Book Recommendation: Beyond Belief

Have you ever known someone who struggles with the same problem again and again—despite the solution being completely obvious to everyone around them?



I’m sure most of us can think of at least a few people who fit that description. Maybe it’s a friend who continually makes bad choices in their dating life. Or a person who complains endlessly about their job but seems unable to take even trivial steps to improve it. “If they only did X,” we think, “their problem would go away.”

In almost all of these cases, the problem lies in their beliefs. The person struggling isn’t able to see a solution that’s obvious to everyone else, because their worldview won’t allow them to.

Limiting beliefs are easy to spot in other people; they’re much harder to notice within ourselves.

Today I want to recommend a new book on the science of beliefs, written by my friend Nir Eyal. Beyond Belief explains the fascinating science of how beliefs shape what we perceive, how we feel and the actions we take. It also provides tools for helping us identify our own limiting beliefs—and how to change them.

Nir sent me an advance copy of his new book to read, and I recorded an interview with him about what he learned digging deep into the research:

Belief, Reality and Delusions

Writing about belief is hard to do well.

On the one hand, there’s ample evidence for the power of beliefs to transform what we perceive, feel and do. We’re never just neutrally observing reality. Instead, what we experience is always a combination of the outside world and our beliefs about what that outside world is like.

On the other hand, a lot of self-help has taken the belief-shapes-reality notion too far. There’s a whole genre of delusional, quasi-mystical books that argue that simply believing in something is enough to change reality. These books teach a kind of unsustainable optimism—every time something bad happens, the explanation is that it’s because our beliefs were imperfect. Thus, every failure of the prediction becomes more evidence we need to double-down on our delusional optimism.

Nir does a good job of avoiding the extremes of both delusional optimism and faux-intellectual pessimism in his coverage. In reviewing the science on the placebo effect, for instance, he points out a great study which found that placebo inhalers for asthmatics had a similar effect on relieving symptoms as real ones, but, critically, the placebo didn’t actually change lung capacity.

There’s a sort of meta-question here that seems important: what actually can be changed by our beliefs, and what are the stubborn truths about reality that don’t change based on how we think.

Belief and Energy

Nir’s book release comes as I have been researching and writing on energy management, spurring me to think about how our topics overlap.

Fatigue and energy levels are exactly the kind of domain where our beliefs can have a big impact. Indeed, one of the early critiques of ego depletion research was that depletion can be moderated substantially by mindset. If we believe working hard “depletes” or “energizes” us, that belief itself can make a big difference in our persistence.

More deeply, the story we tell ourselves about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it can have a big impact on our energy levels.

A major finding in research on fatigue is that intrinsic motivation plays an enormous role in moderating the tiring effect of mental effort. It’s why doing sudoku puzzles can be a relaxing activity on a Sunday morning, but we might find the same task straining if if it was a work assignment.

Intrinsic motivation is all about beliefs. The best theory of intrinsic motivation is that we feel intrinsically motivated to pursue activities that allow us to satisfy our basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and connectedness. But those, in turn, depend critically on our other beliefs about whether our job is a burden or a calling, if we feel skillful or inept, and whether the work is meaningful or useless.

Further Questions on Beliefs

One sign of a good book is that it leaves you thinking about its ideas long after you’ve finished. Some of my lingering questions after finishing this book include:

• How much of having “better” beliefs is a shift towards greater accuracy versus useful self-deception?
• Are explicitly articulated beliefs and unconscious expectations governed by the same mechanisms? Are there some beliefs that we can change simply by introspection, while others require direct experience to shift?
• Is it better to shift beliefs by affirming the desired belief, or by increasing doubt on the limiting one? In other words, is the action of belief change more like increasing confidence or increasing skepticism?
• How should we reconcile the “beliefs as tools” notion with the idea of degrees of belief, as espoused by Bayesian models of rationality?
• If limiting beliefs are easier to spot in others than ourselves, how do we see past the self-fulfilling logic of our own worldview? What techniques and practices should we cultivate to help spot when our own beliefs need adjustment?

I encourage everyone to check out Nir’s book. I found it a compelling read that pushed me to rethink some of my own beliefs.