It’s a bit ironic that walking along the sidewalks this morning, I looked up to see a sign advertising the Chattanooga Design Studio. A wide crosswalk. A few homeless. Young couples Sunday sleepy, and then I was walking through the old Read House building where a Gospel Breakfast was taking place. Design. Beliefs. The Bible Belt. That’s as good a place to start this post as any, and what’s a belt for but to hold up a pair of trousers? And what are a pair of trousers but beliefs with which we clothe portions of our being?
First though, a mea culpa. I didn’t *plan* on blog posts that would end up going on and on about design, history, contingencies, or words-as-objects, and yet here I am. There’s another bit of irony for us, though. Planning…or lack thereof, and design. Sometimes the plan only emerges from the doing, and so there is hope that some sense will emerge – sense or hot mess.
So, in my last post I suggested that our psyche is a designed thing. Indirectly, to be sure, but the idea is in there. The logic goes like this: all objects have a history, history is the accumulated processes that led to the object existing – some might go so far as to add “…and provided its purpose,” but let’s not go there just yet. Words are objects as much as can openers or bible belts – objects shaped by the happenstance of their histories. The same, though goes for our psyche. It’s an object, too. One that we happen to inhabit, and one that sticks to the skin like a wet shirt on some days, but nonetheless, an object. And if we want to talk about the history of a psyche, well, what we are talking about is the science of psychology.
Psychology is a science. I think anyone reading this knows that, but I’d like to take a moment to make sure that we all know what a science is, exactly, because to put it bluntly, science is a process for designing beliefs. A cabinet maker designs and crafts cabinets. A tailor designs and creates clothing. Scientists design and create beliefs. Particular sort of beliefs, to be sure, but beliefs, nonetheless, that emerge from the contingencies of their craft.
Now, science isn’t the only process for designing beliefs. There are lots of others. Let me give you an example.
Gone Phishin’
About three months ago I was targeted by a phishing exploit. I received an email that seemed to be from my Department Chair, and the whole thing went like this:
“Hi. Sorry. I’m in a meeting. Could you do me a favor?” “Sure. I’m not available until 10:00, but can help out then.” “I’ll still be in the meeting.” “No problem. How can I help?”
At this point I received a message asking if I could go get a gift card for $500, write down its code, and email it back. To my credit, when I read the ask for a gift card, I became suspicious. However, NOT to my credit, this suspicion didn’t immediately kick in. It took a moment to wade through a variety of other beliefs. There was the irritation about the presumption of being asked to do such a strange favor (“The favor is for me to get a gift card?!”) There was the self-criticism for having agreed to do the “favor” in the first place (“How could you be such a sap?”). At the same time there was a bit of ego patting related to being “the person” that my chair was turning to for a favor. Yeah, I wanted to believe that I was the type of person that others could count on.
All of those thoughts and emotions were triggered and played themselves out over 10s of seconds, and only then, did another belief begin to arise. “Wait. Am I being played?” This belief then led me to check the real email address of the sender. My mail client only showed a name as the originating email. But my chair’s name had been spoofed, so that hers was the name displayed on the “From” line of the email. Digging out the actual email address, though, provided the evidence I needed to realize that the emails were coming from a stranger. Who exactly I was communicating with, I have no idea. Only that they were trying to take advantage of the way that I construct my beliefs about the world, and that for a moment, it had worked. I had been led to believe that I was communicating with a particular person.
Sadly, these experiences with scammers are becoming more and more frequent. Buttons pushed. Psychological dials turned. And out pops a belief.
Here’s another one, which isn’t all that different from the frequent phone calls some of us get from the “IRS” telling us that we have urgent back payments to make.
Your in trouble, but we can get you out of it. Just provide your password, and everything will be a-ok!!
Now of course, as long as we aren’t the one who fell for the scam, it can be tempting to mock those that did. “OMG, how could someone fall for that!? What idiots!!” For that matter, let’s throw in the belief that a race of reptiles is secretly running the world, that the Denver airport is the nexus of a New World Order, or that Jimi Hendrix made a pact with the devil that allowed him to play the guitar in the way that he did. [Head palm] How can anyone be so stupid?
