Reddit mentions of Mirror for Humanity: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 7th Edition

Alright, I'll expand. Hope you bear with me, this might be long and slightly tangential.

Basically, most of our strong beliefs are not something that we inspect regularly in our conscious mind. They are rather part of a general worldview that seems natural to us and are not given much thought ever. These beliefs more or less fit the worldview of our surrounding social environment, and that makes them relatively invisible to us. Not only that, but they often get boxed with what we perceive to be an objective perspective on reality. It's not a belief if it's reality, right? The beliefs that we do notice tend to be marginal beliefs that are more centered around our own experience of reality versus that of those surrounding us.

So for example, an American (typing with broad strokes here) middle manager may have a very different view of how one should build a career in a productive manner than an American retail worker playing music with his band on the weekends. This perspective on careers will appear to be a strong belief they both have because it may clash when they interact with each other, and the intense interactions may end up crystallizing these beliefs into what you'd call "strong beliefs", which then become an important part of a person's ideas when evaluating potential social relationships. But these beliefs about professional undertakings are actually very marginal compared to topics such as whether or not everyone can or should be happy, or whether or not people are generally trustworthy due to their nature. Human nature is perceived (wrongly) as something static by many, many people (especially in the US) and it affects policy-making, charity-giving, business practices, etc. The idea that human nature is static will change how we see redemption, how we see economic policies, how we even see intimate relationships. The belief that people hold free will will affect how we judge criminals, how we judge people who wronged us (I won't start on the topic of betrayal but god that word irks me), etc.

Now how we build our personal worldview and beliefs (strong or otherwise) is complex, so might as well take the time to suggest further reading on the matter:

Conrad Phillip Kottak's introductory book on Anthropology is well-respected, and I would recommend it to have a better overview of how different societies view the world quite differently, and how the local culture's worldview easily becomes one's own without actually realizing that it's happening. It's called enculturation - the learning of one's culture by living through it and interacting with others in it - and tends to be invisible to most people, despite its impact on a large amount of our beliefs.

As a small example of this but one I find rather valuable, there is a documentary on India's Ladakh region, called Ancient Futures - Learning from Ladakh, in which you can see the anthropologist interacting with women from the local communiy, and talking about how she can't really sew. And the women are just surprised because to them, you learn by practice, simply. There's no acceptance that someone can't learn to use the techniques they're using because they literally don't know anyone who can't sew. As long as you practice and sit with someone who knows how, you'll learn. And it's fascinating because in our culture, there is a prevalent belief that some people just can't learn functional understanding of certain things. Seems obvious, right? Not everyone can be an astrophysicist, not everyone can be a competent engineer. But what if that was wrong? And there's actually ridiculously interesting research on how this worldview can affect women in math classes, as well as young blacks in academic grading. People take all of this for granted but it is a massive component in how we view social policies.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's researches in social epidemiology have done wonders in exploring the impacts of socioeconomic inequality on a massive amount of social factors, such as criminality, self-esteem, academic performance, etc. And this is only for one (albeit an important) factor in societies; how unequal the distribution of income is. 400 scientific articles later, one finds a clear trend; socioeconomic inequality has massive impact on things that you would never think of. They affect how people trust each other within a given society, because larger differences in socioeconomic circumstances lead to more conflict and different subcultures having trouble interacting with each other because their reality is so different. This seems beside the point but it really isn't; it strongly affects how the average person thinks others around him/her are worthy of trust. It has consequences on how we relate to each other and how we see the average stranger. This is not something we can inspect easily without knowing about it firsthand, so it's a "hidden" belief that is crazy in its impact on our lives.

And these factors all relate to general beliefs about others and the world, in an external manner. We also have trouble understanding a lot of what goes on inside our own decision-making process, which most people think does belong to them. Some researches have shown that you can impact someone's perspective on a stranger they just met by priming them with negative words or unpleasant experiences prior to the meeting, or by making them suffer through prolonged mental problem-solving. A paper studying the chances of getting paroled by parole judges observed that you had the most chance right after they had eaten, and the least before noon because they became more impatient towards inmates when their blood sugar was low. Other studies have shown that if you test cognitive reflexes for racism, most people who do not think that they are indeed racist will find that they have a ton more prejudice than they originally thought. This doesn't register as much when thinking about how you consciously view the world but it shows when writing or interacting with others without being focused on your own thoughts. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why you see minorities struggling so much to be represented in mainstream culture, except for the token black guy or the "faire-valoir" woman.

I'm written too much already but I strongly recommend Daniel Kahnemann's book Thinking, Fast and Slow to better understand what cognitive sciences have taught us about how our thoughts are affected by our brain's physiology and our prior experiences. I am serious in saying this; there is no way this book will not be useful to you in some way, no matter what kind of life you lead. If you have limited time or money, he gives this lecture which is kind of alright to summarize his book. I stress this man particularly because he is a legend. The man is reasonable, intelligent, and has more than three decades of solid research to back what he says.

I wanted to mention questions of free will more because they kinda relate to this whole thing but I'm gonna stop here and just recommend you check out Sam Harris' lecture on Free Will on youtube. I don't agree with much of what the guy says on other topics but he summarizes things well in that specific lecture.

Sorry again for writing such a wall of text. I hope that was worth the time to read it.