Belief & Behaviour

I reviewed a lot of literature over the past few days and took a hard critical look at the debate which seems to be raging on the subject of Belief, Knowledge, Truth and Behaviour. The story is very different when I look at these areas through the lens of philosophy, versus psychology; and these are different again from those who seek to profit from their expertise (as executive coaches) in applying the still shifting theoretical framework in the business world.

So where do I stand?

I quickly ran into a major problem with the idea of TRUTH. It is subjectively defined and a wide range of data may be accepted as "evidence". Let me briefly run through the key concepts I've encountered:

• We have, via natural selection, developed into a species that seeks information to better survive, and exploit to our own advantage, the environments we find ourselves in.
• We are social animals, and as such, are to some degree dependent on the continued goodwill of those we live and work with. Therefore the beliefs and opinions of my family, neighbours and co-workers will have an impact on the decisions I make. How much of an impact they may have on my behaviour, and to what degree they impact my own beliefs will vary depending on how much importance I ascribe to a particular social relationship. I will likely place a great deal more importance on the beliefs and expectations of a spouse, than I would on those of a distant relative I see only once every few years.
• We have adapted to a reality that a few false positives are less detrimental to our well-being than the odd catastrophic false negative. (ex: Is that a threat to me or my resources? If I act as if it IS a threat, whether it really is or not, I'll feel more secure about the well being of myself and my stuff. If I decide that I don't really KNOW that's a threat, and behave accordingly, I may be wrong -- with disasterous results.)
• Some perspectives, like that expressed by Neale Walsh in The New Revelations (Hodder Mobius, 2002), say that humans tend to believe that doing something will make things better, when in fact we should be looking at beliefs - rather than behaviours.
  "You can take whatever action you want to take to alter someone else's behaviour or to stop it, but unless you alter the beliefs that produced such behaviour, you will alter nothing and stop nothing. You can alter belief in 2 ways. Either by enlarging upon it, or by changing it completely. But you must do one or the other or you will not alter behaviour. You will merely interrupt it."
• The Theory of Reasoned Action as put forward by Miller (2005), and Ajzen's expansion of the model into the Theory of Planned Behaviour; both propose that the most utilitarian theoretical models incorporate belief(attitudes), social implications (subjective norms), and behaviour (behavioural intentions). In it's simplest form, Reasoned Action or Planned Behaviour can be expressed as a mathematical formula (Hale, 2003):

BI = (AB)W1+(SN)W2

BI = behavioural intention

(AB) = one's attidude toward performing the behaviour (attitude = sum of all beliefs related to the subject)

W = Empirically derived weights

SN = one's subjective norms related to performing the behaviour (influence of the attitudes of significant others in my life towards the behaviour)

The science looks good but it has to make some sense to me on a gut level--I need to see this in action to believe it! I realize our gut response is sometimes wrong but I cannot bring myself to ignore common sense, either. I can certainly grasp the the value of mis-belief (believing things that aren't true) as being utilitarian on an individual level. It's like the expression to "err on the side of caution". We get plenty of this in safety awareness education - "what to do if...." is supposed to help us avoid harm or damage in high risk situations.

People aren't dumb. They will find their own methods to express this in a variety of ways. Right off I'm thinking of how mothers will manipulate belief in their children to protect them from perceived harm "Don't stand in the boat dear, or you'll slip and drown". "Don't stick your finger in the socket -- it bites!" The concerned parent doesn't care whether the belief they are instilling in the child is true or not -- what matters is the safer behaviour that results from holding this belief.

Ok, I'm convinced this is a useful model for exploring how we choose what to do. Next, I want to consider applications for knowledge workers -- esp when our choices will have a real impact on the safety or wellbeing of our fellow humans.