Dimensions of Identity-Representing Belief

Recent work has proposed that there are symbolic beliefs. These beliefs do not serve primarily to track the facts in the world but rather to express the believer’s own identity. On this view, several disparate features of belief – from whether a belief is important to identity to whether it is sensitive to evidence – would be related to an underlying “symbolicness” dimension. We converted the features potentially related to symbolicness into items and asked people to rate their own beliefs on them. Study 1 found that beliefs which were high on one feature (importance) were rated higher on all the items, except for sensitivity to evidence. Study 2 found that ratings of any beliefs on almost all the items loaded onto a single, symbolicness factor, except again for evidence insensitivity. Study 3 asked participants to rate their own beliefs on all the items in Study 2 and several additional items which got at whether a belief was subjective. We recovered the symbolicness factor, but found it was largely orthogonal to the subjectivity and evidence insensitivity items. These findings suggest that most of the features we tested relate to an underlying symbolicness factor, which corresponds to whether a belief represents identity. But, surprisingly, this factor was not related to items that get at whether a belief represents facts about the world. It would seem that some beliefs express identity and track facts; some beliefs only do one of these things; and some beliefs do neither.