I keep worrying, as with a loose tooth, about news media elites who are going for the UFOs-as-space-aliens theory. This one falls halfway between election denial (too upsetting for me to want to think about too often) and belief in ghosts (too weird to take seriously).
I was also thinking about the movie JFK, which I saw when it came out in 1991. As a reader of the newspapers, I knew that the narrative pushed in the movie was iffy, to say the least; still, I watched the movie intently—I wanted to believe. In the same way that in the 1970s I wanted to believe those claims that dolphins are smarter than people, or that millions of people wanted to believe in the Bermuda Triangle or ancient astronauts or Noah’s Ark or other fringe ideas that were big in that decade. None of those particular ideas appealed to me.
Anyway, this all got me thinking about what it takes for someone to believe in something. My current thinking is that belief requires some mixture of the following three things:
1. Evidence
2. Desire
3. Support
To go through these briefly:
1. I’m using the term “evidence” in a general sense to include things you directly observe and also convincing arguments of some sort or another. Evidence can be ambiguous and, much to people’s confusion, it doesn’t always point in the same direction. The unusual trajectory of Oswald’s bullet is a form of evidence, even though not as strong as has been claimed by conspiracy theories. The notorious psychology paper from 2011 is evidence for ESP. It’s weak evidence, really no evidence at all for anything beyond the low standards of academic psychology at the time, but it played the role of evidence for people who were interested in or open to believing.
2. By “desire,” I mean a desire to believe in the proposition at hand. There can be complicated reasons for this desire. Why did I have some desire in 1991 to believe the fake JFK story, even thought I knew ahead of time it was suspect? Maybe because it helped make sense of the world? Maybe because, if I could believe the story, I could go with the flow of the movie and feel some righteous anger? I don’t really know. Why do some media insiders seen to have the desire to believe that UFOs are space aliens? Maybe because space aliens are cool, maybe because, if the theory is true, then these writers are in on the ground floor of something big, maybe because the theory is a poke in the eye at official experts, maybe all sorts of things.
3. “Support” refers to whatever social environment you’re in. 30% of Americans believe in ghosts, and belief in ghosts seems to be generally socially acceptable—I’ve heard people from all walks of life express the belief—but there are some places where it’s not taken seriously, such as in the physics department. The position of ghost-belief within the news media is complicated, typically walking a fine line to avoid expressing belief or disbelief. For example, a quick search of *ghosts npr* led to this from the radio reporter:
I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in ghosts. Now, I say pretty sure because I want to leave the possibility open. There have definitely been times when I felt the presence of my parents who’ve both died, like when one of their favorite songs comes on when I’m walking the aisles of the grocery store, or when the wind chime that my mom gave me sings a song even though there’s no breeze. But straight-up ghosts, like seeing spirits, is that real? Can that happen?
This is kind of typical. It’s a news story that’s pro-ghosts, reports a purported ghost sighting with no pushback, but there’s that kinda disclaimer too. It’s similar to reporting on religion. Different religions contradict each other, and so if you want to report in a way that’s respectful of religion, you have to place yourself in a no-belief-yet-no-criticism mode: if you have a story about religion X, you can’t push back (“Did you really see the Lord smite that goat in your backyard that day?”) because that could offend adherents of that religion, but you can’t fully go with it, as that could offend adherents of every other religion.
I won’t say that all three of evidence, desire, and support are required for belief, just that they can all contribute. We can see this with some edge cases. That psychologist who published the terrible paper on ESP: he had a strong desire to believe, a strong enough desire to motivate an entire research program on his part. There was also a little bit of institutional support for the belief. Not a lot—ESP is a fringe take that would be, at best, mocked by most academic psychologists, it’s a belief that has much lower standing now than it did fifty years ago—but some. Anyway, the strong desire was enough, along with the terrible-but-nonzero evidence and the small-but-nonzero support. Another example would be Arthur Conan Doyle believing those ridiculous faked fairy photos: spiritualism was big in society at the time, so he had strong social support as well as strong desire to believe. In other cases, evidence is king, but without the institutional support it can be difficult for people to be convinced. Think of all those “they all laughed, but . . .” stories of scientific successes under adversity: continental drift and all the rest.
As we discussed in an earlier post, the “support” thing seems like a big change regarding the elite media and UFOs-as-space-aliens. The evidence for space aliens, such as it is—blurry photographs, eyewitness testimony, suspiciously missing government records, and all the rest—has been with us for half a century. The desire to believe has been out there too for a long time. What’s new is the support: some true believers managed to insert the space aliens thing into the major news media in a way that gives permission to wanna-believers to lean into the story.
I don’t have anything more to say on this right now, just trying to make sense of it all. This all has obvious relevance to political conspiracy theories, where authority figures can validate an idea, which then gives permission for other wanna-believers to push it.
