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Truth, Belief, and Social Bonds

Humans have a deep desire to belong to social groups for survival reasons, which can sometimes conflict with a desire for truth and accuracy. While understanding truth is important, social connection is often more helpful for daily life. As a result, people may hold beliefs that bring social allies rather than those most likely to be true. False beliefs can be socially useful even if not factually accurate. Changing someone's mind requires integrating them into your social group so they do not feel abandoned, as being part of a tribe is prioritized over facts alone. Making social connections such as sharing meals with those of differing views can increase understanding and tolerance between groups. Facts do not change minds as effectively as developing friendships.

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Einah Einah
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146 views2 pages

Truth, Belief, and Social Bonds

Humans have a deep desire to belong to social groups for survival reasons, which can sometimes conflict with a desire for truth and accuracy. While understanding truth is important, social connection is often more helpful for daily life. As a result, people may hold beliefs that bring social allies rather than those most likely to be true. False beliefs can be socially useful even if not factually accurate. Changing someone's mind requires integrating them into your social group so they do not feel abandoned, as being part of a tribe is prioritized over facts alone. Making social connections such as sharing meals with those of differing views can increase understanding and tolerance between groups. Facts do not change minds as effectively as developing friendships.

Uploaded by

Einah Einah
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

The Logic of False Beliefs

Humans need a reasonably accurate view of the world in order to survive. If your model of reality is wildly
different from the actual world, then you struggle to take effective actions each day.
However, truth and accuracy are not the only things that matter to the human mind. Humans also seem to have a
deep desire to belong.
In Atomic Habits, I wrote, “Humans are herd animals. We want to fit in, to bond with others, and to earn the
respect and approval of our peers. Such inclinations are essential to our survival. For most of our evolutionary
history, our ancestors lived in tribes. Becoming separated from the tribe—or worse, being cast out—was a death
sentence.”
Understanding the truth of a situation is important, but so is remaining part of a tribe. While these two desires
often work well together, they occasionally come into conflict.
In many circumstances, social connection is actually more helpful to your daily life than understanding the truth
of a particular fact or idea. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker put it this way, “People are embraced or
condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-
holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true.”
We don't always believe things because they are correct. Sometimes we believe things because they make us
look good to the people we care about.
I thought Kevin Simler put it well when he wrote, “If a brain anticipates that it will be rewarded for adopting a
particular belief, it's perfectly happy to do so, and doesn't much care where the reward comes from — whether
it's pragmatic (better outcomes resulting from better decisions), social (better treatment from one's peers), or
some mix of the two.”
False beliefs can be useful in a social sense even if they are not useful in a factual sense. For lack of a better
phrase, we might call this approach “factually false, but socially accurate.” When we have to choose between
the two, people often select friends and family over facts.
This insight not only explains why we might hold our tongue at a dinner party or look the other way when our
parents say something offensive, but also reveals a better way to change the minds of others.
Facts Don't Change Our Minds. Friendship Does.
Convincing someone to change their mind is really the process of convincing them to change their tribe. If they
abandon their beliefs, they run the risk of losing social ties. You can’t expect someone to change their mind if
you take away their community too. You have to give them somewhere to go. Nobody wants their worldview
torn apart if loneliness is the outcome.
The way to change people’s minds is to become friends with them, to integrate them into your tribe, to bring
them into your circle. Now, they can change their beliefs without the risk of being abandoned socially.
The British philosopher Alain de Botton suggests that we simply share meals with those who disagree with us:
“Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and odd benefit of making it a little
more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However, the
proximity required by a meal – something about handing dishes around, unfurling napkins at the same moment,
even asking a stranger to pass the salt – disrupts our ability to cling to the belief that the outsiders who wear
unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents deserve to be sent home or assaulted. For all the large-scale
political solutions which have been proposed to salve ethnic conflict, there are few more effective ways to
promote tolerance between suspicious neighbours than to force them to eat supper together.”
Perhaps it is not difference, but distance that breeds tribalism and hostility. As proximity increases, so does
understanding. I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln's quote, “I don't like that man. I must get to know him
better.”
Facts don't change our minds. Friendship does.

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