Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [46]
Once we acknowledge that implicit assumptions and explicit convictions are just subsets of the single category of belief, we can go further and acknowledge that even the distinction between them is suspect. All of us have plenty of beliefs that we are somewhat aware of holding, or that we can become aware of holding when necessary. (I don’t believe anything about the location of my sunglasses in December, but come June, when I can’t find them, I believe that my sister borrowed them.) Still, however tenuous this distinction might be, it is relevant to this book in at least one respect. While many of our beliefs fall somewhere in the middle of the implicit-explicit spectrum, it is those that lie at the extreme ends that collapse most spectacularly in the event of error. If anything can rival for sheer drama the demise of a belief that we have adamantly espoused, it is the demise of a belief so fundamental to our lives that we never even registered its existence.
Our beliefs, then, are models of the world—but they aren’t just models for models’ sake. Like economic models, our mental ones exist to help us make predictions and policies. In the words of William James, beliefs “are really rules for action.” One obvious corollary to this is that our beliefs have consequences. I don’t mean that being wrong about them has consequences, although that’s also true: as we just saw, a flawed belief helped eradicate nearly half the world’s wealth. I mean that simply holding a belief can have consequences.
Consider another financial example. Since 1992, CalTech and MIT have been collaborating on a project known as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. The observatory is the single most expensive project ever funded by the National Science Foundation. It took ten years and $300 million to build, and costs $30 million per year to operate. Its mission is to find gravitational waves (“ripples in the fabric of space-time [that] are produced by violent events throughout the universe,” says the NSF, if that helps), and it had better succeed, because the existence of those waves is posited by nothing less than the general theory of relativity. As the science writer Margaret Wertheim has noted, this is an instance where “belief has brought into being a half-billion-dollar machine.”
A half-billion dollars is a bundle of money, but pricey machines are just the tip of the iceberg. Housing bubbles, holy wars, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the lunar landing: all of these came about as the result of belief. Plainly, then, our beliefs don’t just have financial and material consequences. They also have political, legal, intellectual, cultural, and even corporeal ones. And, crucially, they have emotional and psychological consequences as well. Again, I’m not talking about the emotional consequences of being wrong about a belief, a topic we’ll get into later. I’m talking about the emotional consequences of merely believing it—the way that building a gravitational-wave observatory is a consequence of believing in general relativity (whether or not it is correct), and investing in the stock market is a consequence of believing that it is sound (whether or not it is).
Some of the emotional consequences of our beliefs are pretty straightforward. If you believe that your true love is nervous during dinner because he plans to propose to you over dessert, you will be excited and happy; if you believe that he is nervous because he plans to break up with you, you will