Beliefs Part 1: What Is A belief

If you ask anyone, they all believe in something. Even someone who reports not believing in anything has just admitted to a belief. These strong and sometimes hidden subconscious beliefs hold immense power in people’s lives. Wars, crimes, love, stories, and innovative ideas have all stemmed from a belief in something.

In this 3 part series, we will look deeply into:

• What beliefs are and how they evolved with human evolution. (This current post)
• How can belief change, how there influenced and why is it so hard to change beliefs?
• Before finally wrapping up with a conclusion on how understanding beliefs benefits us, why challenging these beliefs are helpful, and understanding how beliefs impact us as individuals and socially as well as giving a few strategies for helping deal with your own beliefs as well as other peoples beliefs, hopefully inspiring some compassion and understanding for others.

There are three primary forms of belief we will be talking about over the series; let’s quickly cover them. These terms and concepts are one of Sigmund Freud’s, the father of modern psychology, considerable contributions to psychology:

[1]

The different types of beliefs are housed in different areas of the mind. As you can see in the image above a conscious belief sits in the conscious mind and so on.

• Conscious beliefs: These are the beliefs we have awareness of. We act out on them daily. E.g. I am someone who eats breakfast each day. I know this to be true and am aware of it, I can now go about my day knowing I am someone who will eat breakfast each day.
• Sub/Pre conscious beliefs: These are the beliefs that we are not currently aware of at this moment as they aren’t the focal point of attention. These are can be formed in early childhood or from traumatic events that we now have integrated into our self-identity. E.g. I like the approval and attention given to me when I do something nice for someone.
• Unconscious Beliefs: This is the part of the mind where the deeply repressed beliefs or fundamental concepts someone operates from, as well as parts of the body that control functions out of our control or awareness sit. These parts of the mind aren’t accessible to us directly. E.g. Maintaining our digestive system.

We also have belief systems which are able to be described as “…the stories we tell ourselves to define our sense of Reality. Every human being has a belief system that they utilize, and it is through this mechanism that we individually, “make sense” of the world around us. Perceived reality is constructed by means of systems of signs, being affected and being changed by means of Belief systems.” [2]

Another way to think of beliefs is with the metaphor of glasses. The glasses, representing our beliefs, are what we use to see the world clearly. We see the world through our beliefs. Without the glasses, navigating the world becomes blurred and or difficult to define. But when we reapply our beliefs (glasses), we suddenly find it easier to define and navigate reality, as the beliefs give us a frame work to operate around.

Understanding this helps to see that beliefs and belief systems are the thoughts, stories and ideas that a person holds about specific parts of them selves and the world in which they are inhabiting.

Here is an example of a few different beliefs:

• Believing that a god or gods created the world
• That plants are essential to human survival
• We believe that we sit at tables
• That it’s not polite to abuse people in any social setting
• Science can give us objective truths about the universe

All these statements can be and are, for many people, beliefs. It’s how they view the world and their concept of a given subject. Of course, we, as humans, hold different beliefs about everything we interact with in reality. But, no matter what the belief is (or even if the view is “true”) this belief or belief system will give a frame work for the person to then deal with reality, through the lens of that belief. This is where the saying limiting beliefs comes into play. Someone can limit themselves because they hold a belief that may not be objectively true and then their world view is different from reality, leading them to have a limited view of themselves or the world.

The statements above help us see that if we didn’t have beliefs about those topics, it would be much harder to know what to do when confronted with those situations. If we didn’t hold beliefs that help us deal with topics such as death or that I can get food from animals, we would struggle deeply to make decisions and act in conformity with reality.

We can see this when someone with different life experiences may act or say things differently. For instance, a child will climb all over the dinner table and throw the chairs, this is because the child hasn’t yet formed the belief that tables are for sitting at and that it’s not socially acceptable to use chairs as hats as they run around the room. So what may seem odd or their behaviours may not make sense, it can sometimes and most often be explained because of differing beliefs about a topic or how to act in a given situation. Here we find the main idea yet again that beliefs help us navigate a highly complex world.