It reminds me of one of the great smack downs in literature, a fantastic scene in Hamlet in which Hamlet tears into the puffed up, suck-ups Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me. You would seem to know my stops. You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. You would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass. And there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak? ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.
“Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.” Take that scam artists, fake news, conspiracy peddlers, propagandists, and politicians. You won’t fool us.
And yet…
… we all do have beliefs, and our beliefs do come from somewhere. Most of us would claim that our beliefs, unlike so many others, are grounded in evidence. Except that what qualifies as evidence never gets much examining and our belief about ourselves being guided by evidence also doesn’t get much questioning. Hamlet believes that he cannot be played upon like a pipe, and yet there are many instances in which he is played. He believes that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are merely playing at being his friends. He believes that his Uncle murdered his father, he believes that others have tried to play upon his love for Ophelia in order to pump him for information, and he believes that Ophelia allowed herself to be so used. In other words, Hamlet swims in currents of beliefs that have been triggered by processes of some sort while mocking the processes that would have him embrace particular beliefs. In another part of the play he spits out, “Seems madam? Nay, it is; I know not “seems,” as if to say, “everyone else’s beliefs are wrong, but not mine. Mine are capital-T true.”
If we take a moment, it is relatively easy to become aware of at least some of the processes that design our beliefs. In other words, to become aware of the manner in which all of us are “played like a pipe.” The preacher stands before the congregation and states that god is love and we accept this statement because the preacher is an authority figure. He stands alone before a group, with the other group members apparently attentive. He often is positioned above everyone else and wears robes that indicate a particular status and area of expertise. He is a particular age, has a particular color of skin, way of arranging his hair, and uses terms and phrases that make sense because they are said with inflections that we hear as conviction or urgency. Most of us, if we take a moment to reflect on our own thinking, would recognize that all of these “triggers” construct a potential belief that “here is a person that I can trust and whose own beliefs I will use to guide my own.”
This says nothing about the rightness or wrongness of the beliefs, by the way. That’s not something I care to get into. The important point for right now is to simply recognize that beliefs don’t just spontaneously occur. They are built from particular processes that act on all of us. It is these processes that scam artists conduct like an orchestra. It is these processes that build up, brick-by-brick, the conspiracy theories that haunt the internet. But really, these histories of belief are ubiquitous. They lead the child to blame themself for their parent’s divorce. They haunt the teen who looks in the mirror with self-disgust. They spur the athlete to run just one more lap. The bonds of trust and friendship that make our day-to-day living more meaningful and the superiority complex of the psychopath – all are the clothing of belief.
I’ll get back to the particular sorts of beliefs that science constructs, but I think maybe I’ll sit with beliefs just a bit longer. For example, it is a common misconception that beliefs are “stated things” – a sort of creed or set of values to which we pledge allegiance. For a psychologist, that statement is true: creeds and values are beliefs, but not all beliefs are explicitly stated things. In the same way that a dinner jacket is only one category of clothing, creeds and values are only one category of belief. There are many other types that emerge from the factories of our psyche’s design. Perhaps we keep them hidden, and speak them only to ourselves, but perhaps not, because we don’t have the words to speak them. Yes, some beliefs reside within the realm of words. Others might more accurately be said to lie within the body: emotional beliefs, reflexive beliefs. We also have what we might as well term perceptual beliefs: beliefs that give us, for example, the meaning in a visual scene. And finally, when beliefs are combined with judgments of value, then we have moral beliefs that guide us to approach, avoid, defend and eliminate – sometimes others, but yes, sometimes ourselves.
(Cropped)
So sure, all of us are being played, day in and day out. We have all, at least on occasion been led to believe whatever it is that we believe. We’d like to think that we’re the one doing the designing, but at best we participating in design processes that shape our psychology. Even if you are convinced that you base your living on evidence, think of all the “evidence” you never have the opportunity to experience. The saying, “He was born on third base, and believes he hit a triple” emerges, after all, from a narrow read of the evidence – the narrow slice that a single consciousness inhabits — and the goal is to become aware of history, explicitly choose from the objects it offers, and consciously project the meaning that they offer into the future. That’s the goal.