Belief; A Complication

In what ways are our notions about people (and in particular, categories of people) so deeply engrained that the associations become unlearnable? As applied to women and sexism, race and racism, it is surely true that people absorb the stereotypes and value system of the prevailing culture. I write today about belief, drawing mostly from the realm of philosophy. In particular, I explore the different types of beliefs that exist within society, with special attention to how implicit, semiconscious versions of belief are at the root of our ideas about race and sex, culturally learned values and societal norms. Examination of the systems of beliefs that operate within us to make stereotyping habits of thought resistant to rewiring is relevant to any efforts to overcome these stereotypes.

Tamar Gendler, of the philosophy department here at Yale and a long time personal hero of mine, has championed a theory that disentangles two types of belief, what she calls “alief” and “belief.” To make a complicated story short, an alief can be thought about as an unconscious, associational, and automatic belief based on habits and perhaps, in part, imagination.

To define this concept by example, think about a horror movie goer who is terrified when a killer comes on screen. The viewer both “knows” that the killer is merely on screen and thus is harmless (a “belief”) but acts as though she is in some sort of danger (based on an alief), as shown by her terrified response. The details are less important here and in fear of misrepresenting the theory I’ll leave it at this. People can “believe” things at multiple levels, and implicit, unconscious visceral beliefs can operate to affect behavior (aka: acting fearful at the theater). The implicit belief, the alief, can be seen in countless examples (see Gendler) in our behavior.

Let’s turn to the topic at hand. People may cognitively believe that, lets say, women are just as capable as men, but implicitly and unconsciously “alieve” traditional stereotypes about the groups. Just to clarify, the individual may not (and it seems usually does not) have conscious control over the functioning of the “alief.” As much as I want to act in accordance with my higher level cognitive belief that the differences between the sexes are unimportant in most contexts, my “aliefs” formed by culture or personal experience may lead to an implicit belief at a lower level to which I do not ascribe consciously.

Gendler’s theory of “alief” helps to explain the effects we see on the Implicit Association Test. People’s implicit biases against groups become clear on associative tasks such as this, indicating that people do have beliefs about racial groups that they do not promote deliberately.

The idea that our unconscious belief (alief) can ascribe to views we do not promote consciously is certainly interesting in and of itself. Gendler’s work is also exciting in that it merges philosophical rumination on the meaning of the concept “belief” with experimental psychological evidence about how people truly behave. Lastly, her ideas have implications for stereotyping. We can change beliefs without changing aliefs, leaving the portions of our behavior that are governed by implicit processors problematic.