True Believers : and Why It Works

In the social sciences, talk about belief is ubiquitous . Since social scientists are typically self-conscious about their methods, there is also a lot of talk about talk about belief And since belief is a genuinely curious and perplexing phenomenon , showing many different faces to the world , there is abundant controversy. Sometimes belief attribution appears to be a dark, risky, and imponderable businessespecially when exotic, and more particularly religious or superstitious, beliefs are in the limelight . These are not the only troublesome cases; we also court argument and skepticism when we attribute beliefs to nonhuman animals, or to infants , or to computers or robots. Or when the beliefs we feel constrained to attribute to an apparently healthy adult 35 True Believers :