Why what we believe is often wrong

and some consequences

It’s natural to assume that we believe a thing because it happens to be true; but in reality we think that something is true because we happen to believe it; and we acquired our beliefs from parents, peers, teachers, preachers, and more, as we became acculturated.

We begin to be acculturated almost from birth, progressively into family, clan, tribe, religion, nation. We acquire many beliefs before reaching the maturity to think for ourselves and to form judgments on the basis of facts and logic as well as personal experience and individual study.

Western Civilization as a whole appears to have moved quite slowly and hesitantly towards that sort of maturity. The Renaissance and Scientific Revolution of the 15/16^th centuries and the “Enlightenment” of the 17^th century are often taken as evidence of such maturity, of basing beliefs on tangible evidence and logical reasoning instead of on the statements of religious or political authorities.

But any such “enlightenment describes, at best, to only a very small proportion of the world’s human population.

How beliefs are acquired through acculturation, and how beliefs thereby trump facts, is explained In convincing detail by Andy West in The Grip of Culture [1].

Once a belief has been acquired, it resists change.

Human psychology has evolved mechanisms that make it easy not to notice things that contradict established beliefs, so as to avoid “cognitive dissonance” [2].

Institutions resist admitting wrong belief lest they lose prestige, status, support [3].

Humans in groups feel obliged to be loyal to the group’s tenets, to not “rock the boat” or “blow the whistle” even if they privately no longer share the group’s communally expressed belief; “Groupthink” [4] prevails.

The bitter lesson is that disputes can rarely be settled by discussing — arguing over — what the facts are, because opposing sides interpret evidence with different biases. It is only in purely technical matters that indisputable facts may sometimes be available, and then only with rather simple systems like laboratory experiments in chemistry. Even in “science”, in complex matters — cosmology say, unproven or unprovable assumptions determine viewpoints; thus some astrophysicists continue to prefer the “steady-state” theory of the universe over the “Big Bang” theory, and evidence of a sort can be cited to support each of those views.

About social issues, or medical matters, or historical questions, it is rare, perhaps even never, that available evidence permits only a single interpretation of what “the facts” really are.

Much public discourse is therefore irrelevant, wrong-headed, beside the point. When, for example, Joe Scarborough and others on “Morning Joe” (MSNBC TV, 6 am weekdays) continually express incredulity that supporters of Donald Trump are so oblivious to “the facts” about his actions, behavior, or character, they are whistling in the wind, since those “facts” are not the reason why Trump gained supporters in the first place.

The force of acculturation has many consequences indeed.

Difficult to acknowledge is the possibility that some of one's own views might be wrong, not in keeping with the objective reality of the world; this is grounds for serious introspection, as well as good reason to practice humility over what one believes to be true.

More generally, the great resistance to any change of long-standing beliefs makes it understandable why cultural changes happen so slowly (if at all). Some obvious illustrations Include that enslaving human beings has become rather uncommon; that women are beginning to attain equal treatment to men in more places; so to with the lessening of discrimination against gay people, and against adherents to certain religions, and against members of particular human “races”.

This train of thought also supports the frequently made claims and speculations that changes in belief, or cultural changes, come about only under unusual circumstances or through the actions of unusual individuals. Thus it has been suggested that scientific discoveries often come from people moving into a new discipline, as with molecular biology which owes its existence to the work of chemists and physicists. “When good scientists step into a field from the outside, their views, not yet conditioned by the field’s standard thinking, can sometimes really shake things up. That was the case with this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, awarded to Australia’s Peter Doherty and Switzerland’s Rolf Zinkernagel for their insights into the inner mechanics of the immune system” [5].

Many discoveries by outsiders or mavericks are listed by Harman and Dietrich [6]; and evidence from psychology is adduced that being an outsider confers benefits in conceiving innovations [7]. Of course not all significant advances have been stimulated by outsiders [8]. Nevertheless, the influence of culture means that there are more benefits to abiding with the status quo than there are incentives to dissent, let alone rebel. As George Bernard Shaw put it, progress is stimulated by “unreasonable” people [9].

Strong evidence that outsider status increases the chance of starting or discovering something new and noteworthy comes from the data about  Jewish winners of Nobel prizes [10]. About 22% of the Nobel prizes up to 2023 were awarded to people of Jewish (or part-Jewish) ancestry, even though  Jews constitute only about 0.2% of the world's population. Some part of this 100-fold disproportionality must however be attributed to the happenchance that most Jews have lived in relatively developed parts of the world. Among Nobelists in the United States, 36% had some Jewish ancestry, with Jews constituting about 2% of the U.S. population. The latter disproportionality is  considerably smaller, yet still, at ~18-fold, demanding some explanation.

One popular suggestion is the cultural tradition of scholarly work and respect for it, so that parents encourage their children in that direction. The same sort of explanation seems to work for the disproportionate success of children of Chinese ancestry in, for example, the United States or Australia: the student population at the academically top public high school in Sydney (The Sydney Boys’ High School) is now largely of Asian-ancestry, and for the last couple of decades the majority of valedictorians there have been likewise.

Nevertheless, some part of the 20-100-fold disproportionality of Jews among winners of Nobel Prizes may be attributed plausibly to the fact that Jews have been outsiders, in a variety of places and for a couple of millennia or more.

The grip of culture is felt less by those excluded from it, so they are more free to try new things.

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[1]    The book’s full title is The Grip of Culture: The Social Psychology of Climate Change Catastrophism, but the belief in climate change is used primarily as an example of a cultural entity defined by a common belief. The point is that “The attitudes of national publics to climate change are largely unaffected by the scientific  arguments”.
The 2023 paperback is on sale at amazon.com, but the book is also offered at no charge as a pdf at https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2023/07/West-Catastrophe-Culture6by9-v28.pdf

[2]    Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, & Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World, University of Minnesota Press, 1956;
       Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford University Press, 1957

[3]    “How wrong theories can persist and do harm”; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/how-wrong-theories-can-persist-and

[4]    Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972; Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, 1982

[5]    T. Gura, “Unraveling immune-cell mysteries”, Science, 274 (1996): 345

[6]    O. Harman & M. R. Dietrich, Outsider scientists: routes to innovation in biology, University of Chicago Press, 2013

[7]    D. Baer, “Psychology says that outsiders are the most innovative people”, 20 January 2016 https://www.businessinsider.com/why-outsiders-are-the-most-innovative-people-2016-1

[8]    T. F. Gieryn & R. F. Hirsh, “Marginality and innovation in science”, Social Studies of Science,13 (1983):87-106

[9]    George Bernard Shaw, in REASON, pp. 281-2, in "Maxims for Revolutionists", Man and Superman, Penguin, 1946 (first published 1903).

[10]  “Jewish Nobel Prize Winners”; https://www.jinfo.org/Nobel_Prizes.html