Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People

This slender and very clearly written book challenges an influential view that seems to be supported by social and cognitive science: that outside domains where there is familiarity and effective feedback, people are by and large rather irrational. This irrationality is said to be hardwired in our cognition and, say, makes us receptive to demagogues and explains why many of us are scandalously politically ignorant. This popular view is supported not just by survey data, but also by large number of experiments that provide purported evidence for so-called rationality deficit models of human nature. By contrast, Neil Levy, argues that what he calls ‘bad beliefs’ are caused by ‘polluted’ epistemic environments in which the proper functioning of higher order evidence and cues is undermined or corroded. Often this epistemic pollution is the work of strategic (even manipulative) political agents. But cues are generally sources of information and, thus, reasons, not necessarily manipulation. In fact, they can be manipulated in virtue of the fact that they are treated as reasons or reliable sources. In order to make this position plausible, Levy offers a novel account of belief formation and its nature. In particular, many very important beliefs result from the (rational) practice of deference and are often largely off-loaded on the environment. Levy is especially interested in explaining the widespread existence of bad beliefs and drawing solutions from this explanation to prevent or undermine the prevalence of bad beliefs. The previous two paragraphs do not convey how the book is animated by great concern over unfolding human-induced climate change. Levy seems to hold that because the populace holds a number of bad beliefs ‘in defiance of the scientific authorities’, (xi) political decisionmakers are unwilling or unable to act on the dire warnings of climate science. There is, thus, a real urgency to Levy’s writing which is peppered with illustrations from recent political life. In what follows, I first explain what Levy means by ‘bad belief’. In order to facilitate discussion, I also introduce a further term, ‘authoritated belief’. I then provide a critical survey of each chapter followed by a discussion of Levy’s methodology. I conclude with reflections that put Levy’s project in a wider historical and methodological perspective. A bad belief