the evidence for and against SAB. Importantly, there are really two issues
here. First, although I have tried to explain why SAB offers a plausible explanation of the
phenomena outlined in Section 4, I have also noted that in most cases there are
competing explanations of such phenomena that make no reference to social incentives:
for example, the second-order ignorance widely thought to drive confabulation, the
purely personal hedonic and motivational benefits of positive illusions, and the
combination of in-group trust and unfortunate epistemic circumstances alleged to
underpin the relationship between group identity and ungrounded beliefs. Future work
should search for more effective ways of adjudicating such controversies. To take only
one example, SAB makes a straightforward prediction: manipulating people’s expectations
about the social consequences of candidate beliefs should influence the way in which
they seek out and process information.
8
Future experimental work should look for ways
to test this prediction.
Just as important, however, is a more theoretical question that I have largely
ignored throughout this paper: even granting that social incentives influence the way in
which we seek out and process information, why treat the cognitive attitudes that result
from such incentives as
beliefs
?
9
Many philosophers and psychologists have sought to
draw a distinction between different kinds of cognitive attitudes that are often subsumed
under the general term “belief.”
10
Although none of the distinctions such theorists have
drawn that I am aware of align straightforwardly with the difference between socially
adaptive beliefs and ordinary world-modelling beliefs that I have outlined here, one
might nevertheless worry that the functional properties of the former are sufficiently
different from the latter to warrant status as a different kind of cognitive attitude. To take
only the most obvious example, socially adaptive beliefs are typically much less
responsive to evidence than ordinary beliefs. If one individuates cognitive attitudes by
their functional properties, doesn’t this threaten the idea that they constitute the same
kind of attitude?
From my perspective, this line of argument is better thought of as a potential
clarification of SAB than a critique. After all, implicit in the theoretical argument of
Section 2 is that one should
expect
socially adaptive beliefs to function differently from
ordinary world-modelling beliefs. That is, insofar as their function is to elicit desirable
responses from other agents, one would expect their functional properties to be adapted
to this function. For example, one would expect agents to shield socially adaptive beliefs
from counter-evidence, to be emotionally invested in such beliefs, to advertise them to
others, to be reluctant to draw implications from such beliefs that are not themselves
socially adaptive, and to be reluctant to act on such beliefs outside of social contexts.
Indeed, I noted in Section 3 that beliefs that we are less likely to act on are the prime
candidates
for the influence of motivational influences such as social goals. If one
8
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
9
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.
10
Some influential distinctions include: Dennett (1978), who distinguishes beliefs from opinions; Bratman (1992), who
distinguishes beliefs from acceptances; Rey (1988), who distinguishes “central beliefs” from avowals; and Van Leeuwen
(2014, 2018), who distinguishes “factual beliefs” from religious credences.
Page 21 of 25
concludes from such functional differences that socially adaptive beliefs are not really
beliefs at all but rather a different kind of cognitive attitude merely
masquerading
as
beliefs, that would be an important theoretical clarification of SAB.
Nevertheless, it is a notoriously difficult philosophical question how to
functionally individuate beliefs (and psychological kinds more generally), and there are
equally persuasive considerations for treating socially adaptive cognitive attitudes as a
kind of belief. For example, they guide sincere verbal assertions, which is plausibly the
most important cue used by ordinary people for belief ascription (Rose et al. 2014), and
the functional differences just outlined are themselves differences of
degree
, not kind.
Agents
do
in fact act on the kinds of socially adaptive attitudes outlined in Section 4, they
do use them in reasoning, and they are not literally impervious
to counterevidence.
Further, the appeal to motivational influences is intended to
explain
the functional
differences between motivated beliefs and non-motivated beliefs without appealing to a
difference of kind in the relevant cognitive attitudes. A drug addict motivated to deny her
drug problem, for example, also harbours beliefs with fundamentally different functional
properties to ordinary beliefs (Pickard 2016). Rather than explaining such functional
differences by introducing a distinct cognitive attitude, it is plausibly more illuminating
to explain them in terms of the way in which a single kind of cognitive attitude adapts to
the influence of the agent’s motivations. It may be that something similar should be said
about socially adaptive beliefs.
These brief remarks barely scratch the surface of this complex issue. For a fully
satisfying understanding of the way in which the contents of our minds are shaped by the
structure of our social worlds, however, this is an issue that must be addressed in future
work.
References
Abelson, R. (1986). Beliefs Are Like Possessions.
Journal For The Theory Of Social
Behaviour
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