Beliefs are like posessions

The last paragraph of Thomas Kida's chapter 5 entitled Seeing Things That Aren't there concludes:

As psychologist Robert Abelson has said, our beliefs are like posessions. We buy our possessions because they have some use to us. So it is with our beliefs. We often hold beliefs not because of the evidence for those beliefs, but because they make us feel good. How can we overcome perceptual biases that lead to faulty beliefs? It's difficult, but a good place to start is by asking three questions:

• (1) Do you want this belief to be true?
  
• (2) Do you expect this event to occur? and
  
• (3) Do you think you would perceive things differently without these wants and expectations?
  

If the answer is yes to these questions, you should be very careful in how you interpret your perceptions of the world. (Kida p 117)

This reminds me of my"Once Burned" blog post where Victor Niederhoffer recalls the no longer useful beliefs of some of his family members. The relative held onto the belief, because it protected him from another loss which he'd previously experienced during the depression.

Kida, Thomas Edward. Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. 2006

Kida cites these two items in his concluding paragraph:

R. Abelson, "Beliefs Are Like Possessions," Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 16 (1986): 222.

Plous, Scott. The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. McGraw Hill: 1993. (p 21)