Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [45]
By contrast, when philosophers talk about belief (which they do often; it is an occupational hazard), they mean something markedly different. Or rather, they mean something more: they agree that our overt convictions about financial markets and so forth deserve to be called beliefs, but they think a lot of other things merit the term as well. Suppose you are reading this book in bed at midnight with the blinds drawn. Philosophers would say that your set of beliefs right now includes the following: that it is dark outside; that the sun will not rise for many more hours; that when it does, it will do so in the east; that the mattress underneath you is a solid object; that a flying saucer is not about to crash through your bedroom window; that you will wake up tomorrow as the same person you are today, and so on.*
What makes these additional beliefs seem so strange—what makes them seem, in fact, so unbelief-like—is that there is no experience associated with holding them. Believing that my mattress is solid doesn’t feel like believing in God, largely because believing that my mattress is solid doesn’t feel like anything. I am completely unaware of believing it. Left to my own devices, I’m extremely unlikely to characterize it as a belief, and, if I’m called upon to defend it, I will be both baffled as to why I should do so and at a loss as to how to go about it. In other words, almost everything we normally associate with the experience of believing—consciousness, conviction, emotion, explanation—is absent from these other, implicit beliefs.
Psychologically, then, the everyday concept of belief and the philosophical one differ from each other in the most salient way imaginable: in how we experience them. Functionally, however, they are virtually indistinguishable. Whether we are aware of our beliefs or not, they are all, like Greenspan’s free-market philosophy, models of the world. In the literal sense, a model of the world is a map, and that’s basically what beliefs are, too: mental representations of our physical, social, emotional, spiritual, and political landscapes. My explicit belief that my father-in-law dislikes me is crucial to my mental representation of my family, just as my implicit belief that my mattress is solid is crucial to my mental representation of my bedroom. Both serve the same maplike function of helping me figure out where I might or might not want to sit when I enter a certain room. Both, in other words, are necessary pixels in my picture of the world. Whether or not I can feel that pixel light up in my head is irrelevant. Think about what happens when I walk into an unfamiliar hotel room at night: in order to decide where to lie down, I need a mental image of the kind of things on which I can sleep, but I don’t need to know that I have that image. The model of the world—the belief—is vital, but awareness of the belief is dispensable. In fact, lack of awareness is the norm. From the anticipated behavior of inanimate objects to the presumed identity of our parents to whether we can see a mountain chain or see at all, the vast majority of our mental models are implicit: entirely unfelt, yet essential to how we make sense of ourselves and the world.
Just as implicit and explicit beliefs function in the same way, they also fail in the same way. However different they might seem to us under normal circumstances, in the moment of error, they are identical. Or rather, they become identical: the instant an implicit assumption is violated, it turns into an explicit one. Imagine for a moment a scene worthy of a Marx Brothers movie. It’s nighttime, I emerge from the bathroom in my pajamas, pick up my