An illuminating history of how religious belief lost its uncontested status in the West
This landmark book traces the history of belief in the Christian West from the Middle Ages to the ...Enlightenment, revealing for the first time how a distinctively modern category of belief came into being. Ethan Shagan focuses not on what people believed, which is the normal concern of Reformation history, but on the more fundamental question of what people took belief to be.
Shagan shows how religious belief enjoyed a special prestige in medieval Europe, one that set it apart from judgment, opinion, and the evidence of the senses. But with the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation, the question of just what kind of knowledge religious belief was-and how it related to more mundane ways of knowing-was forced into the open. As the warring churches fought over the answer, each claimed belief as their exclusive possession, insisting that their rivals were unbelievers. Shagan challenges the common notion that modern belief was a gift of the Reformation, showing how it was as much a reaction against Luther and Calvin as it was against the Council of Trent. He describes how dissidents on both sides came to regard religious belief as something that needed to be justified by individual judgment, evidence, and argument.
Brilliantly illuminating,The Birth of Modern Beliefdemonstrates how belief came to occupy such an ambivalent place in the modern world, becoming the essential category by which we express our judgments about science, society, and the sacred, but at the expense of the unique status religion once enjoyed.
Correlation Neglect in Belief Formation ENKE, BENJAMIN; ZIMMERMANN, FLORIAN
The Review of economic studies,
01/2019, Letnik:
86, Številka:
1 (306)
Journal Article
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Many information structures generate correlated rather than mutually independent signals, the news media being a prime example. This article provides experimental evidence that many people neglect ...the resulting double-counting problem in the updating process. In consequence, beliefs are too sensitive to the ubiquitous “telling and re-telling of stories” and exhibit excessive swings. We identify substantial and systematic heterogeneity in the presence of the bias and investigate the underlying mechanisms. The evidence points to the paramount importance of complexity in combination with people’s problems in identifying and thinking through the correlation. Even though most participants in principle have the computational skills that are necessary to develop rational beliefs, many approach the problem in a wrong way when the environment is moderately complex. Thus, experimentally nudging people’s focus towards the correlation and the underlying independent signals has large effects on beliefs.
Abstract
Does one’s stance toward evidence evaluation and belief revision have relevance for actual beliefs? We investigate the role of endorsing an actively open-minded thinking style about evidence ...(AOT-E) on a wide range of beliefs, values, and opinions. Participants indicated the extent to which they think beliefs (Study 1) or opinions (Studies 2 and 3)
ought
to change according to evidence on an 8-item scale. Across three studies with 1,692 participants from two different sources (Mechanical Turk and Lucid for Academics), we find that our short AOT-E scale correlates negatively with beliefs about topics ranging from extrasensory perception, to respect for tradition, to abortion, to God; and positively with topics ranging from anthropogenic global warming to support for free speech on college campuses. More broadly, the belief that beliefs should change according to evidence was robustly associated with political liberalism, the rejection of traditional moral values, the acceptance of science, and skepticism about religious, paranormal, and conspiratorial claims. However, we also find that AOT-E is more strongly predictive for political liberals (Democrats) than conservatives (Republicans). We conclude that socio-cognitive theories of belief (both specific and general) should take into account people’s beliefs about when and how beliefs should change – that is, meta-beliefs – but that further work is required to understand how meta-beliefs about evidence interact with political ideology.
In the above letter <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1 , the name of the author Ryuichi Tatsukawa was incorrectly provided as Ryuichi Tatasukawa. The author's name should appear as Ryuichi Tatsukawa.
Making predictions is an adaptive feature of the cognitive system, as prediction errors are used to adjust the knowledge they stemmed from. Here, we investigated the effect of prediction errors on ...belief update in an ideological context. In Study 1, 704 Cloud Research participants first evaluated a set of beliefs and then either made predictions about evidence associated with the beliefs and received feedback or were just presented with the evidence. Finally, they reevaluated the initial beliefs. Study 2, which involved a U.S. Census–matched sample of 1,073 Cloud Research participants, was a replication of Study 1. We found that the size of prediction errors linearly predicts belief update and that making large errors leads to more belief update than does not engaging in prediction. Importantly, the effects held for both Democrats and Republicans across all belief types (Democratic, Republican, neutral). We discuss these findings in the context of the misinformation epidemic.
