For survival reasons, it’s important to know the truth. Knowing that eating the root of a specific plant makes you sick, is useful information – it means you can avoid it. What if the shaman of your tribe is asking you to eat the root as part of a ritual? In a social context, the incentives are reversed. You know you’ll get sick for a few days if you eat the root, but that’s preferable to risking being shunned or even ejected from the tribe. Throughout most of human history while we lived as hunter-gatherers, being ostracised was equivalent to death: we couldn’t survive except as part of a group. So it’s not surprising that we’re programmed to respond to cultural incentives, even when it conflicts with our incentive to follow the truth.
When our beliefs are merit-based, we care about and monitor accuracy: if you believe your train leaves from platform 5 and the conductor tells you it’s actually platform 10, you thank them. You aren’t upset they corrected you. The opposite is true for ‘crony’ beliefs – things you believe in order to make the right impression on others – because challenging those beliefs is either an attack on your ‘tribe’ or risks you’ll be ostracised for associating with a ‘nonbeliever’. Effective groups actively build a collection of crony beliefs that are increasingly costly to hold: isolating members from other groups they may be part of, and making it harder to leave. Scientologists don’t stay despite the ‘Xenu’ story (belief in a galactic overlord), they stay because of it: once you’ve reached level OT3, it’s too costly to leave the group, so you swallow the belief and get pulled deeper in.
| Name | Link | Type |
|---|---|---|
Crony Beliefs | Blog | |
The fear of rejection isn’t psychological, it’s biological, it’s in our DNA | Blog | |
Why Do Scientologists Accept the Xenu Story? | Blog |