1.1 Social cognition: meaning and beliefs  (Page 6/7)

• Third, beliefs may be conscious, not conscious but accessible to consciousness, or entirely subconscious. This implies that an individual need not be aware of a belief or of its implications for the belief to be a functionally active unit. Indeed, it is plausible that all too often we ignore, if not our beliefs, at least most of their implications. Here again belief differs from attitude and other cognitive units.

It makes sense that your beliefs are not going to be conscious. Beliefs are things that can arise at any moment from the subconscious, they are usually too complex to be formed in an instant in a situation. Furthermore, when they arise when you are doing an action, you might not be aware of it but it could still play a role with what you are doing with that action. There might also be many implications for beliefs you have, they don't need to surface at all but their implications might have an impact.

• Fourth, many different media can be used for expressing beliefs. Consequently, no special connection should be assumed between beliefs and language or between beliefs and sentences in general or even a particular syntactic form of a sentence. Not only are there subverbal beliefs in the prelinguistic stage, but even human adults have many beliefs that are wholly or partly averbal or subverbal. Yet we assume that in principle any belief can be expressed verbally n the form of a sentence. Nonetheless, the precise linguistic form through which a belief is expressed seems to us irrelevant. For example, the forms "His mother loves him," "He is loved by his mother," "His mother's love for him," etc., are lal equivalent from our point of view.

So when a belief arises in a situation, you don't necessarily have to form a sentence in order to make this belief known or expressed to you. There could be different ways in which you 'know' that the belief is now involved or that you evoked that belief. You could get a feeling for that belief, you could change in a certain way, etc.

• Fifth, beliefs are not necessarily permanent or even enduring units. In this too beliefs differ from attitudes and other cognitive units, which are commonly endowed with at least some degree of endurance. Some beliefs are retrieved from memory or stored in memory for later use. These are permanent to some extent. Others may reflect an enduring core of meaning but be transient in form, that is, they may be expressed in a certain context in a particular linguistic or other mode that is later discarded or forgotten. Beliefs may also be produced on the spur of the moment simply to serve some specific purpose. Such beliefs, which are the products of instantaneous generation, may be of varying endurance.

So while an attitude is something you hold for a certain period of time, a belief is something that you can just say to yourself in an instant. However, it is still that the belief has an impact on your behavior or just has some impact on you for a certain period of time after you say the belief or bring it up. You don't even have to verbally say the belief to start its effect, you could just enter a period of time where it seems like you are under the influence of a certain belief. For example maybe for 5 minutes you start acting like the belief 'humans are nice, so you should be nice to them' is true. Maybe you brought that up yourself unconsciously, or maybe it was triggered by something external.