Why You Should Considering Caring About What (Some) Other People Think

If you are a normal human being who already cares about what other people think, and know how to discriminate between the ones you should care about and the ones you shouldn't, this post isn't for you. Please look away.

In childhood, I often got this advice: you shouldn't care about what other people think. I wonder if this advice is given less true now then when I was a kid. It certainly is given less often in most other countries relative to the hyper-individualist culture of the U.S. But in my early life, it came from multiple quarters - parents, advertising, peers. And like many things in life, part of the social test is knowing how seriously to take the repetitive slogans broadcast everywhere. I probably took it more seriously than most, hence the italicized disclaimer that began this post. If, like me you need a reason to be a normal healthy fully socialized human, then here are some reasons why you might consider caring what other people think.

1. Someone who truly does not care what others think is much more likely than the average person to be a psychopath. Consider whether you want to be like a psychopath.
   
   
2. Related, a big part of caring what other people think is empathy; if you don't care what they think, you don't care if you hurt them or offend them. Announcing that you don't care what they think and don't care if they're offended is broadcasting that you may hurt them, if not hurting them would inconvenience you. At the very least, it suggests you're not a reliable cooperator. (Story time: I used to love going out of my way to tell people I thought sports were a waste of time. I once did this at a small social gathering, and in a later discussion, one person I'd just met for the first time that day said "You already announced you're incapable of loyalty, no need to weigh in further." While that's not true - I am capable of loyalty where it matters - i.e., not sports - I've realized that intentionally announcing this in a casual social setting to someone who clearly does like sports, does nothing but potentially leave certain kinds of people with this impression, which doesn't help. I'm taking a risk here because this isn't a casual social setting, and it's much less combative to say this in an essay sitting inert online than to choose to say it at an oppositional moment.)
   
   
3. Rejecting and denigrating another person's cherished beliefs in public, is a dramatic announcement of #2 above. You're announcing that you don't care if you're hurting people and disrupting their culture. That may be worth it to you, but be clear and honest with yourself WHY it's worth it to you, before you do it. Also, confirmation bias is a bitch - if you let a black cat cross your path, call a superstitious person a moron for saying something about it, and then lose your wallet that same day, you'll be ridiculed and (when you've rejected more serious beliefs) a self-destructive moron that others should avoid. So they have a false belief - so does everyone! If it harms you or people you love, fine, call it out.
   
   
4. It turns out you can benefit from interacting and coordinating with irrational people. The company you choose to work for may even be an example! But, you should balance the benefits you gain from such coordination against exposure to these people because you may reinforce their irrationality and bad values, you will become more like them, and they will have more influence over your life.
   
   
5. It also turns out that people sometimes have to rapidly (in literal seconds) make snap judgments about you, using easily available information - your appearance, your clothing, your reputation. Even if you think you're valuable in the context where you're being evaluated (meeting with senior leadership at your company, a speed-dating lunch, salesman OR customer), they have no way of knowing that in the seconds where they're making a first impression. (The need to make snap judgments on increasingly dubious proxy indicators starts happening more and more when a small company grows rapidly beyond a certain point, meaning you can no longer know everyone.) AND even if you're so high-value that you're initially rejected and then an evaluator runs across you again later and realizes you're valuable, the evaluator might still think "That person could have succeeded/built confidence sooner/faster if they had just worn the thing/acted the way that they were supposed to; that shows arrogance, passive-aggression, and/or poor social awareness, and remains a negative predictor for the future."
   
   
6. For rationalists: it's actually not good to change your mind in public too often. Each time you change your mind to another position in public, your audience's "needle" quite rationally edges over toward "listen to someone else besides this person, because they're an inferior decision-maker" (at best) to "they are capricious and unpredictable and their commitment is not meaningful." The exception is if you're so powerful you can afford to be capricious, because you have something others want and they have no choice but to put up with you. But, you're almost certainly not that powerful.

IMPORTANT: it's hard to start caring what others think later in life, because it doesn't come automatically, and you might start caring about everyone, or caring about the wrong people. It's kind of like trying to pick up a sport in adulthood. You're just not going to be as good at it as people who have been practicing since they were kids. So once you start caring about other people, as a guide think: does this person share my values? Do I want to be like them? Am I likely to spend more time around them in the future? Pragmatically, do they have some impact over your life? Then that's a good candidate for caring what they think about you. (Notice that this is still focused on real actual people, not some hypothetical person on the internet or at a club that you haven't met.)

You might say, "Well, you're still a psychopath. Everything so far has been about how you have learned to react to what other people say and do, rather than whether you actually care." Controlling your response is the beginning of caring. For those people who you've realized are specifically worth more of your attention than the average human, what they say and do (about and to you) is worth more of your consideration, as are the way they feel when they're around you. And you just can't care about everyone: not only do you not have the bandwidth, but what people care about frequently conflicts in important ways.

