[Serious] Questions about Belief and Personal Identity

[John 6IX Breezy]

To what extent do the expressed beliefs of others alter our opinions of them and why should that be the case?

We create ingroups and outgroups surprisingly quick and easy. This has been observed under a series of studies investigating what is now called the minimal group paradigm. (So called because ingroups and outgroups are created from the most minimal conditions.) For example, if you put people in a room and ask them to estimate a series of dots that they see on a screen, and then classify them as an "underestimator" or "overestimator," they will begin to show biased judgments towards members of "their group" that differ from those for members of the "other group." (These experiments are done in such a way that a person has absolutely no information about the other members beyond how they estimated the dots—they don't even see their faces).

To answer your question, I would say that to the extent that the expressed beliefs of others allow us to categorize them as belonging to a group different from ours, it will automatically and insidiously alter our opinions of them. And there are a number of ways in which these biases begin to emerge: Ingroup favoritism, ingroup overexclusion, outgroup homogeneity effects, the list goes on.