CRITICAL THINKING - Cognitive Biases: Alief [HD]

In this video, the psychologist Laurie Santos (Yale University) explains the philosopher Tamar Gendler (Yale University)'s concept of alief — an automatic or habitual mental attitude. The video discusses why aliefs differ from beliefs and how aliefs can affect our important decisions more than we expect.

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[WirelessPhilosophy]

Hey everyone, thanks for checking out our video! This is the first in our brand new series on cognitive biases, featuring the psychologist Laurie Santos (Yale University). We'll be releasing a new video every day this week, so keep an eye out! Tomorrow's on Anchoring :)

[ashwinsamuel]

man these videos are so underrated they deserve more credit that most nonsense on youtube

[CurtisKayfish]

Thank you for this accessible explanation. What some call conscious vs unconscious reasoning. I’ve had trouble explaining to myself and others why we intellectualize one way, yet act another, and the concept of our Aliefs summarizes this.

[jdetychey]

Cognitive Biases are fascinating, please complete the playlist on it!

[mariamamin]

This video was incredible, I’ve been finding it so hard to engage with my university work this term but this was so clear and easy to follow it’s really helped. Thanks a lot :))

[antoniomarcos]

Congratulations, Laurie. Your video is very clear and your delivery is really listener-friendly.
Thank you.

[mymyersfamily]

I believe this video is flawed. When I hesitate to pick up a plastic spider in the box with my Halloween decorations, it is because I am aware that there is a very small, but still real, possibility that a real spider has crawled into the box and that I am mistakenly picking it up thinking it is plastic. Once I have picked it up and confirmed it is plastic, I have no continuing stress over holding it in my hand, which seems to refute to notion of an alief. If the alief theory was applying to this situation, I'd continue to feel stress while holding the plastic spider. Similarly, a person might refuse to eat a brown shaped you tell them is chocolate when it looks like poop, because there is always the risk, however, incredibly small, that some one is playing a very bad practical joke or that by some unknown and highly improbable series of events, real poop is being presented as chocolate. I expect once they take a bite and confirm it is chocolate, they no longer are more likely to refuse to continue eating it. Finally, with the see-through bridge, we all know that glass is brittle and weak, and we all would reasonably hesitate to step out on a glass walkway over a deadly fall. The see-through bridge looks like the bottom is made of glass. I've stood on such things before, and my stress was always based on the fact I did NOT know for sure that the surface I was standing on was every bit as solid as concrete or cement or whatever an opaque bridge might be made of. The narrator claims we know for sure, intellectually, that the see-through walkway is safe or we would not be on it. That's false. We do risky things for the adrenaline rush all the time. We go on rollercoasters at carnivals where we rely on the mechanical skills and safety awareness of carnies, and in my experience, part of the adrenaline rush is not just the speed/momentum of the ride, but the knowledge that if anyone made a slight error in assembly or maintenance, I could die. In fact, we all know that bridges have failed, walkways have failed, supposedly unsinkable ships have sunk, people have died on rollercoasters at major theme parks and at carnivals, yet we still cross bridges, walk on walkways, sail in ships, and ride rollercoasters. It is NOT because we intellectually know them to be safe, but that we know the risk presented is very, very small. However, our reaction to a risk is a product of BOTH the size of the risk and the severity of the consequences. Death is such a severe consequence that even a very, very tiny risk can create a fear and stress reaction. I will say we can develop emotional callouses to fear and stress reactions, which explains why our palms are not sweaty when we drive on the freeway. If you take a person from a remote tribe who never rode in a car, and put him in the passenger seat doing 75mph on the freeway, you can bet his palms will be super sweaty. Anyway, I agree belief is a complicated issue, but I'm not at all convinced by this presentation that the proposed alief / belief dichotomy adequately models what is happening psychologically. I mean, the narrator seems to suggest we ALL know that the grand canyon walkway is statistically safer than standing on a sidewalk, but before seeing this video, I knew no such thing. Moveover, taking one walkway that has never had a death is a too small a sample to use for comparative statistical analysis. A more appropriate comparison would be to take all the deaths at all the walkways over scenic vistas in the world and compare that to all the deaths of pedestrians on sidewalks, and I would bet money the walkway deaths are MORE than zero if you did that. Ultimately, it's just a flawed presentation to the extent it tries to sell us on the idea that this is how our minds work, with aliefs and beliefs. It would have been better if it had been more clearly framed as saying, "Some one proposed this alief/belief dichotomy, and I'll now explain what they meant by aliefs, though it is not entirely clear this is actually how the mind works, it is just one proposed model." Instead, the video seems to present aliefs as if they actually are proven to exist, which is wrong.

[gabytorres]

I had been trying to explain this "cognitive and rational knowledge being eclipsed by emotional erroneous beliefs" thing that had been causing me and the people around me so many problems. Maybe this video doesn't solve the issue, but words are powerful handles of our reality. Maybe this will help us understand that we all experience this, and that it's also a hard thing to overcome.
Thank you. I'm hooked.

[RealXstream]

Skydivers have a says Ng that "knowledge dispels fear". As a tandem skydive instructor with an interest in psychology and the human condition I have long considered my work to be helping individuals transcend their instinctive but irrational ALIEFS in favour of their scientific, knowledge based BELIEFS.
More over, I suspect that each time an individual practices transcending ALIEFS in favour of beliefs, they are evolving into a more modern, more conscious human being.
I haven't be able to explain this quite as succinctly as I can now thanks to your video. :-)

[cgm]

How is an alief different fro an implicit bias or an autonomic response? What use is this new category?

[tetrapharmakos]

This seems like an alternative model for what Daniel Kahneman calls "System 1".

[juliobaquerizo]

@wireless Philosophy can you please tell us your sources? i would like to red more about biases. can you suggest any books?

[mrjoony]

Please do more on this topic. This video is a good introduction but what is the science part of it? How can we overcome it and stuff like that?

[lakkakka]

I believe the plastic hand one was a bad example as I have no problem smashing those.

[tonyowens]

Thank you so much, I've been looking for this for my clients and friends for years.

[융쏘Yoonsso]

making Korean subtitles for this video....complete! Great video by the way :)

[Mindbridge]

Some very good stuff. The more souls we awaken, the more positive vibration we create and the more positive and enlighten the World becomes. A beautiful cause and effect relationship.

[snowqueen]

literally have a final in a couple hours thanks sm

[thanossurtugal]

Something significant that has to be said is that calling a person racist and punishing them based on their alieves is wrong.We can't change our alieves, and thus shouldn't be punished for having a wrong alief.

[rg]

I suspect aliefs are also involved in how we treat men and boys for example. Consider how the sexes are treated differentially in prison, for example, on the same crimes.