Belief in free will as an adaptive,ungrounded belief

False beliefs and delusions are usually regarded negatively, especially in psychology and evolutionary biology. Recently, McKay and Dennett (2009b) have argued that there are ungrounded beliefs which confer benefits on individuals even if they are false. I propose to expand this class of beliefs to include the belief that one has free will, and I will defend the claim that this belief is advantageous, even if it is false. One derives one’s belief in control from one’s experience of control, which is generated by a set of cognitive systems termed “control systems.” While the control systems and the interpretive mechanism are useful in and of themselves, the belief in personal free will is adaptive because it directly leads to fitness-increasing behaviors. As such, we have good reason to regard the belief that one has free will as an adaptive, ungrounded belief. This paper will also suggest that further research on the possible distinction between belief in personal free will and belief in general free will may put us in a better position to understand recent, apparently contradictory data on individuals’ beliefs regarding free will and other related phenomena.     

Race versus belief about race as determinants of attraction: Belief prejudice and two kinds of race prejudice

An experiment was conducted to assess the effects of actual racial membership versus similarity of beliefs about racial issues on interpersonal evaluations. Prejudiced and unprejudiced White male students observed a videotaped interaction of two Black and two White male actors discussing racial issues and then evaluated the actors on several scales. One White and one Black actor took a conservative stand on racial issues, and the other White and Black pair of actors took a liberal position. Results from the ratings showed strong belief prejudice effects. Prejudiced subjects were attracted to conservative actors while unprejudiced subjects were attracted to liberal actors. Additionally, there were two kinds of race effects. Prejudiced subjects preferred White to Black actors, but unprejudiced subjects showed a reverse bias, preferring Black to White actors. A tentative explanation for this unusual finding was proposed.     

Commentary on Ted Ruffman’s “Belief or not belief: …”

I applaud Ruffman for cautioning us against interpreting early sensitivity to others’ beliefs as evidence for an innate theory of mind and for making room for learning. In turn, however, I caution against his claim that all infants need is to understand that people act depending on what they perceive. Instead, infants may keep experiential records (Perner & Roessler, 2010) for other people or records of what they have registered (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009), which makes it less obvious that all required knowledge can be acquired by statistical learning. As a general criticism I remonstrate with current theory of mind research on its lack of concern that we understand people as acting for reasons which goes beyond detecting lawful regularities in behaviour.     

Disentangling the belief in God and cognitive rigidity/flexibility components of religiosity to predict racial and value-violating prejudice: A Post-Critical Belief Scale analysis

Past research indicates that being religious is associated with prejudice toward racial and value-violating out-groups. However, this past research treated religiosity as a unidimensional construct without taking into account how different components of religiosity—belief in a higher power and the rigidity/flexibility of religious beliefs—are associated with measures of prejudice. Two studies examined the relationship between these two components of religiosity, as measured by the Post-Critical Beliefs Scale, and racial (African Americans, Arabs) and value-violating prejudices (atheists, gay men). As the flexibility of religious beliefs increased (literal vs. symbolic dimension), attitudes toward racial and value-violating out-groups became more positive (Study 1). As belief in God strengthened (exclusion vs. inclusion of transcendence dimension), attitudes toward value-violating out-groups became more negative. Study 2 demonstrated that these two components of religiosity fully mediated the relationship between general religiosity and prejudice toward African Americans, Arabs, and gay men and partially mediated the relationship between religiosity and prejudice toward atheists. Results are discussed in light of reexamining the conclusion that simply being religious is associated with prejudice.     

Hypnosis and belief: A review of hypnotic delusions

Hypnosis can create temporary, but highly compelling alterations in belief. As such, it can be used to model many aspects of clinical delusions in the laboratory. This approach allows researchers to recreate features of delusions on demand and examine underlying processes with a high level of experimental control. This paper reviews studies that have used hypnosis to model delusions in this way. First, the paper reviews studies that have focused on reproducing the surface features of delusions, such as their high levels of subjective conviction and strong resistance to counter-evidence. Second, the paper reviews studies that have focused on modelling underlying processes of delusions, including anomalous experiences or cognitive deficits that underpin specific delusional beliefs. Finally, the paper evaluates this body of research as a whole. The paper discusses advantages and limitations of using hypnotic models to study delusions and suggests some directions for future research.     