This leads me to think about how technology is changing these three pillars: evidence is easily manufactured and support can be found in numerous echo chambers (even ones that were also manufactured). I suppose desire has always been there. But the bottom line is a much richer environment in which belief can grow and reproduce. Pure speculation here: but my impression is that what used to take generations to become a “belief” now can take place in days.
Dale –
I agree. Social media reinforces and accelerates the process of “support.” Which enhances “desire.” And now it’s so easy to get a graph showing associations to be seen by a mass audience. So a shallow from of “evidence” becomes very influential.
I find myself thinking that somehow it was better when “causality” was more the province of carful academics who did extensive study to make a carefully-reasoned case for “causality,” based on an evaluation of the supporting literature and with an applied filter of considered opinion of other people who studied the relevant literature.
I’ve been thinking that in reaction to the context of Jonathan Haidt getting massive attention for basically putting out a bunch simple charts showing a correlation between cellphones and a spike in various metrics of poor emotional health (particularly in teenage girls) and making absolute statements about the casual relationship. I find myself wishing that he would instead take a different route of publishing his ideas in through academic articles that explicitly reference the existing literature and undergo careful scrutiny from other people with a domain-relevant background).
But maybe that never really existed and I’m basically an old man (well, but that old) yelling at clouds?
Meanwhile, while I can see resins to the think Haidt’s assertions are plausible, I also see important critiques as well large numbers of people who are absolutely convinced by his “evidence” – a group that largely overlaps with a “desire” and “support” (his arguments nicely on to an anti-woke orientation).
Hmmm..
… map nicely on to
… reasons to think
… not that old
….in thorough
…careful academics
I remember hearing the opposite claim: now that cellphone cameras are common, claims about Bigfoot/UFOs became less common. The recent UFO discussion is a bit different because it’s more from military hardware than eyewitness testimony.
I think there’s pretty much (not 100% in all individual instances or 100% of the time) a directional chain here.
Support–> desire–> evidence.
In other words, often it starts with ideological orientation and the existence of an in-group. That fuels the desire (often to demean or at least differentiate from an out-group), which then dramatically impacts what’s seen as evidence.
Thus, you can very often predict what beliefs are by looking at ideological group orientation. As Dan Kahan (does anyone know why he seems to have disappeared from public view?) said: beliefs on climate tell you more about who someone is than what they know (paraphrase).
We need an example of something you do believe though.
That’s a very interesting idea and I hope Andrew takes you up on that. I thought about my answer to what I believe, and it appears to be “very little” or “less and less.” Is this just a reaction to how easily people seem to believe outlandish things? Or have I, in my advanced age, achieved the wisdom of not believing anything? I guess I believe the earth is somewhat pear-shaped (not flat at all), based on numerous pieces of evidence (too many to all be manufactured), personal observation (I’ve seen the curvature of the earth from an airplane – or from the ground in Saskatchewan), and repeated expert opinions and theories concerning the shape of the earth. My belief that the Holocaust was real is just as strong for many of the same reasons. But when the sources of evidence are more concentrated, my belief becomes weaker, and quickly. Do I believe the number of innocent Palestinians that have been killed by Israeli operations? I have many doubts, although somewhat less as time goes on and more evidence is produced – in the earlier days when there was only one or two sources of (mis)information, I did not know what to believe.
It seems to me that the safest course is to believe very little. I almost said “unless I have personal evidence” but then I thought of the famous Feynman quote, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
I belive that chipmunk will translate any post on this blog into a rant against librulz
Anon:
I believe lots of things. I believe that Australia exists, that I can swim, that birds can fly, that the flu virus makes people sick, that the Korean war occurred, that you can use transistors and other electronic components to build analog computers and solve differential equations, that the solar eclipse happened as anticipated based on the calculated trajectories of the sun and the moon, that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories, . . . all sorts of things. To ask for an example of something I believe is like asking for example of a non-raven that’s non-black: there are so many examples that there’s no logical place to start!
UFOs/Space Aliens goes in cycles, and I’d say there’s a clear process:
1) True Believers make noise, get government interest to investigate.
2) Government issues a report, or declassifies an earlier report.
3) Now there’s a media “hook” to write stories, pack journalism takes place.
4) Topic gets “old”, considered played-out, quiet (not zero) for a while.
5) GOTO 1
We’re just seeing the “media elites” doing part 3 now of the current cycle. It’s actually pretty small compared to some earlier cycles, when there were blockbuster movies on the topic (e.g. “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”).
Of possible interest:
Neil Van Leeuwen, _Religion as make-believe : a theory of belief, imagination, and group identity_ (Harvard University Press, 2023) https://clio.columbia.edu/catalog/17948026
(The catalog entry contains a brief description and a list of the book’s chapters.)
