The value of irrational beliefs

The idea that human beings like us are rational cost-calculators, coolly surveying the evidence around us and making informed choices about our actions and behaviours, was a guiding principle behind much of Western science, philosophy and economics for centuries. It is a belief that has been steadily eroded in more recent years, especially in the fields of social and behavioural psychology.

Pioneering work by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, among many others, has shown, through deftly designed experiments, how many of beliefs and opinions are informed by irrational forces, from memories clouded by biases, to the short-cuts we use to make decisions in our daily life.

What is less discussed, according to Professor Lisa Bortolotti, a philosopher at the University of Birmingham, is whether certain irrational beliefs might be providing a valuable service to the person holding them, without necessarily harming anyone else. “There might be ways that irrational beliefs are good for us, and we don’t realize the role they play in our mental economy,” says Professor Bortolotti.

Irrational beliefs can be defined as those which are either ill-grounded in evidence when they are adopted, or that prove impervious to counter-evidence later. Bortolotti is interested in the relationship between these epistemically irrational beliefs - including reports of distorted memories, fabricated explanations for actions, delusional beliefs and optimistically biased beliefs - and epistemic functionality, meaning a person’s ability to engage actively with their surrounding environment.

As an example of a helpfully irrational belief, Bortolotti gives the case of a person suffering dementia who conveys to someone a distorted memory. “It might be clearly false, but actually, it contains some important accurate autobiographical information about them. If you challenge what they say, they might stop sharing their thoughts and, because recall helps them remember, they might lose that information about themselves over time”. Allowing people to continue holding false beliefs that are useful to them, is something that caregivers, family members and physicians have long grappled with in mental illness and dementia.

“There is a big debate among psychiatrists and clinical psychologists about what to do if someone tells you something very unusual, very strange, something you think is a delusion. Do you engage? Do you ask them questions? Do you challenge them? Do you confront them? There are lots of different ways of dealing with this, and each potential response has implications”. Confronting a false belief could be emotionally hard on an individual if that belief is helping them make sense of something difficult.

_{“At the time people are expressing the belief, it may be important to them. In the future, it is likely to become less important, and will be OK for you to challenge it, but at the time, the challenge may not be the most helpful response.”}

Lisa Bortolotti, Professor of Philosophy, University of Birmingham

Positive illusions are an obvious example of helpful falsehoods. Not expecting that one will fall victim to cancer, or that one’s marriage will end in divorce, might be necessary beliefs to live in hope and positivity even though, statistically, both have a far from trivial likelihood. Positive illusions could improve a person’s grit. A view that one failed a driving test because the examiner was biased against them, for instance, makes it more likely they would try the test again, compared to someone who concluded they were simply hopeless at driving.

Professor Bortolotti argues that false beliefs sometimes prove their utility precisely because they are dropped when their usefulness expires. She cites the example of a musician who became quadriplegic after an accident. While in hospital, his girlfriend left him. He convinced himself that she had not left him - that in fact, they recently got married. His care team did not challenge the belief; they could see that it was helping him avoid a major depression, which could limit his engagement in rehabilitation, or worse, even push him to consider suicide. Over time, the man completed his rehabilitation and eventually moved into his own apartment, at which time he had accepted the realities of his situation. “The belief helped him manage his overwhelmingly negative emotions. Such irrational beliefs can help us overcome a crisis.”

Approaching false beliefs with an open mind as to their potential utility could reveal continuities between those with mental illness and those, clinically-speaking, without them. “We tend to think about people with mental health issues being irrational in a particular way. It’s true that they may make mistakes of reasoning, and may not consider the evidence, but that’s exactly what we do every day,” says Professor Bortolotti. “It’s just that, because the content of our beliefs is more mundane, others don't notice it as much. It is a mistake to think of people with mental health issues as irrational in some special way.” Ultimately, irrational beliefs involve the same violations of epistemic norms - namely, lack of evidence to support them in the first place, or failure to adjust course when counter-evidence presents itself. “Symptoms of schizophrenia or mental disorders are beliefs that share a lot of characteristics with beliefs which are not symptomatic of mental disorders but are equally irrational, like beliefs in conspiracy theories, prejudiced beliefs, or superstitions.”

Bortolotti recognizes that some false beliefs are dangerous and unproductive - both to the individual and to wider society - but hopes her work, which will be published in a forthcoming book by Oxford University Press, could provide a mechanism to sift through those beliefs we should attempt to replace with less irrational ones versus those whose replacement could obstruct some useful epistemic outcomes from happening.