How misinformation taints our belief system: A focus on belief updating and relational reasoning

This commentary complements Stanley et al.'s (2022) target article by concentrating on the process of false belief construction and its associated cognitive mechanisms. It also concurs with the target article that a deeper understanding of the cognitive mechanisms by which consumers revise their truth judgments in view of new evidence is needed. Specifically, this essay develops two main dimensions: the first about what we know from the actual construction of truth judgments; the second about what we know from the cognitive mechanisms by which truth judgments are constructed. Particularly on this second dimension, I develop the idea that relational reasoning is key to understanding how individuals integrate new information within their internal belief systems. These two dimensions are both process-minded, yet one is about how beliefs evolve over time, whereas the other is about the cognitive mechanisms that underlie belief construction. Overall, an understanding of these two elements is crucial to finding behavioral interventions that may curb the spread of misinformation.     

A theory of belief

A theory of belief is presented in which uncertainty has two dimensions. The two dimensions have a variety of interpretations. The article focusses on two of these interpretations.The first is that one dimension corresponds to probability and the other to “definiteness,” which itself has a variety of interpretations. One interpretation of definiteness is as the ordinal inverse of an aspect of uncertainty called “ambiguity” that is often considered important in the decision theory literature. (Greater ambiguity produces less definiteness and vice versa.) Another interpretation of definiteness is as a factor that measures the distortion of an individual's probability judgments that is due to specific factors involved in the cognitive processing leading to judgments. This interpretation is used to provide a new foundation for support theories of probability judgments and a new formulation of the “Unpacking Principle” of Tversky and Koehler.The second interpretation of the two dimensions of uncertainty is that one dimension of an event A corresponds to a function that measures the probabilistic strength of A as the focal event in conditional events of the form A|B, and the other dimension corresponds to a function that measures the probabilistic strength of A as the context or conditioning event in conditional events of the form C|A. The second interpretation is used to provide an account of experimental results in which for disjoint events A and B, the judge probabilities of A|(A∪B) and B|(A∪B) do not sum to 1.The theory of belief is axiomatized qualitatively in terms of a primitive binary relation ? on conditional events. (A|B?C|D is interpreted as “the degree of belief of A|B is greater than the degree of belief of C|D.”) It is shown that the axiomatization is a generalization of conditional probability in which a principle of conditional probability that has been repeatedly criticized on normative grounds may fail.Representation and uniqueness theorems for the axiomatization demonstrate that the resulting generalization is comparable in mathematical richness to finitely additive probability theory.     

Functional belief and judgmental belief

Synthese - A division between functional (animal) belief, on the one hand, and judgmental (reflective) belief, on the other, is central to Sosa’s two-tier virtue epistemology. For Sosa, mere...     

Belief in God: A game-theoretic paradox

Conclusions The Belief Game is a two-person, nonzero-sum game in which both players can do well [e.g., at (3, 4)] or badly [e.g., at (1,1)] simultaneously. The problem that occurs in the play of this game is that its rational outcome of (2, 3) is not only unappealing to both players, especially God, but also, paradoxically, there is an outcome, (3, 4), preferred by both players that is unattainable. Moreover, because God has a dominant strategy, His omniscience does not remedy the situation, though - less plausibly - if man possessed this quality, and God were aware of it, (3, 4) would be attainable.How reasonable is it to use the device of a simple game to argue that nonrevelation by God, and nonbelief by man, are rational strategies? Like any model of a complex reality, the Belief Game abstracts a great deal from the problem that confronts the thoughtful agnostic asking the most profound of existential questions. Yet, to the degree that belief in God is seen as a personal question, conceptualized in terms of a possible relationship one might have with one's Creator, it seems appropriate to try to model this relationship as a game. The most difficult question to answer, I suppose, is, if God exists, what are His preferences in such a game?I have argued that He would first like to be believed, but at the same time not reveal Himself. These goals, in my opinion, are consistent with the role He assumes in many biblical stories, although this is not to say that the Bible offers the final word on philosophical and theological matters in the modern world. Nevertheless, it seems to me to be a logical place from which to start, and the clues it offers on God's preferences seem not contradicted by contemporary events.Of course, the Belief Game supposes that God not only has preferences but makes choices as well. To many people today - myself included - these choices are not apparent. But if He does make them, and in particular chooses not to reveal Himself, I think the Belief Game helps us to understand why nonrevelation is rational. Furthermore, it gives us insight into why, given this choice by God, our own reasons for believing in Him - in a game-theoretic context - may be rendered tenuous.     

