The Romans adaptation of Greek philosophy was illustrated by the Stoics and Epicureans. The Stoics held that humanity is determined by the fates of nature, while the Epicureans believed that happiness came from seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Plato was revived by Plotinus and dominated Roman philosophy during the early years of Christianity. Both the missionary zeal of early Christians and the tranquility of Roman administration rapidly spread Christianity. The teachings of Jesus were bolstered by defenders, who gave Christianity form and content. St. Augustine successfully reinterpreted Platonic thought within Christian theology, and the consequent influence on psychology continued well beyond. With the fall of the Western empire, intellectual life came to a virtual halt, and only the monastic movement preserved remnants of Greek and Roman civilization. The papacy assumed a leading role in spiritual direction and civil administration. The power shift to the East saw the Byzantine Empire assume a distinctive Greek character. The rise of Islam threatened the survival of Christianity in the Middle East and in North Africa. But, at the same time, much of the Greek heritage of scholarship was preserved and extended in the great academic centers of medieval Islam.

German science and culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries benefited from the enlightened patronage of the Prussian King Frederick the Great. Moreover, the universities of Germany prospered and became centers of excellence in the West, especially in science. Advances in psychology by German philosophers focused primarily on mental activity. Discarding the environmental determinacy of British empiricism, Leibniz defended the active agency of the mind in molding sensory data to provide experience. The active principle of his monadology lent itself to a dynamic view of harmony between independent physical and psychic processes. The rationalism of Wolff was fully elaborated by Kant, who described pure reason as the formation of perceptions innately through time and space, and asserted an elaborate structure of the mind in terms of categories that order the environment. From these formulations, German psychology received a variety of models suggested by Herbart, Beneke, and Lotze. Collectively, the German tradition is diverse but united by the belief in the activity of the mind and its control of environmental influences.

One common and informative way that people express their beliefs, preferences, and opinions is by providing rankings. We use Thurstonian cognitive models to explore individual differences in naturally occurring ranking data for a variety of political, lifestyle, and sporting topics. After demonstrating that the standard Thurstonian model does not capture individual differences, we develop two extended models. The first allows for subgroups of people with different beliefs and opinions about all of the stimuli. The second allows for just a subset of polarized stimuli for which some people have different beliefs or opinions. We apply these two models, using Bayesian methods of inference, and demonstrate how they provide intuitive and useful accounts of the individual differences. We discuss the benefits of incorporating theory about individual differences into the processing assumptions of cognitive models, rather than through the statistical extensions that are currently often used in cognitive modeling.

Irrational beliefs are often associated with poor mental health and are seen as costly beliefs that should be eliminated or replaced when possible. Building on decades of empirical research, we argue that irrational beliefs are widespread in human cognition and not confined to people with poor mental health. Moreover, recent philosophical research has emphasized that irrational beliefs can be beneficial to the person holding them, not only psychologically but also epistemically, which suggests that in some cases elimination or replacement is not the most appropriate course of action. The problem emerging is how we decide when an agent’s irrational belief needs to be challenged: in this chapter, we point to the importance of the social context surrounding the agent by discussing one case of everyday confabulation whose effects vary across contexts.

Delusions are false and incorrigible beliefs. They have yet to yield to psychological or neurobiological explanation. Contemporary theories attempt to bridge these levels of explanation. However, they differ in the allowable directions of influence between brain regions and psychological processes. More recently, beliefs and belief updating have fallen under the lens of social network theories. Uniting individual level accounts with those that incorporate the influence of others on ones’ beliefs may yield new avenues for treatment, that leverage key nodes in an individual’s extant social network, or that reconfigure networks to facilitate more healthful and appropriate belief formation and updating.

This chapter reviews research at the intersection of psychology and political science that studies how people form political beliefs. We discuss the degree to which people’s motivations shape the beliefs that they form, paying particular attention to the extent to which people’s political beliefs are generated through reflection. Both individual differences and situational factors affect the extent to which people are reflective in political domains. As always, more questions remain than researchers have answered, and we conclude with some thoughts about the most pressing ones that future research should tackle.

The ascendancy of French political power supported literary success and scientific achievement. Investigators such as Lagrange, Laplace, and Lavoisier gave mathematical and empirical support to modern chemistry, physics, and biology. In parallel, philosophical discourses on psychology led to a reinterpretation of Descartes’ formulation to focus on sensation. Condillac, Bonnet, and La Mettrie argued for the equation of mental operations and sensory input, with the result that they reduced psychology to sensation. Helvétius and Cabanis attempted to back off from such extremism by asserting the mediating role of a central ego, although both remained committed to sensory physiology. Biran and Comte recognized the consequences of reducing psychology to mere sensory physiology, but each worked out separate solutions. Biran rejected sensationalism as inadequate, suggesting an individual psychology based on consciousness and the will. In contrast Comte ultimately accepted sensationalism and dismissed psychology. For him, the individual person should properly be studied by physiology; the individual behaving in a group is the province of sociology. Comte, however, advocated a spirit of objective observation that was eventually useful to psychology. Thus, the successors to Descartes in France left psychology in a somewhat tenuous position, removed from recognition as a formal discipline.

