Legend holds that on arriving at Veracruz, Cortés burned his ships so that his armies could not retreat. His men became predictably committed to fighting. Similarly, our contracts, emotions, affiliations, markings, gifts, punishments, and other costly acts anticipate our future responses. These factors transform partner options, enabling reliable forecasting of cooperative behaviors. Such predictability enhances cooperation's prospects for success. Schelling called these expressions “commitment devices” (Schelling Reference Schelling1960). His concept helps to explain otherwise perplexing behavior, but can it help explain belief? To think so might seem strange. Cortés allegedly burned his ships to motivate action, irrespective of belief. To generalize: If beliefs represent environments, the faculties that generate belief appear poorly equipped for predicting social commitment. Environments constantly change. Yet, a commitment device must anchor cooperative futures against these sea tides.

Nevertheless, certain beliefs – that the ship is burning, for example – proximately motivate social responses. The effect is well illustrated by religious commitment. Peter believes his God abides. From this conviction, Peter receives strong motivations, for example, to stand this holy ground, come what may. Like a boat on fire, his belief in God narrows Peter's strategic options, by overdetermining one. Where religious beliefs are shared, a universe of possible interactions strongly contracts, affording cooperation's success. Where religious commitment motives actions by sacred rewards, religious partners will suffer fewer distractions from personal risks. Cortés' sabotage does not promote cooperation through intrinsic reward; rather, it sets a trap. As such, it remains a poor instrument by which to disable anxiety, as slings and arrows rain down. Furthermore, where religious beliefs can be reliably recognized, fellow believers may find a common inspiration that they know to be common. The affective and symbolic cues of religious culture give what Schelling calls “salience” for otherwise risky coordination points. Notice, religious culture supports coordinated action for collective problems whose nature cannot be anticipated. At best, Cortés' act is only useful for the fight. Finally, religious beliefs can be evoked and assessed by ordeals that appear “crazy” without such beliefs (Irons Reference Irons, Bulbulia, Sosis, Genet, Harris, Wyman and Genet2008). Where opportunists threaten religious cooperation, evidence for commitment can be discerned from our deeds. To generalize: While actions are important to social commitment, beliefs intricately interact with actions and motivations to support effective social prediction (Bulbulia Reference Bulbulia, Schloss and Murray2009). Such prediction requires shared epistemic habits that maintain common social goals as the world changes. We call the products of these habits “ideologies.”

Ideologies function as commitment devices, though they function differently to burning boats. Indeed, commitment devices function best when we are unaware of their existence. In the Cortés legend, commitment arises through explicit means – removing the antisocial option: Run away! However, because motivations are affected by confidence, commitment theory predicts tendencies to strongly deny ideology's social causes. To think that ideology is believed for commitment, rather than as simple truth, enables one to second-guess one's ideology, and with it, the social commitments ideology inspries. This second-guessing may impair the social prediction so fundamental to cooperation's success. In their discussion of “alief,” McKay & Dennett (M&D) observe how discrepancies sometimes arise between explicit knowledge (the bridge is safe) and implicit response (vertigo) (also explored in McKay & Cipolotti Reference McKay and Cipolotti2007; Dennett Reference Dennett1991). Commitment theory predicts the opposite relationship will hold too: consciousness will obscure motivations arising from collective goals (epistemic boat burning). For again, it is belief as true that motivates. We notice, however, that incorrigible persistence in believing, come what may, is unlikely to afford cooperative outcomes. Commitment theory predicts that ideologies will instead shift to meet strategic demands: Beliefs are subtle beasts.

There is much evidence for such subtlety. For example, Festinger et al. describe a UFO cult dealing with the pathos occasioned by the failure of a predicted doomsday (Festinger et al. Reference Festinger, Reicken and Schachter1956). While some cult members packed up and left, most remained, updating their beliefs to explain the persistence of life as the effect of the group's piety and prayer. Such intellectual leger de main, however striking, is not restricted to UFO-spotters. The dissonance literature shows that we often revise peripheral beliefs to meet our goals, not Bayesian demands. Such results are important to commitment models because they reveal that motivations shape our conscious beliefs, and so, that the link between belief and motivation is a two-way street. Moreover, commitment theory enriches dissonance models by focusing to the dynamics of goal maintenance for interactions whose success depends on reliable social prediction.

Organizations of the environments in which we interact (developmental and local) powerfully affect our cooperative commitments; their functional elaboration is critical to the explanation of ideology. While our understanding of these mind/world systems remains obscure, initial results reveal a fascinatingly strong capacity for sacred traditions (core elements of which have been conserved for centuries) to promote cooperative behaviors in large social worlds (Bulbulia, in press; Sosis Reference Sosis2000). For example, the neuroscience of charismatic authority suggests that neural circuits supporting ideological commitments are similar to those recruited during hypnotic suggestion (Deeley et al. Reference Deeley, Identity and Identity2003; Schjødt et al., submitted; Taves Reference Taves2009). Charismatic authority appears to work like a trance. Other research shows that impersonal elements of culture – its music, symbolic displays, and large-scale ritual events – dramatically affect social sensibility and emotions, suggesting that charismatic enchantment extends to impersonal culture and its instruments (Alcorta & Sosis Reference Alcorta and Sosis2005; Baumgartner et al. Reference Baumgartner, Lutz, Schmidt and Jäncke2006; Bulbulia, in press). Among these instruments, synchronous body practices appear especially effective at evoking and maintaining cooperative orbits (Hove & Risen, in press; Wiltermuth & Heath Reference Wiltermuth and Heath2008). In other works we suggest that ritual, music, and symbolic practices are fundamental to establishing the informational and motivational settings that maintaining cooperative behaviors at small and large scales (Bulbulia Reference Bulbulia2004a; Bulbulia & Mahoney Reference Bulbulia and Mahoney2008; Sosis Reference Sosis2003; Reference Sosis2005).

To summarize, commitment theory is important to naturalistic study of belief because it reveals that a core subset of positive illusions are better approached as social goals, masquerading as beliefs. These ideologies interact with our social and cultural circumstances to promote accuracy, not in representing the world as it is, but rather in forecasting what we will do next.