Personality and Paranormal Belief: A Study Among Adolescents

A sample of 279 13- to 16-year-old adolescents completed the Short-form Revised Junior Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (JEPQR-S) and a six-item Index of Paranormal Belief. The data demonstrate that neuroticism is fundamental to individual differences in paranormal belief, while paranormal belief is independent of extraversion and psychoticism.     

Necessity, possibility and belief: A study of syllogistic reasoning

The present study extended the investigation of the belief bias effect in syllogistic reasoning in two ways: (1) The effect was studied under instructions to decide whether conclusions were possible, as well as necessary, given the premises; and (2) the effect was studied for types of syllogism where people rarely endorse the conclusions as well as those (valid and fallacious) where endorsements are common. Three experiments are reported, which show first that there is a marked tendency to reject unbelievable conclusions relative to abstract or neutral controls on all kinds of syllogism and under both types of instruction. There was also significant evidence of positive belief bias (increased acceptance of believable conclusions) and of interactions between belief bias effects and logical form. The results are discussed with particular respect to accounts of belief bias offered by theorists in the mental-model tradition.     

信念之谜(下)

在1972年《命名与必然性》的演讲中,作者提出了直接指称论的观点:名字的语义学内容仅仅就是所指称的对象。一般认为,如果接受直接指称论就必然导致信念之谜。因为,假如专名的语义学内容仅仅就是所指称的对象,那么两个共指称的专名,比如"Cicero"("西塞罗")和"Tully"("图利"),就应该在信念语境中可以替换。但这似乎是错误的,因为,似乎"琼斯相信西塞罗是秃子但不相信图利是秃子"可以是真的,而倘若作替换,就会得出矛盾。在本文中,作者试图论证:实际上导致信念之谜的乃是两个更为基本的原则,即去引号原则和翻译原则;不能把信念之谜的产生归咎于直接指称论。通过这种间接论证,作者认为,直接指称论没有被信念之谜难题驳倒,它还是能够获得辩护的。     

Beliefs as signals: A new function for belief

Beliefs serve at least two broad functions. First, they help us navigate the world. Second, they serve as signals to manipulate others. Philosophers and psychologists have focused on the first function while largely overlooking the second. This article advances a conception of signals and makes a prima facie case for a social signaling function for at least some beliefs. Truth and rational support are often irrelevant to the signaling function. If some beliefs evolved for a signaling function, then we should expect various biases that aid in the manipulation of others.     

Permitting immoral behaviour: A generalized compensation belief hypothesis

When are we more likely to permit immoral behaviours? The current research examined a generalized compensation belief hypothesis that individuals, as observers, would morally tolerate and accept someone paying forward unfair treatment to an innocent person as a means to compensate for the perpetrator's previously experienced mistreatment. Across five experiments (N = 1107) based on economic games (Studies 1–4) and diverse real-life scenarios (Study 5), we showed that participants, as observing third parties, were more likely to morally permit and engage in the same negative act once they knew about previous maltreatment of the perpetrator. This belief occurred even when the content of received and paid-forward maltreatment was non-identical (Study 2), when the negative treatment was received from a non-human target (Study 3) and when the maltreatment was intangible (e.g. material loss) or relational (e.g. social exclusion; Study 5). Perceived required compensation mediated the effect of previous maltreatment on moral permission (Studies 4 and 5). The results consistently suggest that people's moral permission of immoral behaviours is influenced by perpetrator's previous mistreatment, contributing to a better understanding of the nature and nuances of our sense of fairness and contextualized moral judgement.     

Religious pluralism and justified Christian belief: A reply to Silver

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -