Belief is not enough

Having looked at how information and beliefs spread a bajillion times, what about behaviour ? In the end, what people believe matters only insofar as it affects what they actually do. This nice Aeon piece looks at the intermediate stage of desire, where on the basis of some information, we want to proceed with some action. We may or may not actually carry it out, and sometimes people do things they don't really want to. Even so, wanting to do things is obviously an important stage of the process in general.

A few recent posts seem relevant here. First, there was the interesting speculation that we tend to copy all the behaviours of people we like because we aren't (or at least weren't in the past) sufficiently rational to figure out what aspect of them made them successful. Successful behaviour occurred (and occurs) more through luck than judgement, so a certain amount of proverbially sheep-like behaviour is actually quite sensible. If all your friends jumped off a cliff, you probably would too, because there'd surely be a very good reason they were jumping off a cliff. A herd mentality makes a degree of sense.

Secondly, doing something because everyone else is doing it is not the same as addiction - but they aren't mutually exclusive either. You can't really be addicted to wearing ponchos (right ???), but you might decide to wear one if everyone else does. As soon as they decide that ponchos are no longer cool, yours goes away the same as everyone else's. But of course you certainly can become addicted to smoking cigarettes, and it's even easier to fall into the habit if all your peers are puffing away. Some things you only want to do because everyone else is doing them, but others have internal causes.

Thirdly, some group behaviours can arise due to psychological universals, not because of the spread of ideas. That is, all - or at least a very high fraction - of people tend to behave in similar ways in certain similar circumstances. Some behaviours are highly individual, but not all. So it's not all down to the societal network or organisational system. As above, you can't really said to be addicted to eating a healthy amount of food, for example, or do so only out of a herd mentality, but internal modes of thought can give rise to more sophisticated universal behaviours as well.

On to the Aeon piece then :

We often get infected by the desires of people around us. And we get infected by the emotions of others – a film can seem much funnier if everyone in the audience is laughing out loud. Our emotions are influenced by the emotions of others. And our desires are influenced by the desires of others. 

The difference is that emotions are fleeting. When you leave the cinema, you might no longer find the film that funny. And if you are no longer in the same room as the yawners, you will stop yawning. But desires that you form on the basis of other people’s desires can stay with you for years and decades, and have a major impact on how your life turns out to be.

Which is an important point about the different ways information can affect us. It can cause us to do something only once, merely responding to present circumstances, or actually change our beliefs and long-term behaviour.

While in the case of testimony we are pretty good at screening out false beliefs [caveats later], we are completely defenceless against some forms of desire infection. But if this is true, then the whole idea of an autonomous self is somewhat illusory. Much of what we do in life is drifting along fuelled by the desires of those around us.

Well, I don't know about that. A self so powerful and knowledgeable that it didn't need external input would be essentially God. Us mere mortals must instead rely largely on external information on which we can respond. I don't see that that diminishes the self in any way, it's just that we shouldn't define the self by our actions or opinions - it's much more fundamental than that. The self is what makes the internal choices based on internal and external influences. Since it doesn't have infinite internal knowledge, it's necessarily subject to external forces. Yes, of course you can be influenced by sex/drugs/rock and roll/all your friends jumping off a cliff, but that doesn't mean you aren't making a choice based on what you know.

But I digress. On to the different ways beliefs can influence desires. The article describes basic thirst, which can have a purely internal cause, thirst for a specific drink based on prior knowledge, desire for a drink based on other people's recommendations about what's good to drink, and desire based on everyone else's actions without understanding them :

In the cult film Blow-Up (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni, there is a scene at a rock concert where the protagonist grabs a piece of the guitar that one of the band members has just smashed. Once he has managed to escape all the other fans who want the same guitar piece and is safely alone on the street, he throws the piece away. The protagonist’s desire was formed on the basis of the other fans’ desires but it is not based on a belief that he acquired by means of testimony. He does not seem to have a belief that this guitar piece is very valuable or precious – given that he throws it away once he’s on the street.

Or to be pedantic, it's not formed on the basis of a belief in the value of the thing he's after, but presumably a less direct belief that he should have it. Like when a crowd of people are looking up and someone new joins in : they have no knowledge of what they're looking at, but good reason to suppose they might see something interesting if they look up. Or why they fill in timesheets for no good reason. You can believe that you need to do something (and actively want to do it) whilst having absolutely no understanding of it whatsoever.

If I find myself with a desire that does not seem to be based on any of my beliefs – or maybe it is even in conflict with some of my beliefs – I can rationalise my desire and come up with some (confabulated) explanation for why I want what I want. We have plenty of experimental evidence from social psychology that we go to great lengths to make sense of and rationalise our actions, preferences and desires. And post-hoc confabulated rationalisations of this kind can cover up the importance and prevalence of direct desire infection.

And while contradictory information acts to shape our beliefs, what about desires ? This may be even more complicated.

Beliefs form a coherent network, but desires don’t. We can, and very often do, have conflicting desires. Just because a desire I acquired by means of desire infection contradicts some other desire of mine, I will not normally reject it. Contradictions between beliefs are easier to spot than contradictions between desires.

Our screening of false beliefs often fails. And, as some techniques in psychiatry show, some ‘unwanted’ desires often do get screened out, for example, by making the conflict between them blatantly obvious. But while there is a default mechanism for the screening of beliefs, there is no comparable default screening mechanism for desires.

I would add that there are many different levels of belief. Sometimes we have explicit, sincerely held beliefs but fail to act on them. At other times we do things we strongly professes not to want to do at all : what people think they believe and what they actually believe can be - in a sense - in conflict (implicit bias). And then there are things over which we have virtually no control at all : you can't really will yourself to like or dislike a movie, you just simply do. Your opinion can change, but not because you wanted it to do so.

Cigarette or beverage commercials are very efficient ways of infecting you with desires. They are not trying to communicate a message [beyond, "you want a beer", I suppose]. If they did, they would probably choose a more efficient message than Real men smoke a certain brand of cigarette. Such commercials are trying to trigger desires in you, bypassing your screening mechanism, which is probably against smoking and consuming sugary beverages. And they do so very efficiently: even though you think that a certain brand of sugary beverage is very unhealthy and bad for you, if the commercial is well-done, it will nonetheless trigger a desire in you.

That's an important point. I can sincerely believe that drinking is bad for me, but just not care because goddammit given me the frickin' beer already. It's interesting to think of beliefs and desires as being orthogonal, that you could have one without the other. Perhaps that's what winning hearts and minds really means. Perhaps implicit bias arises not from some deep-seated belief, but from a totally different aspect of personality over which we have little or no control. Hence people can genuinely believe something but act hypocritically.

Of course, beliefs and desires aren't completely orthogonal. We can form a belief by rationalising desire, and desire can arise from belief. But even if they are not totally independent, that's still interesting - not so much for the notion of the self discussed in the article, but in the practical, sociological implications. Getting people to believe something is true (e.g. "I should cast my vote") and getting them to actually do it may have quite different aspects. Making people believe the facts is different from getting them interested or enthusiastic in a fact-based policy.

Can you stop yourself being infected with other peoples' desires? - Bence Nanay | Aeon Essays

Most of what we know, we know from someone else. I believe that Moroni is the capital of the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean because a friend of mine just told me this five minutes ago, and I have no reason to think that she is trying to trick me.