Why We Believe What We Believe
How much of what we think we know about ourselves is true, and why do intelligent people hold on to beliefs that evidence contradicts?
Every decision rests on beliefs, about the world, about other people and about ourselves. This path asks how those beliefs are formed and why they are so hard to change.
It begins with social psychology’s central finding, that situations shape behaviour more than character, and with the limits of self-knowledge. It then turns to emotion and reason, which turn out to depend on each other, and to the mechanisms by which people defend beliefs they should abandon. The last books ask why reasoning works as it does, why people sometimes escape from freedom into certainty and what makes some minds more flexible than others.
The How to Judge a Decision path covers the biases in judgement; this one goes deeper into the mind that holds them. The idea of cognitive dissonance is a companion throughout.
For a different angle on self-knowledge, Gödel, Escher, Bach proposes that the self is a pattern a brain builds of its own activity, a model that then steers the brain that made it.
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Ross and Nisbett’s classic summarises social psychology’s central lesson: behaviour depends far more on situations than we think, and we consistently overrate character.
- Read it for
- The fundamental attribution error and the role of construal.
- Carry forward
- When someone here behaves badly, have we looked at the situation we put them in?
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Wilson shows that much of the mind works outside awareness, so that our explanations of our own feelings and choices are often confident guesses.
- Read it for
- The adaptive unconscious and the limits of introspection.
- Carry forward
- Which of my reasons for a recent choice did I construct after making it?
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Damasio’s studies of patients with brain damage showed that emotion is not the enemy of reason but necessary for it.
- Read it for
- The somatic marker hypothesis and the case of Phineas Gage.
- Carry forward
- What is my gut telling me about this decision that my spreadsheet is not?
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Barrett argues that emotions are constructed by the brain from bodily signals and concepts, not triggered by fixed circuits, a view with consequences for how we read others.
- Read it for
- The theory of constructed emotion and emotional granularity.
- Carry forward
- Am I reading other people’s emotions or projecting my own concepts onto them?
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Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)
Tavris and Aronson show how cognitive dissonance leads people to justify bad decisions rather than admit them, in families, courts and governments.
- Read it for
- The pyramid of choice and the mechanisms of self-justification.
- Carry forward
- Which past decision am I defending because admitting it was wrong would hurt?
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Mercier and Sperber argue that reasoning evolved to persuade others and evaluate their arguments, not to find truth alone, which explains confirmation bias and why groups reason better than individuals.
- Read it for
- The interactionist account of reason.
- Carry forward
- Who argues with me in good faith, and do I listen?
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Fromm’s study of why people in the twentieth century fled from freedom into authoritarianism and conformity explains the psychological appeal of certainty.
- Read it for
- Freedom from and freedom to, and the mechanisms of escape.
- Carry forward
- Where do I prefer someone else’s certainty to my own responsibility?
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Ends with recent research. Zmigrod studies the cognitive roots of rigid, dogmatic thinking and the flexibility that protects against it.
- Read it for
- Cognitive flexibility and the link between how people think and what ideologies they adopt.
- Carry forward
- Which of my beliefs would I abandon if the evidence turned, and which would I not?
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