Do personal beliefs change behavior?
| February 2, 2008 | Posted by idnet.com.au under Culture |
Do our beliefs about free will change our behavior? It seems they do. Here researchers primed some subjects to believe that our behavior is wholly determined by environment and genes, and that free will is a myth. (This is a theme of Dawkins who says that punishing a criminal is like kicking your car when it breaks down) Those subjects acted less ethically than those not primed. Beliefs influence behavior.
What would a similar experiment show if the belief challenged was that there is Design behind the universe and life? Do people act the same after reading and believing “The God Delusion”?
None of this addresses the actual truth of the belief, just whether believing it changes behavior. Fascinating!
38 Responses to Do personal beliefs change behavior?
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Gerry
I’d believe it if I saw the ten commandments suddenly carved into the face of the moon a hundred meters deep in letters kilometers in size. Or any other number of miraculous ways of communicating. While I still couldn’t be sure I wasn’t living in some permutation of “The Matrix” where all my memories and experiences are false I think I’d probably still believe my senses. We should probably leave it at that and agree to disagree. I’ll give you the last word.
“I’d believe it if I saw the ten commandments suddenly carved into the face of the moon a hundred meters deep in letters kilometers in size… I’ll give you the last word.”
Why should God bother to carve ‘em into the moon when when He’s already carved them (or something very much like them) into our hearts and heads? Conscience is a universal and undeniable non-material force in every man’s life – it can make a man do what he ought to do, even if that’s not what he needs or wants. And the fact that you know what I mean by “ought” is proof that the letters are big enough for even you to read!
Sorry, I forgot to mention that conscience is both easy to describe and highly unlikely to arise by chance, so it passes the specified complexity test and must therefore be the result of design.
Who would design such a thing? Why?
IMHO it’s rather obvious that beliefs inform actions and behavior. The beliefs of the September 2001 hijackers informed their terrorist actions. Eric Rudolph’s beliefs that the US sanctioning of abortion should go punished informed his actions to bomb Centennial Olympic Park in 1996.
Imagine the resulting behavior of the following belief:
Because man evolved into a social species, various pressures selected those individuals who acted morally which fostered a healthy society in which offspring were more likely to survive and thrive. It is therefore beneficial to the survival to act morally.
Much data backs this belief. I don’t think the result of teaching this could be at all harmful.
Why would an experiment such as this even be of any significance? All one need do is look at the effectiveness of advertising, especially the kind that attempts to inculcate the notion that what it’s selling is “cool”, fashionable, or makes one appear more desirable in some way. This kind of pitch imparts almost no practical information, but is highly effective in getting members of its targeted audience (marks in Carney speak) to view themselves differently if they only have the product being sold. Just look at how many different ways one can supposedly lose all that “belly fat!”
Brilliant Physicist: “There’s no such thing as time.”
Ordinary Man: “You said that before. But I’m busy now. Can we talk about this later?
Davescott- to call time a “metric” and claim that physics has nothing to say about in which direction if flows is incorrect- You see the concept of time as expierenced in the mind is as best as physics can tell- a physical expierence betwee nbrain waves- sight reason and the physical body. There is not diffence between feeling somthing solid or deriving the intution of the passage of change as time is derived by sight memeory and reason which are all physically rooted- to get outside of physics one has to ask what is guiding time or what created or desingd it- but this question can equally be asked of matter- so unless you consider physics to say nothign about what matter can and will do then i think your claim that physics has nothing to say about which direction time is going in- is misconcieved.
To elucidate my point a little further- think about all the so called alws of physics and the like – they are all based on expeirce and that which we observe that is universal or cannot be broken- for if they could be broken then they would not be laws. Time as a metric if you like flows foward- i cant go back and change thigs that i have done-
even if time travel was possible until it is proven so the flow of time forward is a law and one which i think is very well gounded in physics and has yet to be challanged by a winner of tomorrow’s lottery-
Frost 122585, I didn’t get the impression that Dave Scot was subjectivising time. It seemed to me that he was updating Aristotles description of time as “a measure of motion.”