James E. Alcock - Belief

ALSO BY JAMES E. ALCOCK

Science and Supernature

Parapsychology: Science or Magic

A Textbook of Social Psychology (coauthored)

Social Psychology: Global Perspectives (coauthored)

Published 2018 by Prometheus Books

Belief: What It Means to Believe and Why Our Convictions Are So Compelling. Copyright 2018 by James E. Alcock. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Alcock, James E., author.

Title: Belief : what it means to believe and why our convictions are so compelling / James E. Alcock.

Description: Amherst, New York : Prometheus Books, 2018. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017054056 (print) | LCCN 2018010369 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633884045 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633884038 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Belief and doubt. | BISAC: PSYCHOLOGY / Social Psychology. | PSYCHOLOGY / Cognitive Psychology.

Classification: LCC BF773 (ebook) | LCC BF773 .A43 2018 (print) | DDC 153.4--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054056

Printed in the United States of America

Jim Alcock leads a busy life. His full-time job is as professor of Social Psychology at York University in Toronto. He also maintains a private practice. He contributes chapters and articles to books and journals. He and his wife, Karen, travel extensively and frequently.

So for him to write a book is quite an achievement. Considering the amount of scholarship and research that has gone into the present book, it is more than an achievementit is a miracle.

Psychology covers a number of subareas. Every generation of psychologists complains about the lack of an overarching and integrated set of principles that unifies all these separate categories of psychology. This book, however, ties together fields of psychology that rarely, if ever, overlap. Every psychologist and psychology student should read it. Unless the situation has changed drastically since I retired in 1998, typical undergraduate psychology majors receive an overview of the various fields of psychology in the Introductory Psychology class. After that they choose courses from a menu of offerings, which could include Sensation and Perception, Cognition, Comparative Psychology, Individual Differences, Learning, Memory, Motivation, Social Psychology, Statistics, Child Psychology, and so on. If they continue on to a graduate degree, they will end up in one of the many special subdivisions of psychology. These could include Occupational Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Animal Psychology, Testing and Assessment, Cognitive Science, Social Psychology, or others.

I believe that all psychology majors should be required to take a course that provides an integrated overview of all the areas of psychology. This book would be an ideal text for such a course. While not actually claiming to put forth such an integrated framework, this book shows how a single concept, in this case belief, can be illuminated by using the findings from all areas of psychology and related disciplines. At the same time, the focus on belief enables us to gain an integrated sense of psychology as a whole.

Jim says that he has written this book for a general audience. He writes so clearly that anyone, regardless of background, will be able to not only read it but also to enjoy it and learn from it. The fact that he has aimed for a general audience does not mean that he has oversimplified or skimped on what he includes, though. Indeed, his coverage of belief is exhaustive. I know of no other treatment of this topic that is so comprehensive and authoritative.

In other words, Jim has written a book on belief that can be read and enjoyed by a general audience, but that is, at the same time, a book that can, and should, be read by psychologists and professionals such as philosophers and social scientists. In fact, everyone can benefit from this book.

Ray Hyman

Professor of Psychology Emeritus, University of Oregon, and founding member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry

I extend my grateful appreciation to all those who have provided feedback and guidance with regard to various portions of the book, including Ray Hyman, Timothy Moore, Guy Proulx, and Tomasz Witkowski. My deepest gratitude goes to the three people who carefully read through the entire manuscript and provided detailed and incisive feedback that helped me improve the book in a number of important ways. They are, in no particular order:

Psychologist Loren Pankratz, whose extensive comments and thoughtful insights, and in particular those that reflect his impressive breadth of psychological knowledge and experience, have been invaluable;

Author Gary Bauslaugh, whose acumen as a writer and keen insight into the human condition have helped shape my presentation of important concepts, and have been of particular value in making this psychological material more accessible to a lay audience;

My wife, Karen Hanley, who not only provided astute guidance and constant encouragement during the long preparation of this book, but also applied her keen editorial professionalism to careful review of the manuscript throughout the editing process.

Thanks also to Emily Duncan Nadeau for her assistance in the initial literature search and to Laura Galin-Corini for her help with the formatting of the extensive set of endnotes.

I also wish to thank my literary agent, Nancy Rosenfeld, and Prometheus Books editor in chief Steven Mitchell, both of whom were key to the successful publication of this book. In addition, I thank all those at Prometheus Books who were involved in making this book a reality, including Sheila Stewart, Hanna Etu, Liz Mills, Laura Shelley, Catherine Roberts-Abel, Bruce Carle, and Cheryl Quimba.

Believing is the most mental thing we do.