_Levels_Of_Belief
Three Levels of Belief
There are three levels that people can operate on when acquiring knowledge or forming beliefs.
1. Authority based.
This is where we take an authority at their word. for example: ”My parent said so, so it must be right.”
In childhood, number 1 is an important survival mechanism. If you believe your parents when they tell you not to cross the road, you survive and can pass on your genes later.
2. Opinion based.
Where everybody and anybody is correct, it’s all just opinions.
At school and college, some teachers in an attempt to be open minded sometimes teach number 2, that anything goes and all beliefs and opinions are equally valid.
3. Evidence based.
Where knowledge has to be backed up with evidence
In college you are sometimes taught number 3. This is how real knowledge has been advanced since the scientific revolution. For better or worse, it is the most reliable and useful information available.
Being at stage 3 not only protects people from manipulation, loss of money or opportunity, it also is utterly fascinating and allows people to develop accurate models of the world that they can intelligently act on throughout life.
Are all opinions equally valid?
Lets say you have somebody who has done some experiments on falling objects in physics, and somebody who hasn’t, who’s opinion is going to best predict the motion of an object? The one that has looked at the experiments, right? Correct or not? Or are both equally valid? The one who hasn’t done the experiments has seen objects move all his life, why is his opinion not as good? The reason is he has not conducted experiments or studied the experimental based subject. In fact, the book “How to Think Straight About Psychology” by Stanovich describes an experiment that showed that normal people are surprisingly bad at predicting the motion of object, even a simple system of a spinning pendulum that is then cut, despite the fact they often have more than 20 years of observational experience of moving objects.
Would you trust someone who complains about a conspiracy of orthodox science to build an airplane for you? If he had 50 years of experience of watching airplanes take off, and he said he could explain how they worked with a theory the mainstream said was untestable (or untested), would you take a ride in the plane he designed? Would you trust an aeronautical engineer who bypasses peer review and publishes straight to the public? What if his book turns out to be really well written, more spiritually meaningful and so much more exciting than any other on aeronautical science?
Or would you trust an aeronautical scientist who is basing his ideas on falsifiable and peer reviewed science based on experiments and a long history?
If you don’t trust someone who is not peer reviewed and who complains about a conspiracy of orthodox aeronautical science, why do we trust those that are the same way about psychological science?
So are all opinions or beliefs really all valid? I’ll leave that to the reader to answer.
So why do we assume everybody’s opinion on psychology is as equally valid as a peer reviewed psychological scientist? The truth is all opinions are not right, and psychology is no longer “anything goes” when it comes to theories. You need evidence these days with the American Psychological Association (APA) (although some say the APA still allows some untestable stuff in at the fringes, and that it has poor enforcement), and even more so with the apparently more scientific Association for Psychological Science (APS): http://www.psychologicalscience.org/
This improvement in psychology protects consumers more than it did in the past.
As you read this website have these three levels in the back of your mind. If this website achieves nothing else, if it helps just one person become more evidence based, I will feel I have done something.
“I am regarding primal therapy and psychology… not sure where to turn and whom to trust.”
This is precisely what I am talking about in this section. When you learn stage 3 evidence based thinking, you are able to assess the evidence for yourself, without being tugged one way and then another by persuasive writing. In other words learn how science works and learn how to evaluate the evidence for yourself. After time you may start to see patterns in those who base their ideas on evidence and experiment, in the correct way, and then you can start to trust those people for accurate information (so you don’t have to do all the research yourself!). An introductory psychology course, and a social psychology course (a local cheap college is fine in any country) may really help you to learn stage 3 thinking. It makes a whole lot of difference to have a teacher help you, and have to justify your ideas with evidence to the teacher or class (its better than learning alone, but any learning in this area is great). And really work at the learning process, the more you put in the more you get out.
Bear in mind that scientific evidence based thinking does NOT come naturally, it is not genetic, and it is a learned cultural development that came out of the scientific revolution. The medical and psychological treatments that existed up until this scientific revolution usually fall into the category of either placebo or barbaric (although they may be a few exceptions).
