Ideologies Are Like Possessions

Gries, M€ uller, & Jost (this issue) address a topic of great theoretical and practical importance: the origin of the ideologies that shape—and increasingly define—the current political and social climate. Adopting an economist’s perspective on ideologies, they seek to understand what purpose belief systems serve and why specific ideologies are embraced by individuals. Their answer, in a nutshell, is that people assess how well different ideologies would satisfy their psychological needs (and consumption) and choose the belief system that addresses their needs the most (subject to constraints such as limited information about ideologies and limited supply of ideologies in the “market” of belief systems). At a time when beliefs about, and behavior toward, ostensibly scientific issues such as climate change and vaccination, have become polarized as a result of being viewed through the lens of political ideologies, these questions are of existential importance. As advocates of a new wave in economics commonly referred to as “belief-based utility,” we applaud Gries et al.’s effort to apply an economic framework to understanding how people adopt, update, and abandon their belief systems. Belief-based utility is the idea that the main sources of utility are not material consumption, as economists generally assume, but rather people’s beliefs—about the world, and especially about themselves (e.g., whether they are virtuous, smart, attractive, likeable; see Loewenstein & Molnar, 2018; Molnar and Loewenstein, in press). The idea that people care about what is in their mind, and not just about material consumption, goes way back to classical economists (see Loewenstein, 1992). For example, Jeremy Bentham, who first proposed the notion of utility that became the backbone of economics, listed only a handful of material determinants of utility in his seminal work on hedonics and utility (Bentham, 1789), but a wide range of immaterial, nonphysical concepts, such as reputation, memory, imagination, or expectations—the majority of which can be labeled as beliefs. Adam Smith, likewise, made a case for the role of beliefs driving human behavior: “To what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world?” Smith asked, and answered: “To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages we can propose to derive from it” (Smith, 1759, pp. 108–110). Although these ideas were largely sidelined during the early to mid-20th century as a result of the ordinalist revolution in economics, behaviorism in psychology, and the ensuing exclusive focus on directly measurable goods and outcomes, economists began to re-incorporate these insights in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. For example, Thomas Schelling (1984), in a brilliant paper titled “The Mind as a Consuming Organ,” discussed how little of what we “consume” is actually observable, physical, goods (what standard economics would conceptualize as “consumption”), and how much of it takes place entirely in our minds. By now, theories and models of various sources of belief-based utility have been developed and applied to numerous contexts, such as finance, healthcare, politics, or organizational behavior (see Molnar & Loewenstein, in press).