Beliefs are an interesting double-edged sword: they can be beneficial or harmful, depending on the relationship between your beliefs, reality, and your desired outcome. The interesting part about beliefs is that they are complex parts of our psyche and have monumental impacts on our lives. While there is a lot to be said about the topic of beliefs, we’ll give a quick summary of it all here and then go into an interesting part about how beliefs have evolved so much over the course of humanity despite being one of the fundamental aspects of our existence.
So let’s start with the basics: a belief in the way that we’ll be discussing it is simply anything that you assume to be true about your reality. That includes knowledge, which are things that you can prove/have proven to be true, as well as things that you have not proven or cannot be sure of at this moment but assume to be true as a basis of your behavior. For example, you know from science that pure water at sea level air pressure will turn into ice at 0 degrees Celsius/32 degrees Fahrenheit. You know that because scientists have proven it based on countless experiments. However, if someone knocked you unconscious and you wake up in a random room with liquid, a freezer, and a thermometer, you can only believe that the water will freeze at 0 degrees because the liquid might not be pure water, you might not have typical atmospheric pressure, and the thermometer might not even be properly labeled or calibrated. So even things we know to be factually correct become beliefs if we are unsure of all of the variables that go into our knowledge being correct.
This is frequent in daily life because you might have sworn that you locked your door when you left your house but then find out later that someone else came by and unlocked it. As such, your knowledge about events—even if true at some point—are even subject to change based on conditions.
Now, why should this matter to you and your life? Well, beliefs can either be beneficial or harmful, depending on whether they make you better or worse off as a result. And there is where things get wild because it could be easy to assume that you should only believe things that are true for the optimal outcome in your life (people who believe this proudly call themselves “realists”)—but you’d be wrong if you assumed that. This is where things get weird.
You probably already know that there are only two relationships between your beliefs and reality (aligned or misaligned) that come in four possibilities:
Now, here’s where things get strange: whether or not the belief was “good” or “bad” is not whether it’s true; it’s whether it got you to the best outcome. So, you can believe that you can fly, jump off a cliff and flap your arms, and die…and that would be a bad belief that led to a bad outcome. But you can also believe that you will be President of the United States, work your entire life up through politics, and lose the election by one vote, thereby making your belief about being president false but you are much, much better off in life than you would’ve been without that belief. Similarly, you cannot believe that police officers are on the road you’re speeding on, be wrong, and get a ticket…and that would not be good. But you can also not believe that a feat is difficult and then do it easily, whereas in reality it’s very difficult and it’s only from your ignorance (often known as “beginner’s luck”) that you were able to do it easily.
So, using a similar four-flavor structure as defined above, you now have four relationships between beliefs and outcomes:
Note that the reason for four flavors is that it’s possible to hold a belief that both protects you from harm and prevents your growth (e.g., “men are bad”) or enables your growth and harms you (e.g., “NFL football is my chosen profession”). It can also harm you and prevent growth (e.g., “I am stupid”) or enable your growth and protect you from harm (e.g., “I only associate with good people“).
So the trick to holding good beliefs is a delicate balancing act of aligning them as close to reality to prevent harm but be as beneficial to you as possible to enable your growth. A fun way of saying that is that you should believe that you can fly metaphorically in your social life and career by being the best version of yourself but not that you can fly literally by flapping your wings while jumping off a cliff. The former encourages you to behave in beneficial ways, while the latter could get you killed.
With that background on beliefs (which is necessary to understand the following concepts), let’s talk a little about their evolution over the course of human history.
The fundamental form of belief is the assumption. It’s fundamental because all organisms do it: there have been studies done where amoebae are given the choice of multiple food sources and they gravitate toward the one with the optimal nutritional content for their growth and reproduction. As you know, amoebae are not consciously choosing that food source in the way that we understand consciousness in humans—it is written in their DNA to behave in that way. An instinct is the ultimate assumption: behave in this way biologically because that will maximize your likelihood of surviving. My favorite example of this is the family who had a pet beaver and they took a video of the beaver collecting items around the house and blocking the doorway with them like it was building a damn in a river—a fantastic instinct to survive in the wild (assuming that a dammed river will create the best environment for it), but completely illogical in a modern home.
You make thousands and thousands of assumptions every day, from assuming what you will have for food because you planned your meals when you went to the grocery store to putting clothes you have in your closet instead of going to a clothing store naked to buy new ones to falling asleep in your bed because you assume that no one is going to strangle you in your sleep. These are all beliefs that guide your behavior: you believe that you are as safe as you can be, so you sleep. You assume that you have food in your kitchen, so you walk there to prepare it and eat it. While it’s possible that a bear could bust through a window and eat your food or start eating you, it’s more than likely a safe belief to hold most of the time.