Functional psychology was less a system than an attitude that valued the utility of psychological inquiry. Assuming a philosophical underpinning from the pragmatism of William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, functional psychology fit well into the pioneering spirit of America. From its beginning, functional psychology had a clear emphasis on applying psychology to individual and social improvement, as was evident from the works of Münsterberg, McDougall, and Hall. The tradition of British natural science and evolutionary theory was integrated into psychology in the views on adaptation championed by the Chicago functionalists, such as Dewey, Angell, and Carr. Mental testing and the study of human capacity constituted important areas of investigation among the Columbia functionalists, represented by Cattell, Thorndike, and Woodworth. Although its reaction to structural psychology kept functional psychology from developing a systematic alternative model of psychological inquiry, this phase of American psychology resulted in two critical benefits. First, functionalism firmly entrenched the new science of psychology in America and imposed on it a particular American orientation toward applied psychology. Second, functional psychology provided a necessary transition from the restricted context of structural psychology to more viable models of psychology, permitting the science to progress.

Accounts of religious beliefs are often based on the assumption that these constitute a special domain, with cognitive processes of acquisition and communication that would be different from other domains of belief. Against this, I argue that religious beliefs are only a special class of meta-represented or reflective beliefs. The contents of religious beliefs are not unified, either, as there is a stark contrast between the beliefs conveyed by doctrinal, organized religious traditions and those found in small-scale, pragmatic traditions aimed at palliating misfortune. These conceptual clarifications make it possible to provide a better account of the transmission of religious beliefs and their effects, including their use as coalitional signals.

Cultural misbeliefs are false beliefs that are widely spread through social transmission, such as rumors or conspiracy theories. These misbeliefs are often feared to cause much damage, as people engage in costly actions on their basis. However, it is possible for people to hold a belief in such a way that the belief only has limited impact on their thoughts or behavior – if they hold a belief reflectively, by contrast with intuitively. Here, we argue that (i) most cultural misbeliefs are held reflectively and that (ii) they rarely directly cause costly behavior. We note that different cultures use different misbeliefs to justify similar behaviors, suggesting that the beliefs are secondary to the behavior. Moreover, misbeliefs usually do not have the consequences they would have if they were held intuitively, causing other types of (usually less costly) behaviors instead.

Myside bias occurs when people evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior opinions and attitudes. Myside bias is displayed by people in all demographic groups, and it is exhibited even by expert reasoners, the highly educated, and the highly intelligent. Surprisingly, however, the degree of myside bias shown is not predictable from individual difference variables that we would expect to be associated with it. For example, it is not attenuated by cognitive sophistication, as measured by cognitive ability or thinking dispositions. Another way in which myside bias is an outlier bias is that, in most circumstances, it shows very little domain generality and appears to be very content dependent. Individuals who display high myside bias on one issue do not necessarily show high myside bias on another, unrelated issue. Because of these unusual characteristics, myside bias needs a different type of model – a content-based model, such as those deriving from memetic theory.

Whether it concerns moral attitudes across cultures or claims about what people deserve, human rights, in theory and practice, involves beliefs. Yet, inquiries about belief, such as community-wide dispositions toward human rights claims and (more importantly for legal and cultural systems of rights) what it means to support human rights and how that support is increasing worldwide, are often marginalized. That marginalization is due, in part, to the reluctance of some social scientists to consider the concepts of universality or belief, since these have often been considered western concepts that are wrongfully imposed on others. As this chapter shows, however, the prospective universality of human rights, or what advocates typically describe as an overlapping consensus, remains a critical issue in the field. Moreover, skepticism about belief across cultures is usually grounded in misconceptions about the very concept of belief. All of this entails that belief in human rights is an important topic that is open to research in the brain and behavioral sciences. This chapter considers how human rights beliefs relate to the transdisciplinary study of belief and offers opportunities for cross-cultural cognitive science.

Beliefs are, or at least appear to be, integral to cognition and action. Though there are scarcely features of human psychology more intuitive to their bearers, beliefs are surprisingly elusive targets of study. In this chapter, we consider some perennial questions about beliefs and suggest that some clarity might be achieved by viewing beliefs through the lens of cognitive psychology. We discuss psychological findings and evolutionary considerations which seem to imply that the mind is not designed to form true beliefs, but beliefs that are instrumentally useful. This issue is redolent of debates over whether people are rational or irrational and whether beliefs aim at truth or serve other psychological functions. We survey a series of practical tradeoffs and computational constraints that limit the attainment of true beliefs, and which may be responsible for apparent irrationality. Additionally, the origin of false or irrational-seeming beliefs may be inadequately specified by behavioral data, which implies that a deeper understanding of processes and prior knowledge inside the head is essential for a science of beliefs. We conclude by noting that a view of irrational beliefs as the result of prior knowledge, rather than irrational processes, may have optimistic implications for improving people’s beliefs.