Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Belief" in English language version.
Causal beliefs are a fundamental characteristic of humans; animals, by contrast, [...] have very few causal beliefs. Beliefs come from a wide variety of sources that include the individual's experiences, the influence of authority, and the interpretation of events. At their core, beliefs establish a cause-and-effect relationship between events [...] From an evolutionary point of view, beliefs should help the individual survive, and I will argue that they had their origin in tool making and use.
A collective belief is referred to when people speak of what 'we' believe when this is not simply elliptical for what 'we all' believe.
Sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote of collective beliefs and proposed that they, like all 'social facts', 'inhered in' social groups as opposed to individual persons. Durkheim's discussion of collective belief, though suggestive, is relatively obscure.
[...] all states and all collectives draw upon shared remembrances of the past to establish or preserve a sense of shared identity and a collective belief system. A coherent approach to understanding the functions of social control for collective life is to be found in Erikson's (1966) discussion of the social control of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England.
Collective belief systems are characterized by the belief of knowing what counts as proper beliefs; divergence is condemned as heresy, betrayal, apostasy, etc.
[...] deviance cannot be studied in isolation nor understood apart from [...] overwhelmingly binding collective belief systems.
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