You (or my naive past self) might ask, "Great, so then we should just tolerate everyone's religions, superstitions, and irrational beliefs?" No, but you don't have to announce your negative impressions and beliefs about the people around you every time they pop into your mind, even the people you don't care that much about. "Oh, so we should be sneaky and lie and smile while silently detesting and devaluing them?" Also no. In any given moment, there is a literally infinite number of true statements you can make to another person, and an also literally infinite number of reasons you might say them. Take your, and your fellow humans', social reality into account, and how it is likely to affect your future.

Lists of "Bizarre Beliefs" Reveal Difference Between True Belief, and Tribal Team Cheers

tl;dr Many truth claims - beliefs - are actually just tribal team cheers, or emotional signals, with the propositional verbal content merely superficial. We can get confused and react to these as if they are truth claims, especially because they people saying these things insist that they are. We need a name to distinguish them from real propositions - let's call them dolphin beliefs, because of their superficial similarity to true, propositional "fish" beliefs.


You should read Aaron Bergman's review of Fantasyland, a book about American's relationship with conspiracy and magical thinking, today and over the decades. He cites surveys which show, for example, that one in nine Americans believe they have seen the devil driven out of someone. Others he cites are about Obama being born in Kenya, vaccines causing autism, and ghosts. Recognizing that no one is immune to irrational beliefs, Bergman identifies what he thinks are his most "fringe" beliefs. And here I also engage in this exercise, not because I think you're particularly concerned with my fringe beliefs, but because it's interesting to see the differences in his and my list, vs the kinds of things discussed in a book about American conspiracy thinking.*

A few of my own bizarre beliefs:

• Panpsychism - consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe itself.
• There are living cells on Venus which explain the unknown absorbers and presence of phosphine. (See below for an update to this as of 2025.)
• As we explore the solar system, we will find evidence of von Neumann probes on asteroids.
• There will be nuclear weapons used in war in the lifetimes of many readers, and we don't talk about this nearly enough.

There are two characeristics to note about these fringe beliefs - one of which Bergman and I share with the conspiracy-believers cited in the book, and one which I think we do not.

1. We are not good at knowing what will seem strange to others.
   
   
2. These beliefs are not central to identity.

I think if you asked the devil-drivers to name their fringe beliefs, they would (in keeping with #1 above) not necessarily realize that devil-driving is seen by many others as a strange, fringe belief. Similarly, when voluntarily producing a list like this, I probably haven't been able to identify the beliefs I hold that would most shock most readers. This occurs because we're all embedded in communities. Devil-drivers know a lot of other devil-drivers; the belief doesn't seem strange in that context.

As for #2 - I can't speak for Bergman but I know that, if I encounter a strong argument against panpsychism, or data from a probe in the Venus clouds showing a completely mundane abiotic process that produces phosphine, not only would I probably change my mind - I would not become hostile and defensive, as if I were being personally attacked. Resistant, disappointed, a bit embarrassed to have been wrong in public - sure. But not angry. Whereas I think if you were to engage a devil driver and explain why their belief may be wrong, I predict they would become hostile and defensive, as if they were being personally attacked. Same for antivaxxers and birthers.

This underlines the core difference in two types of beliefs. There are actual hypotheses - what a belief ideally always is, able to be updated by new information – and then there are the tribal team cheers of religion, politics, or conspiracy communities.

If we think of beliefs as a good materialist should, we think about what is actually going on in the nervous systems, and how the behavior of the organism differs systematically in a way that can be categorized or at least placed on a spectrum. Notice that it's not merely isolated "trapped priors" we're dealing with here - antivaxxers and devil drivers don't just calmly reject arguments and information and continue to believe what they already believed. There is community, identity, and emotion involved.

I therefore think we should consider whether the "beliefs" of devil-drivers and antivaxxers are truth claims at all, or something else.** At the very least we should consider whether their utility is more as tribal team cheers than as truth claims.

The implication here is that the superficial content of the belief is not the only determinant of whether it is a functional, updateable belief (a hypothesis) or a tribal team cheer. For example: say I learn that there is going to be a meeting of a local club to discuss the phosphine and unknown absorbers in the Venusian atmosphere. Excited to talk about it with like-minded people, I attend. At the meeting I find people talking about how they just know in their hearts there is life on Venus, that NASA is trying to hide the evidence, and that they don't care what additional evidence the probes might find. In fact when I suggest we send more probes they are actively hostile!*** Whereas the club members and I would both say "There is life in the Venusian atmosphere", I have a hypothesis, they have a tribal team cheer, though the superficially the content of the claim is the same. (The hypothesis IS just the content of the claim; the tribal team cheer is a cake of social behaviors with the words of the truth claim as icing.)