Yuval Noah Harari, Author of ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’, as well as being an Israeli historian and a professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was asked by the Smithsonian Magazine: Is there a unique trait linking all human beings? Yuval’s Reply to this question was “All other animals use their communication system to describe reality. We use our communication system to create new realities. Of course not all fictions are shared by all humans, but at least one has become universal in our world, and this is money. Dollar bills have absolutely no value except in our collective imagination, but everybody believes in the dollar bill.” [3]

The fact that humans have evolved to have this unique ability is, to Yaval and many other anthropologists and psychologists, the reason for our considerable advancement in evolution and technology, which they argue largely stemmed from now being able to work in large groups towards common goals [7]. It has even been suspected that humans learning and creating beliefs lead to larger brain development [4] [5]. We now have the ability to unite and all act towards a goal, which is usually quite hard to achieve with out a common belief [6]. This belief can be as simple as, taking down a mammoth in a hunting party. If everyone in the team works towards this goal it can be achieved easier and with a higher success rate. However if everyone refuses to believe in completing the task and following the belief it becomes a lot harder to complete the goal at hand. This also translates into today with achieving work goals and projects effectively.

Having a group of humans who are united in a belief helps build bonding and trust in humans. It also helps having many minds working towards a goal and more people problem solving and coming up with new ideas, which in turn helps solve tasks more efficiently.

Beliefs are also the reason we fight over different ideas. One group of humans may disagree with others about topics. Complex and difficult topics such as Political ideas and religion are harder to make sense of and belief around these topics can have a deep impact on a persons life. It is also difficult to find solid objective truths in a lot of these areas, but there is also a lot of emotional factors that make up someones belief about such topics. This conflict can result in people uniting against other groups who hold different views, it is how wars, arguments, and many common disagreements break out. A group who shares a common belief and are willing to act in a way of seeing the goal be achieved is very strong. However large groups with different ideas that aren’t accepting and understand the differences of other, can lead large to scale conflicts. This is something we will discuss more about in part 2.

These beliefs can and do make us act in certain ways, here is a quick explanation of the formula of belief.

• There is a complex situation we need to navigate in reality.
• We then create a belief about this situation to give us a framework to act upon, “the only cake that should be sold is chocolate and anything else is wrong and needs to be punished” with this new belief I can now navigate the world and find disgust that other cakes are sold.
• Now I can violently rage against anyone selling cakes that aren’t chocolate, as my belief justifies my actions.
• The final part of this is I can continue acting on my beliefs to which ever end comes. Or I can have my belief challenged either by my own thought or by being challenged by another human with a different idea. This is usually where arguments and wars break out. If the persons belief is malleable and open to new ideas E.g. “other flavors of cakes can be sold in shops”, I now have a new belief and can stop being angry about other flavored cakes being sold in shops.

Understanding how beliefs work and why they have evolved in humans becomes clearer when you see them as foundational frameworks for humans to operate in the world by. We can see that beliefs as a whole play a role in helping us make sense of our Reality, mentally, and physically, as well as being the driving force that guide us towards action and influences our behaviors. Our next section will examine how changing a belief happens and what that means for the individual or group. With this new understanding it can help you be more open minded an maybe reshape your beliefs.

But for now, Stay humble, stay curious!

Research and reference links:

Image — Verywell / Joshua Seong, Updated on December 09, 2020 [1]

Usó-Doménech, J.L., Nescolarde-Selva, J. What are Belief Systems?. Found Sci 21, 147–152 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-015-9409-z -Published 14th Jan 2015 [2]

What Makes Humans Different? Fiction and Cooperation Historian Yuval Noah Harari previews his book on the past and future of Homo sapiens — Arik Gabbai Senior Editor February 2015 [3]

Processes of believing: Where do they come from? What are they good for?- Rüdiger J. Seitz, Raymond F. Paloutzian, and Hans-Ferdinand Angel [4]

Belief formation — A driving force for brain evolution — Rüdiger J. Seitz, Hans-Ferdinand Angel Volume 140, April 2020 [5]

Human evolution: Its influence on our behaviour and perception of facts — Paul Beeckman Prof. Emeritus, Vrije Universiteit Brussels [6]

Metacognitive Development — Deanna Kuhn

Books

- Yuval Noah Harari, Author of ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ [7]

- How the mind works by Steven Pinker [8]