1.1 Social cognition: meaning and beliefs  (Page 5/7)

Beliefs are different from how your mind processes 'meanings':

• First, a belief is a cognitive unit and not a behavior or a predisposition to behavior. This is another of the major features distinguishing the concepts of belief and attitude. In contrast to attitude, which is often regarded as a predisposition to action and sometimes as referring to actual emotions, perceptions, or behaviors, belief remains always sharply distinct from the behavioral output. Unlike attitude it cannot even be inferred from any behavioral act other than verbal or nonverbal communication of the belief. Similarly, an important reason that precludes identifying belief with a proposition in the logical sense is that a proposition depends on the possibility of assigning to the statement a truth value, which is often equivalent to the operational implications of the proposition. Nonetheless, belief has behavioral implications, which are reflected in what we call its orientative aspect. Since the orientative value of a belief may change indefinitely in different contexts it makes no sense to us to identify belief with its behavioral implications or, for that matter, with its truth functional value.

Beliefs are less related to actual behaviors than predispositions to behaviors and attitudes. Attitudes are similar to behaviors because they are emotional in the current time, and that is going to influence behavior or be a predisposition to action. You cannot infer or guess beliefs like you can guess someones attitude. Beliefs still have behavioral implications, however. They orient a person towards certain actions - a person with such and such beliefs is likely to perform such and such actions.

• Second, there are no restrictions on the object, source, foundation, or informational support of the meaning values that comprise a belief, nor on the contents, source, rationality, consistency, commonness, salience, foundation, or veridicality of the belief itself. In other words, all these qualities seem to us immaterial to the characterization of belief as a unit. In this respect as well beliefs differ from most other similar cognitive units. For example, whereas the object of attitude is mostly assumed to be some class of stimuli represented through an object or some abstraction endowed with a minimal degree of constancy, the object of beliefs may be any aspect of the external or internal environment regardless of its constancy or endurance. Similarly, qualities of attitudes like centrality or salience seem to us inconsequential since they are apt to change with the behavioral context. In other words, any belief may become prominent in a situation that sets a priority on the meaning of the specific belief.

So a belief may be very powerful or salient in certain circumstances. It may come from any source, be rational or irrational. I think what they were trying to say is that beliefs can come up at any time, you don't understand them as clearly as something like an attitude. A belief could choose anything as its target or object (a belief might influence one thing in your mind or in the outside environment). You never know what situation might set a priority on the meaning of a specific belief (certain beliefs are going to be more relevant in different circumstances).