(Added later: as of 2025 I have updated my belief and accepted that the unknown absorbers are not life. Not only was that phosphine paper a product of bad spectrometry that failed multiple attempts at replication, there are at least two papers - Jiang et al 2024, and Egan et al 2025 - that have advanced good candidate abiotic explanations for what the absorbers could be. Needless to say I am now a pariah in the Venusian life community, who say I was never actually a true believer, etc.)

In fact, focusing on the process of belief, rather than the content of the belief itself, is what we do in psychiatry. If someone is convinced his wife is cheating on him with absolutely zero evidence, even if she confides "actually I did have a drunken one-night stand ten years ago but he doesn't know about it" - that's still a jealous delusion. He doesn't have a good reason to believe it. The Venus club's stated belief is a community and identity device, not a cognitive tool for explaining the world. Hence bizarre statements, in the rare occasion when they are discussing it with people from outside their community, like "I just feel that it's true", "this is offensive", and "this is a personal attack."

Because it's easy to be confused by tribal team cheers which do indeed look like truth claims, especially when the tribal team cheer-ers are loathe to admit that it's not really a truth claim, it's worth identifying the tribal cheers as something different from hypotheses.

You're probably familiar with the idea of a shibboleth. For me, the belief in Venusian life is a hypothesis; for the club, it's a shibboleth - or at least, much more of a shibboleth than a hypothesis. The more of these characteristics it has, the more likely a belief is a shibboleth than a hypothesis:

• Avoidance of any testing
• Anger at questions, as if somehow being personally attacked
• Formation of identity around the belief
• Reason for belief is emotional
• Association with community around the belief

Devil-driving, birtherism, and antivaxxer-ism are shibboleths. Panpsychism is a hypothesis. In the future of epistemology, people may be amused but charitable that we did not make this distinction, just as we think of people five centuries ago who didn’t understand that dolphins are not fish. For that reason instead of calling these types of beliefs shibboleths and hypotheses, let's call them dolphins and fish respecitvely, to emphasize their superficial similarity, and because many dolphin beliefs are actually not in-group team cheers, they're just used by individuals to send emotional signals.


*It's worth pointing out that the types of beliefs we articulate, when asked what our most surprising beliefs are, are generally about the external world, not internal beliefs like "I'm unlovable" or "I can't accomplish important things" - even if we're frequently aware of such beliefs, we guard them closely. I think this is more likely out of fear of the impact on others' opinions of us, rather than a shrewd calculation about what people want to hear about.

**At one point there was a debate in psychiatry as to whether delusions are really beliefs. My argument is that they are indeed something neurologically and behaviorally different, though this is an academic or semantic distinction at this point.

***Compare to eg creationists, who often spend much more time talking about how their enemies are suppressing them than providing actual arguments and data, making predictions or trying to do something pragmatic and useful with their "theory". Where are the creationist biomedical companies?

How Do People Decide Which Experts to Trust?

A summary of the aim of modern propaganda is this: dictators don't do propaganda so people believe something but so they believe nothing. And more importantly, do nothing. In a modern society, no one individual is in a position to evaluate every scientific, medical, or political claim we hear, so we rely on experts. A central technique for saboteurs of public discourse is to undermine confidence in experts. It's therefore important to understand how people actually evaluate experts.

Hendriks, Kienhues and Bromme (2015) use the Muenster Epistemic Trustworthiness Inventory and show that people's evaluations are affected by three considerations: level of expertise, integrity, and benevolence. People are predisposed to discount any expert opinion that conflicts with their chosen moral authority. Consequently, it's not surprising that efforts to undermine experts frequently focus on integrity ("They're shills/they're only in it for the money" etc.)

This is an important tool not only for understanding propaganda attacks from Russia and other governments, but critically analyzing our own responses to expert opinions, especially ones we're inclined to disagree with. It also provides a way to understand why someone might listen to a celebrity instead of a scientist, if the belief in integrity and benevolence outweighs the expertise factor.


Hendriks F, Kienhues D, Bromme R (2015) Measuring Laypeople’s Trust in Experts in a Digital Age: The Muenster Epistemic Trustworthiness Inventory (METI). PLoS ONE 10(10): e0139309. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0139309

Differences in Belief Updating Depending on Belief Content

A study by Walter and Murphy in Communication Monographs shows that political misinformation is harder to correct than health misinformation. It also shows that the more educated someone is, the harder it is to correct. This both contradicts and coheres with things we thought we already knew.

We already knew that the more educated people were, the harder it is to correct misinformation they believe (here and here) and depressingly, even that increasing people's access to information only makes them dig in further; it doesn't matter if the extra knowledge is inside or outside our skulls, but where politics is concerned, we will recruit it to confirm what we already believed. But notice that most of these kinds of studies (good roundup here) are about politics. What about other kinds of beliefs?

