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No doubt many of you are very familiar with term “belief,” but have you heard of “alief”? I am guessing most of you have not.
To put things in perspective let me give you a three quick examples.
- Let’s say I emptied a bottle of bleach, I then thoroughly sterilized the bottle and filled it with filtered water. Would you drink it? You believe it is safe, but you alieve it is not.
- You're at the observation deck at the Sear's Tower (I'll never call it the Willis Tower), standing in the observation ledge that protrudes from the building. You believe you're safe, but you alieve you this can't be safe.
- Lastly, you are watching a sad movie and you start to cry. You believe the characters are fictional, but you still cry because you alieve they aren't.
Get the picture? Alief is an automatic or habitual belief-like attitude, particularly one that is in tension with a person’s explicit beliefs.
Alief is a relatively new concept introduced by Tamar Gendler, a Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Yale University. It has primarily been applied to psychological phenomena including the pleasure of stories, the persistence of positive illusions, certain religious beliefs, and certain psychiatric disturbances, such as phobias and obsessive–compulsive disorder.
I was introduced to the concept this week through a post on HackerNews. I immediately thought of implications in business, specifically how it effects decision making. Everyday business professionals have to make hundreds of important decisions, is it possible that alief is effecting some of these choices? I argue that it is, even worse I believe it's effecting some of the most important decisions. These bigger decisions have the biggest impact on our careers and personal lives and therefore have a higher amount of stress attached.
Let’s say you’re responsible for an important software purchase for your company. You’ve researched the decision to a point of exhaustion, but you still have trouble pulling the trigger (Side note: perhaps this is why some sales cycles take so long). You know and believe that you’ve done the work necessary to make this choice, but you alief something different. Your alief has delayed or even stopped you from making a choice - an important choice.
The concept of alief is relatively new, but there is no denying that we all experience it. Whether we call it alief, gut feeling or emotional intelligence it’s important to be conscious of how we make decisions, both in life and business. Be logically, be smart and be aware.