So you experience your reality performing behaviors based on beliefs about how it all works (or will work). Now, to maximize your success in life, you will adjust what you believe and know about reality based on experience: if you think you see a tiger and avoid water and it turns out not to be there, you will learn when they are not there. If you don’t see a tiger and then get attacked by one, then hopefully you live long enough to know in the future to recognize the next one.
So you have instincts that make you behave in generally default ways based on what your DNA through evolution has programmed you to do, and then as you go through life you learn through stimulus-response/action-reaction whether things are good or bad for you and then begin to evolve your behavior based on new beliefs about the world.
The most interesting of these evolutionarily is the superstition: a mistaken belief that a certain behavior causes an event to occur when it is completely unrelated. Everyone knows at least one: The number 13 is bad luck; clothing you wear influences the results of sports games; performing certain rituals influences the weather. Some beliefs are just misunderstandings of reality, such as Vitamin C preventing colds (there is no conclusive research on this). Other beliefs are about the relationship between the non-physical and reality that may or may not be true, such as religions and spirituality (unfortunately, science—the study of the physical universe—cannot prove the existence of non-physical). There is a ton of research on the evolution of religious beliefs in humans, but for the purposes of this post we’ll stick to the fundamentals of beliefs and their beneficial effects.
Science has been the primary mechanism for hundreds of years to test beliefs against reality (known as testing hypotheses) and has been a great way to eliminate a lot of superstitions from the conventional wisdom of the masses. But many still persist. The biggest two causes in modern times are desires and principles: what we want to be true, and what we think is right. In the former, people will believe that things that benefit them are true—like they reached a parking space first or their team didn’t really commit that penalty that might cost them the whole game. In the latter, people might believe that men and women should be equally interested in construction, IT infrastructure, and trash disposal (extensive research has shown that they are not) because it fits their worldview about how all societal disparities are due to oppression. Because of these biases, it will be difficult if not impossible to eliminate all false beliefs.
Bringing everything in this post together, these modern disconnects between belief and reality can be beneficial or harmful. If you think you don’t need a spouse but are lonely, then it’s possible that you actually want a spouse and are making yourself miserable. If you think that you need to conform to a societal standard of dress, vocation, or lifestyle but it doesn’t suit you, then you might be going in the wrong direction or not being true to yourself. If you want someone to love you but they don’t, you might blind yourself to the signals and waste a lot of time chasing the wrong person. Your false beliefs can really hurt you.
However, they can also help you. You might have cancer and have the belief in a higher power that gets you through it—at that point, it doesn’t matter whether that belief is true…it matters that you survived. You could live an entire life believing in magic, aliens, or astral projection—if it makes you happy and doesn’t cause you to behave in ways that are harmful to you, then they are not negatively consequential beliefs. You might never be able to win a Super Bowl, but it will make you a better football player if you do. The possibility that false beliefs might benefit you is very, very real.
However, the most dangerous scenario evolving from modern societal systems is an idea termed “luxury beliefs”—beliefs you hold that you have because of your own privileged situation that benefit you socially while negatively impacting others’ lives. Very popular, very dangerous luxury beliefs include “defund the police”, an idea that poor neighborhoods should have less police protection because of the race of the perpetrators and victims, and “lower the standards in the name of representation”, an idea that people could succeed if they were just given the chance even though they didn’t have the opportunity to gain the prerequisite qualifications due to their socioeconomic status. Unfortunately, the former belief causes minorities to become more victimized by crimes when they don’t get the police protection that they so desperately need. The latter causes many people to take on massive debt for colleges that they are not prepared for (see: dropout rates for lower-scoring individuals are much higher than higher-scoring members—regardless of demographic) or get roles that cause huge disasters because they are completely unqualified (example: Theranos famously hoisted a fraud into the spotlight because she was a female CEO). These luxury beliefs benefit the people who tout them (known as “virtue signaling” in modern parlance) while causing millions to suffer.
Unfortunately, the reality about beliefs (pun intended) is that it is very difficult to know what to believe. You form beliefs based on your biological instincts, your education, your parents, your friends, your experiences, your authority figures, your journalists, and your other/previous beliefs. I can’t tell you what specific beliefs about reality to hold (the purpose of this blog is to help you understand how reality works), but I can tell you that you should use your beliefs to maximize the benefits to yourself and others: believe in what’s real to minimize harm; believe in what’s possible to maximize benefit. And, of course, try to test your beliefs whenever possible to ensure that they are aligned with reality and the optimal outcome. If you go too far to reality (what is), you might never realize your potential; if you go too far toward what you believe is possible, you might succumb to beliefs that could hurt yourself or others. Humanity has come a long way from biological instincts and assumptions to superstitions to luxury beliefs, but the fundamentals of believing in what’s true unless believing in something that might not be true makes you better off (emotionally or behaviorally) still hold true.