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Key points
- Nonbelievers lack strong commitment to ideological belief, but that doesn't mean they're nihilists.
- When forming beliefs, nonbelievers use cognitive flexibility, intellectual humility, and analytical thinking.
- While nonbelievers tend to align with liberalism, they recognize the relativism of values and morals.
In my previous blog post, I outlined the five stages of ideological commitment with the underlying premise that the more committed one is to their ideological beliefs, the greater the risk of personal distress, interpersonal conflict, and dysfunctional behavior including the potential for violence. In this post, I’ll discuss the first stage of nonbelief.
Nonbelief
A nonbeliever is one who is uncommitted to any particular ideology, where “ideology” is defined as a shared belief system or “worldview” made up of not only factual beliefs but also values (i.e., beliefs about what’s important) and morals (i.e., beliefs about what’s good or bad and right or wrong).
Being a nonbeliever doesn’t mean that one is a nihilist who doesn’t believe in anything. On the contrary, a nonbeliever might very well subscribe to a specific religious creed or political philosophy. But instead of succumbing to the “paradox of faith” in which one belief is inversely proportional to evidence—in other words, that one believes more passionately with decreasing evidentiary support—beliefs are chosen and maintained according to the “holy trinity of truth detection” consisting of cognitive flexibility, intellectual humility, and analytical thinking.
The five stages of ideological commitment are based on the premise that utilizing cognitive flexibility (i.e., understanding and appreciating alternative viewpoints), intellectual humility (i.e., thinking of beliefs as probability judgments and acknowledging that one might be wrong), and analytical thinking (i.e., suspending intuitive thinking in favor of considering the evidence to support belief) represents a mentally healthy way of believing that’s associated with a lower risk of false belief, vulnerability to misinformation, and social conflict over alternative realities. Because these aren’t intuitive modes of belief formation for most people, the holy trinity of truth detection can be thought of as a set of skills and habits—like critical reasoning and the scientific method of hypothesis testing—that must be learned and practiced.
Despite considerable attention devoted to psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s “two system” theory of thinking based on the interplay between fast, instinctive, and emotional heuristics on the one hand and slow, deliberate, and rational analysis on the other, there’s been surprisingly little research on the phenomenon of nonbelievers who primarily employ the latter. However, there has been mounting evidence in recent years that analytical thinking, cognitive flexibility, intellectual humility—as well as the belief that beliefs should change according to evidence—can predict a broad spectrum of nonbelief including religious atheism and agnosticism as well as skepticism toward paranormal, conspiracy theory, and anti-science beliefs.1,2 Such findings provide preliminary support for a link between nonbelievers and the holy trinity of truth detection.
Nonbelievers, Values, and Morals
Just as nonbelievers shouldn’t be conflated with nihilists who don’t believe in anything, so, too, should they not be mistaken for people devoid of the kind of morals or values that make up ideological belief. While it’s true that nonbelievers may be more likely to reject traditional or conservative morals and values like “being patriotic” and “avoiding carnal pleasures,” they are more likely to embrace liberal values related to fairness and “prosocial” concerns about human welfare.1–3 This suggests that nonbelievers may be more aligned with “individualizing” values than “binding” values according to the distinction made in Moral Foundations Theory.3,4
Still, a correlation between nonbelief and liberal values doesn’t mean that liberals are immune to the pitfalls of deepening ideological commitment. As we’ll see in subsequent blog posts, that’s not the case at all—the risks of deepening ideological commitment are shared between liberals and conservatives alike.
Rather than equating nonbelief with partisanship, nonbelievers should instead be understood as recognizing the inherent relativism of ideological beliefs—including their own—whatever they may be. In other words, while nonbelievers may endorse religious and political beliefs along with related values and morals, cognitive flexibility and intellectual humility allow them to acknowledge that such beliefs aren’t absolutes, but vary from person to person and from culture to culture while also shifting across time. This allows them to conclude, “I believe X, but I recognize that other people believe Y, and that’s OK” while remaining open to changing their minds based on convincing evidence or compelling argument. Maintaining such openness and tolerance to alternative beliefs through the holy trinity of truth detection goes a long way toward facilitating social harmony over social conflict.
For more on pathological belief and the 5 Stages of Ideological Commitment:
References
1. Uzarevic F, Coleman III TJ. The psychology of nonbelievers. Current Opinion in Psychology 2021; 40: 131–138.
2. Pennycook G, Cheyne JA, Koehler DJ, Fugelsang JA. On the belief that beliefs should change according to evidence: Implications for conspiratorial, moral, paranormal, political, religious, and science beliefs. Judgment and Decision Making 2020; 15:476–498.
3. Pennycook G, Fugelsang JA, Koehler DJ. Everyday consequences of analytic thinking. Current Directions in Psychological Science 2015; 24: 425–432.
4. Graham J, Nosek BA, Haidt J, Iyer R, Koleva S, Ditto PH. Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2011; 101:366–385.