That's the take-home from the Walter and Murphy study, and one interpretation is that it's identity protection and/or tribal affiliation that all this motivated reasoning is protecting - and that politics is very identity-defining. It's therefore interesting that when given the chance to improve one's own personal traits, people actually chose things things less central to their identity - for instance, musical ability over moral sense - which is of course completely absurd (study is in a post at Overcoming Bias which I'm having trouble finding and will update when I do.) If your moral sense is that much more important, why would you not choose to improve that? (If what you're really doing is reinforcing your identity, it makes perfect sense.) This is why Paul Graham gives the advice of shrinking your identity, to prevent all your identity-defining beliefs from biasing your thinking.

By this argument, in this sample, people's health beliefs were not as identity defining as their political beliefs. A way to test this would be to measure the importance of such beliefs to people's overall identity, and then see if the health-politics difference is as strong, and also if there's a good relationship to identity-centrality. There are lots of food extremists and antivaxxers whose health beliefs might be as central or more central to their identity than their other beliefs, including their political ones. You might also wonder why the U.S. got into its current failure mode of politics having become so central to identity (moreso than religion by many measures) - my guess is some combination of only two parties for 3x10^8 people, along with the decreasing significance of other meaning-providing communities and overlapping status hierarchies. I'm hardly endorsing religion as the answer, although there are plenty of people for whom the vacuum of meaning left by the decreasing role of religion has made them turn to politics - namely, young white working class people, who despite being less religious, voted enthusiastically for Trump.

The Grammar of Rock Singers and Dictators

I once asked a friend to translate Van Halen's Standing on Top of the World into Japanese, so I could sing it at a karaoke bar in Japantown, San Francisco. My friend said, "I don't know if you can really translate it." Glance briefly over the lyrics and you may understand her complaint:

Hey, baby, woo
I know you believe in me, that's all I ever need
No no, nothin's gonna stop it
Nothin' will discourage me, oh, no

Hey baby, uh, it's the only way out
Oh, little darlin'
Now come on, what's it all about?

Oh, I know you wanna touch
I got to have a little taste
I don't wanna sink my teeth in that fine piece of real estate, yeah

Hey baby, woo! make it nice 'n sweet, oh
Oh, little darlin'
Let's take a walk down easy street


If you're using the term for infant for "baby", or literally translating "I got to have a little taste", or goodness forbid actually trying to understand the meaning and direction of each phrase, you're probably not going to translate the important component of the song. Another friend once asked in frustration about this song, "What is this even about? This song is about nothing. It's just Sammy Hagar selling his personality."

It's becoming increasingly clear that the actual propositional content of human utterances is often secondary to other purposes those utterances may have - particularly, emotional or tribal afiliation purposes. This goes double for beliefs which are professed explicitly for tribal loyalty signaling. When your team wins an upset, and you hold up one index finger as you scream triumphantly into the camera, everyone (including you) knows that your team really isn't number one. Although "beliefs" are often thought of as propositional attitudes, the important part of these team cheers is not the actionable, semantic, propositional content. It's the visceral and emotional loyalty signals it sends. Sometimes, where the stakes aren't so high (as at a football game) you can jokingly point out to your friend that no, we're not really #1, and he'll say "I know, but you know what I mean. Don't ruin the moment." However, in more serious settings, you cannot directly address the emptiness of dogmatic statements ("God is great", "Hail Mary full of grace", and "From each according to ability...", etc.) without giving away the game - so people sometimes get confused, and start to take all their own utterances literally. More interesting perhaps are the gyrations people go through to avoid acting on things that they absolutely insist they believe - and indeed, most people are able to say these team cheers without thinking too much about them or why they don't seem to be able to meaningfully affect their actions in concrete ways.

Donald Trump is difficult to translate, and has frustrated translators the world over with his incoherent stream of narcissistic consciousness. A recent article points out that in fact translators have had this same difficulty with other twentieth century demagogues. Whether this is clever manipulation of crowds or merely the result of impoverished minds, I won't speculate. The important point is that somehow, they communicate something, even if it's semantically jumbled propositionally empty territorial barking. We can think of this as finally boiling off the pesky, pin-down-able, commitment-laden propositions from language and leaving behind a distilled tribal chant, empty of formal meaning but chock full of visceral power. Trying to translate Donald Trump or Van Halen lyrics exposes the vacuum of actual content in both cases, without bringing along the emotional tribal-identity impact that is really the only thing there. Consequently, those who look for inaccuracies and broken promises in Trump's words hoping to finally wake up his supporters are, unfortunately, playing checkers against a wrestling team.