Belief endorsement is rarely a fully deliberative process. Oftentimes, one’s beliefs are influenced by superficial characteristics of the belief evaluation experience. Here, we show that by ...manipulating the mnemonic accessibility of particular beliefs we can alter their believability. We use a well-established socio-cognitive paradigm (i.e., the social version of the selective practice paradigm) to increase the mnemonic accessibility of some beliefs and induce forgetting in others. We find that listening to a speaker selectively practicing beliefs results in changes in believability. Beliefs that are mentioned become mnemonically accessible and exhibit an increase in believability, while beliefs that are related to those mentioned exrience mnemonic suppression, which results in decreased believability. Importantly, the latter effect occurs regardless of whether the belief is scientifically accurate or inaccurate. Furthermore, beliefs that are endorsed with moderate-strength are particularly susceptible to mnemonically-induced believability changes. These findings, we argue, have the potential to guide interventions aimed at correcting misinformation in vulnerable communities.
We survey New Zealand firms and document novel facts about their macroeconomic beliefs. There is widespread dispersion in beliefs about past and future macroeconomic conditions, especially inflation. ...This dispersion in beliefs is consistent with firms’ incentives to collect and process information. Using experimental methods, we find that firms update their beliefs in a Bayesian manner when presented with new information about the economy and that changes in their beliefs affect their decisions. Inflation is not generally perceived as being important to business decisions so firms devote few resources to collecting and processing information about inflation.
The application of multisource information fusion in real-world scenarios is an emerging practice because it effectively uses consistent and complementary data to optimize decision-making. ...Dempster-Shafer (D-S) evidence theory is prevalent because it competently handles uncertainty problems by assigning basic probability assignments (BPAs) to multielement subsets. However, a counterintuitive result may be obtained when the evidence is highly conflicting. To overcome this flaw, this paper defines a new divergence measurement to quantify the differences between BPAs; we name this new metric the belief Rényi divergence. The belief Rényi divergence takes the number of possible hypotheses into consideration, which makes it a more rational and effective difference measurement in the realm of evidence theory. Additionally, some important properties of the belief Rényi divergence are extensively explored and proven, in which the belief Rényi divergence also connects to Kullback-Leibler divergence, Hellinger distance and χ2 divergence. Moreover, a novel multisource information fusion method is devised based on the proposed belief Rényi divergence and belief entropy. Our proposed belief Rényi divergence can efficiently model the differences between evidence, and the belief entropy is used to calculate the information volume of evidence. Thus, the proposed method can sufficiently exploit the relationships among evidence and the information volume of the evidence itself. Two case studies are illustrated to verify the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed method. Also, an experiment on an iris dataset classification is presented to verify the performance of the proposed method. In addition, an EEG data analysis application demonstrates that the proposed method can be effectively used in real-world applications.
This article studies the determinants of college major choice using an experimentally generated panel of beliefs, obtained by providing students with information on the true population distribution ...of various major-specific characteristics. Students logically revise their beliefs in response to the information, and their subjective beliefs about future major choice are associated with beliefs about their own earnings and ability. We estimate a rich model of college major choice using the panel of beliefs data. While expected earnings and perceived ability are a significant determinant of major choice, heterogeneous tastes are the dominant factor in the choice of major. Analyses that ignore the correlation in tastes with earnings expectations inflate the role of earnings in college major choices. We conclude by computing the welfare gains from the information experiment and find positive average welfare gains.
Incentivized methods for eliciting subjective probabilities in economic experiments present the subject with risky choices that encourage truthful reporting. We discuss the most prominent elicitation ...methods and their underlying assumptions, provide theoretical comparisons and give a new justification for the quadratic scoring rule. On the empirical side, we survey the performance of these elicitation methods in actual experiments, considering also practical issues of implementation such as order effects, hedging, and different ways of presenting probabilities and payment schemes to experimental subjects. We end with a discussion of the trade-offs involved in using incentives for belief elicitation and some guidelines for implementation.
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