Parasitic belief structures: Bubbles of local truth
The complexity of social beliefs is that they can be real by virtue of being told, and thus the notion of evidence is entirely connected to our heuristics for common beliefs: it requires not further evidence (Butler, 1990).
Narratives can be understood in this fashion. They assign causal relations between events, and these relations can in fact never truly be proven. All one can ever observe is the sequence of the events, and the reliability of such sequence (Sah, 2013). Hence, we’ve evolved to infer causality, and to compare our models of these causality structures based on other viewpoints, which maximize our datapoints towards the expected sequence (Veissière et al. 2020).
Some aspects of reality are not directly visually observable. Those are in fact very common in the social realm (while there still are observable aspects of social reality, such as written norms, social behaviors or visual icons) (Cruickshank, 2012).
It is hard to observe abstract structures such as hierarchies, or informal rules, or even virtual exchange states. So for instance, it is not directly observable that I lent my partner some eggs, and he now informally owes me some return on this order of magnitude. This ‘’debt’’ is not something I can tangibly point to. They have behavioral correlates, but these are limited in time, and they, themselves are not the structure. The structure can only be inferred by the mechanism highlighted above.
Some social elements are easier to point to, such as norms pertaining to beauty (Yan, & Bissell, 2014). We get many datapoints about them on magazines, or ads on youtube, or even the celebrities that we follow on instagram. While the concept of norms itself is not observable, the direct observable correlates are very much something one can point to.
Some of these aspects are also increasingly common even in the realm of the observable, as our societies super-specialize, we do not access the observable events that might act as evidence (Berry, 2005).
While it may be observable that atoms act in a certain way, or that the planet is close to a sphere, I myself cannot directly observe this. I have to rely on other people, who may or may not have observed this fact themselves. As we specialize, the chain of people between me and a direct observation of an event or concept grows. As it grows, the probability of this event having actually been observed decreases. But even as it decreases, I am not part of only one chain. There are many such chains, and as the chains multiply, so does the probability again. Thus, as humans, we are very good at noticing how evidence amasses around a certain data point through social inference. But this is not a perfect system. As unobservable inferences are made, and repeated in order to fulfill a social goal (such as grouping around a belief), evidence for datapoints that would not normally be repeated amass as well.
In this way, parasitic beliefs can evolve far outside the realm of the observable real, and unobservable real, maintaining only a social reality.
When religious groups make claims about a deity, they are creating social evidence for an unobservable idea (Bishop, 2007; Miller, & Record, 2013). In the same way, when a group claims the planet is flat, they create social evidence for this claim which is essentially unobservable to me.
These bubble beliefs take on a life of their own, self-evidence, and so long as they do not need to become observable, or manifest in a measurable way for the successful enactment of other events, they can remain useful to a social group.
It is mostly irrelevant to me (and for most people albeit not all people) whether the planet is flat or not. While it has a very real impact on my life, it is not a belief that changes my path of action. What I believe in this regard will not change whether I can do the groceries, or perform my plumbing duties, or whether I can vote in critical elections. But this belief does serve a purpose. I can gather around it to find other members of a group who will then allow a sub-structure in which I may find more status or value for myself. When there are less members in a group, the value of the evidence each individual produces has more impact on the other members, even if, overall, this impact is less on the belief structure of other members than if there were more of us. If there are only two of us, I am worth 50% of the evidence produced in this direction. If there are a thousand, the evidence I produce is only worth 1/10 of a percent. Thus, I feel more valuable in a smaller group.
These useful social beliefs grow, and can eventually take so much space that they become priors over other functional beliefs that do in fact need to manifest successfully.
Specifically, what happens when I assign a very high precision to members of my group who make a variety of other claims about reality, that begin to overlap with my functional belief? Say for instance, that the elites in power are not really taking my vote into consideration. It is likely I will begin to act accordingly.
These bubbles eventually cause the crash of the evidence system. The more beliefs are spread that hinder functionality, the less likely it is that the system can function at all.
A good example of this is the vaccines.
So long as the people who did not believe vaccines could help them stayed in small group, this had little to no impact, because we still had herd immunity. But as this group grew, their impact on the evidence system was large enough that other members of other groups started potentially adopting these beliefs (Smith et al. 2011; Gigendal et al. 2019). As they adopted such beliefs, they ceased to vaccinate their children, and we are seeing massive eruptions of previously essentially eradicated diseases, as well as the erosion in the trust for the healthcare system, leading to problematic behaviors during the COVID pandemic (Majumder et al. 2015; Verger & Dubé, 2020).
This is what we are observing with the overlap between the spiritual, conspiracy and fundamental religious groups. This is what paved the way to Q.
We are seeing this now with these groups as they grew and their bubbles of belief structures overlapped. They created enough mutual evidence to essentially be convinced of their reality, and act in such a way as to grind the entire system to a near halt.
Initially published on The Apeiron Blog
References:
Berry, W. (2005). Local knowledge in the age of information. The Hudson Review, 58(3), 399–410.
Bishop, J. (2007). Believing by faith: An essay in the epistemology and ethics of religious belief. Oxford University Press.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic discourse. Feminism/postmodernism, 327, x.
Cruickshank, J. (2012). Positioning positivism, critical realism and social constructionism in the health sciences: a philosophical orientation. Nursing inquiry, 19(1), 71–82.
Gidengil, C., Chen, C., Parker, A. M., Nowak, S., & Matthews, L. (2019). Beliefs around childhood vaccines in the United States: A systematic review. Vaccine, 37(45), 6793–6802.
Majumder, M. S., Cohn, E. L., Mekaru, S. R., Huston, J. E., & Brownstein, J. S. (2015). Substandard vaccination compliance and the 2015 measles outbreak. JAMA pediatrics, 169(5), 494–495.
Miller, B., & Record, I. (2013). Justified belief in a digital age: On the epistemic implications of secret Internet technologies.
Sah, W. H. (2013, November). The development of coherence in narratives: Causal relations. In Proceedings of the 27th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation (PACLIC 27) (pp. 173–180).
Smith, P. J., Humiston, S. G., Marcuse, E. K., Zhao, Z., Dorell, C. G., Howes, C., & Hibbs, B. (2011). Parental delay or refusal of vaccine doses, childhood vaccination coverage at 24 months of age, and the Health Belief Model. Public health reports, 126(2_suppl), 135–146.
Veissière, S. P., Constant, A., Ramstead, M. J., Friston, K. J., & Kirmayer, L. J. (2020). Thinking through other minds: A variational approach to cognition and culture. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 43.
Verger, P., & Dubé, E. (2020). Restoring confidence in vaccines in the COVID-19 era.
Yan, Y., & Bissell, K. (2014). The globalization of beauty: How is ideal beauty influenced by globally published fashion and beauty magazines?. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 43(3), 194–214.
