9.2: Beliefs

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Page ID: 67199

Jim Marteney
Los Angeles Valley College via ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative (OERI)

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Beliefs represent all the bits of information we collect about people, events, and things in our life. They are cognitions that we have discriminated and selected from all those we have been exposed to, relevant to any subject in our environment.

Beliefs are measured using a true-false continuum and a probability scale. There are some beliefs you feel are absolutely true or false; probably true or false; or are not sure about. All of us possess beliefs about a college education. They may include that a college education takes time, is a lot of work, makes our parents happy, and will allow us to make more money in the future, and so on.

Some beliefs are stronger than others or as we say, have more salience. That is, some information about the environment is more important to us than other information, such as, how you are doing in a class as opposed to how another class member is doing.