Background:
Eric Schwitzgebel, “Belief” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief/ [see the links at the end for more, including:]
Andrew Chignell, “Ethics of Belief” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-belief/
and perhaps
Sven Ove Hansson, “Logic of Belief Revision” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-belief-revision/.
Schwitzgebel https://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/ frequently works with good researchers in psychology, often writes in an entertaining way and would be a good resource.
The rather depressing findings of Dan Kahan are of course relevant. While curiosity is protective against resolute attachment to ill-supported belief, fear – and anger, a natural companion of fear – are inimical to curiosity.
The continental drift story is more complicated than most realize, as detailed by Naomi Oreskes in “The Rejection of Continental Drift.” It was pretty much accepted as fact by geologists in other parts of the world even before the mechanism of sea floor spreading was discovered. The lack of a mechanism was not a barrier to accepting drift, which is the usual story; geologists were happy to believe in orogenies (mountain ranges rising up) even though they had no mechanism for it. Apparently the reluctance of geologists here to accept it was based on the idea being inconsistent with the prevailing theory explaining post-glacial isostatic rebound.
This gets to a related issue: disregarding evidence that contradicts what you want to believe. Geologists here ignored very strong evidence for drift, such as similarity in rocks and fossils in parts of South America and Africa, or fossils of plants in Greenland that could not have grown at high latitudes.
It is a bit off point, but I’ve always been fond of a bit of folk wisdom of field geologist: “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.”
I still have a copy of my freshman geology textbook, “Principles of Physical Geology” by Holmes. Long, difficult book. He didn’t believe in plate tectonics and there’s not a single reference to it, so apparently some geologists were not on board.
My beliefs these days take the form of probably’s.
Sorry, I know this is late, but I feel compelled to defend Holmes a bit here–he was one of the earlier proponents of continental drift. (“English geologist Arthur Holmes made not one but two major contributions to our understanding of how the Earth works. He was the first earth scientist to grasp the mechanical and thermal implications of mantle convection… Holmes also made major contributions to the theory of continental drift. This theory was proposed by German meteorologist and geologist Alfred Wegener in 1912 and states that the position of the continents on the Earth’s surface has changed considerably over time. Wegener’s idea was far from universally accepted, since it was not clear what would cause large continents to move across the surface of the Earth. It was Holmes, in 1919, who suggested the mechanism: that the continents are carried by flow of the mantle on which they sit, and that the mantle is flowing because it is convecting…” from https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/earth-inside-and-out/geologist-arthur-holmes as just one easy to access source.)
Ironically, your conclusion (“some geologists were not on board”) is absolutely correct, though you point to one of the earliest adopters of the theory! (I’d check the final chapter of the book, which should be on continental drift.)
“I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.”
There’s a related saying, whose origin I don’t know, but I first heard it in ecology: “No new fact can be accepted until it is confirmed by theory.”!
But, more seriously, the geologist’s folk wisdom expresses not the power of preconception, but the importance of the prepared mind in making observations. A well-trained ecologist or forester can learn much about the history of an area by observing the species composition, size distribution, and placement of the plants. If I see a few large spreading trees surrounded by many even-sized, erect trees, I see a former old field that had a few scattered trees that has regrown into secondary forest. An untrained eye might see just a bunch of trees of varying sizes. When I first went into the field with geologists, in Nahant, Massachusetts, I was amazed how much the English geologist with us, who had never been there before, could infer from careful observation of the rock faces around us– episodes of plutonism and sedimentation stretching over millenia that would be invisible to the casual observer. This reflects not the imposition of a “belief” on the rocks, but the accumulated wisdom gained by geologists over centuries as to what, say, a dike is and how it is formed.
Actually, I do know where it comes from– I cited it in a talk once: it’s by the astronomer Arthur Eddington.
Surely it would be a ghost “sighting” and not “citing”.
Fixed; thanks.
Perhaps “ghost citing” should be the term for when you cite a source, but you didn’t actually read it, and instead read some other source that cited it (which you may or may not optionally cite). You’ve never come in contact with the source as a living thing, just the spirit of it lingering on. If there are errors in the intermediate source that you copied, well that’s just a ghost being an imperfect version of the original.
I wouldn’t confuse the recent wagging about UFOs with anything like “belief”. More like
1) sell clicks and adds
2) bloggers need some bull to put on their blogs to keep people reading them
3) people need some bull to talk about to keep themselves from dying of boredom (not everyone works out statistical models on Sunday nights as a fun family activity)
Also “belief” is a slippery concept. A given “belief” might be rock solid today and non-existant tomorrow in the same individual, and this might vary from one extreme to the other depending on social context or other factors. No doubt, many people are inclined to “believe” things that tend to grease the social and economic gears, and shift those beliefs when a different type of social and economic lubrication appears more functional.