We are all guilty of sometimes failing to act in line with what we believe. Maybe we believe in human caused climate change but fail to change our lifestyle in response. We probably know about the environmental damage caused by the fast fashion industry, not to mention the human labour cost, but we can’t resist buying cheap, throw-away clothes. We are aware of the suffering involved in factory farming, but only a very small percentage of us are vegans. We know about the damage to our skin caused by sun exposure, but we perhaps don’t apply high factor sunscreen as regularly as we should.
The Role of Cognitive Experience in Decision and Action is a three-year research project jointly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation, and the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR). We aim to explore belief-discordant behaviour and offer a new explanation which emphasises the role played by how things seem to us. Usually, the things we believe feel or seem true to us – you believe you’re reading about our project and this belief seems true to you. But sometimes the things we believe don’t seem true. We believe the physicist when they explain that solid objects are mostly empty space, we believe that the Earth is a sphere and orbits the sun, but – probably – none of these beliefs seems true.
Our approach offers a new explanation of the frequent disconnect between our beliefs and our actions and decisions: if our beliefs don’t seem true to us (i) they won’t influence our everyday, unreflective actions, and (ii) they will have far less influence over our reflective decision-making than beliefs which do seem true. What is more, if something seems true to us (iii) it will influence our behaviour and decision-making even if we don’t believe it. This leaves us particularly susceptible to online disinformation which is designed to seem true to us.
Understanding that our actions depend not just on what we believe but on what seems true to us promises to revolutionise strategies for implementing behavioural changes in ourselves and others, helping us to address pressing social challenges more effectively. It’s not enough to simply possess the belief that fast fashion has significant human and environment costs, that factory farming causes suffering, or that climate change is real. If we want these beliefs to inform our actions, they need to seem true.