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.
My comments: I would add to all this that if one is in the group of those not so easily influenced by other agents' punishments/rewards it is due to "excessive" weight to internal reputation (e.g., being uncomfortable with oneself if one bends to the consensus vision when one believes the data is not clear in support of the others' views or even is against the consensus).
---
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.
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 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.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment