4 - Belief, bias and ideology

Summary

Introduction

An ideology is a set of beliefs or values that can be explained through the position or (non-cognitive) interest of some social group. I shall mainly discuss ideological beliefs, although at some points reference will also be made to ideological value systems. Ideological beliefs belong to the more general class of biased beliefs, and the distinction between position and interest explanations largely corresponds to a more general distinction between illusion and distortion as forms of bias. In social psychology a similar distinction is expressed by the opposition between ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ causation of beliefs, or between ‘psychologic’ and ‘psychodynamics’.

The main goal of the chapter is to provide for belief formation what the preceding chapter did for preference formation, i.e. a survey of some important ways in which rational mental processes can be undermined by irrelevant causal influences. As briefly indicated in I.3 above, there are close similarities between irrational belief formation and irrational preference formation. In IV.2 I discuss the phenomenon of illusionary beliefs, an analogy to which is found in preference shifts due to framing. Similarly, many of the phenomena discussed in IV.2 are due to dissonance reduction, and therefore closely parallel to sour grapes and similar mechanisms. One important disanalogy should be mentioned, however. Whereas the causal process of adaptive preference formation can be contrasted to intentional character planning, the causal process of wishful thinking has no similar intentional analogue, because it is conceptually impossible to believe at will. I shall argue that the notion of self-deception, which might appear to provide such an analogy, is in fact incoherent. Another disanalogy is that wishful thinking, unlike sour grapes, will in general give temporary relief only. When reality reasserts itself, frustration and dissonance will also reappear. True, there are cases in which wishful thinking has useful consequences. In IV.4 I discuss the general phenomenon of useful mistakes, arguing that since these are essentially by-products one cannot coherently make them into the basis of policy.