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This post is comprised of some slightly retooled old work (published in 2019, then unpublished). It might just win the banality award (although it’s made some people angry). But some might find it interesting. Some of my references are a bit out of date now, but are still useful. Note: Doxa is belief or opinion. Doxastic just means “of or relating to belief”. So doxastic labour is just the work we do — or don’t do— figuring out what to believe.

In this short series, I’m loosely demonstrating how those we depend on for our survival, delectation, and companionship — hereon, our peeps and peepdoms — figure in vetting candidates for the beliefs we acquire and maintain.

Who are our peeps? Easy. Those who readily come to mind when you think of your peeps. You can name them.

See, What’s in name? A face, a voice, laughter, habits brought readily to mind.

The names of the people we love are like beads on a Rosary, well-worn worry stones oft-fondled for comfort and reassurance.

*Note. We don’t have to love all the peeps in our peepdom, nor even particularly like them. But some are going to leave a stronger impression on us than others.

Some will bristle at the notion they rely on their peeps for so many of their beliefs, I think for myself, dammit! Of course you do. We certainly do come by our beliefs in a number of ways. Such as by direct experience. I’m only saying that for many of our beliefs — in fact, many of our very important beliefs — about the world we pick up with and from those in our peepdoms. For one, our brains are metabolically expensive organs and it’s a good evolutionary strategy to share the doxastic labour among more than one brain. But also a lot, probably the lion’s share, of our beliefs are those that help us navigate our immediate environments. Where to find things, how to behave in a certain situation, what to expect post-surgery or when my kid goes to kindergarten. Some get hung up on associating beliefs only with controversial issues, religion, and ideology. But most beliefs are made up of things like the belief that most shopping malls have public washrooms. Or that this mall has a public toilet. Beliefs are mostly about things useful for our immediate needs.

Of course our peeps can steer us wrong — intentionally or not — and we them. These worries might themselves belie our dependence/interdependence on our peeps and peepdoms.

Anyway. Here I lay out some “bones” (in something of an annotated bibliography format) for thinking about the way — the why and the how — our peeps and peepdoms help us navigate the world. And we them. You might pick up these bones, if you find them interesting, and bring them back to your peeps for inspection. The collection and inspection of information is one of the things we do as members of peepdoms, Hey, did you see/hear/know…what do you think, here’s what I think…you should read/listen to…oh, don’t listen to him…I wonder if…

THE BONES of BELIEF

Pam’s note: We have peepdom mechanisms that place a bar on the truthfulness of the information we bring to our peeps and also on the carefulness of what information we bring to our peeps, whether true or not. We get pretty adept at predicting which is required and when.

“Our social set consists of those who figure as people in the phrase “people are saying”; they are the people whose approval matters most intimately to us.” (27)

• Walter Lippmann. Public Opinion.Dover Publications, 2004. (Original: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922.) 

“We only care what opinion is held of us because of the people who form that opinion…the people before whom we feel shame are those whose opinion of us matters to us.” (Ch. 6, p 73 & 74)

• Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. Dover Publications, 2004.

“As early as their first year of life — far earlier than, until recently, most psychologists would have thought possible — human babies exhibit concern with what someone else not only thinks but thinks about them. For example, babies obviously bask in what can only be described as personal pride when they sense that they are approved of, and they act shamed or embarrassed when they sense that something they have done is not okay with their caregivers.” (116 & 117)

• Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Mothers and Others: the evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2009.

Pam’s note: We’ll think twice about lying if we value the trust and/or affection of the person who now might think a little less of us for doing so. (Sometimes a motivation to lie!) And she knows, and we know she knows, this is so. It’s curious why we have this ‘display and detection system’ and why it is so much more refined, and probably more reliable, in our peepdoms.

Most of us have an intimate core social group, a peepdom (comprised of at least one other), who are instrumental to the acquisition, distribution, and maintenance of information therein. The kinds of information admitted or rejected, for example, will be strongly influenced by our peeps. And we’ve some well-known mechanisms, such as punishment and reward, that make this regulation and constraint of information efficient. A frown can discourage someone from pursuing one idea as much as a smile can encourage the adoption of another. One might conceptualize these mechanisms as analogous to a voltage regulator, maintaining social stability within a fluctuating peepdom — ever vulnerable to surges and shorts.

The regulation of social stability is vital to our survival and delectation. Hence information that poses an incorrigible threat to this social stability is not only more likely to be rejected by members of the peepdom, but also more likely never to be admitted for consideration in the first place. Sometimes, truth be damned. 2019 (2025)

Thomas Hobbes calls this necessitated conformity ‘complaisance’, i.e. “that every man [sic] strive to accommodate himself [sic] to the rest […or else] be left or cast out of society as cumbersome thereunto”

• Thomas Hobbes, A.P. Martinich and Brian Battiste, Eds, Leviathan, Broadview, 2011. Part I, Chapter XV, 17. pp 143, 144.

Studies such as Naomi Eisenberger, et al’s “Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion,” suggests “that social pain is analogous in its neurocognitive function to physical pain, alerting us when we have sustained injury to our social connections, allowing restorative measures to be taken.” 

• Eisenberger, Naomi I., Matthew D. Lieberman, and Kipling D. Williams. “Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion.” Science 302.5643 (2003): 290-292. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14551436/ (accessed Jan 16, 2025)

Kirsten Weir reports that “It’s remarkably hard to find situations in which rejection isn’t painful.” Weir says research suggests that our sensitivity to social rejection is so great, we even feel the pain of social rejection from people we don’t like. In one study, says Weir, Williams “found that African-American students experienced the same pain of rejection when they were told the people rejecting them were members of the Ku Klux Clan.” 

• Weir, Kirsten. “The pain of social rejection.” American Psychological Association 43 (2012). http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/04/rejection.aspx (access Jan 16, 2025)

This pain mentioned by Eisenberger and Weir (above) is a call to correct our behaviour – or else! Get back into line! And, for the largest part, we do. As Aristotle observes, we’re motivated to alleviate or avoid this social pain by moving toward the pleasantness we experience as “a natural state of being [1].” Hence we say sorry, or kiss and make up. Or avoid each other.

• [1] Aristotle, Rhetoric, Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. Dover Publications, 2004. p 40.

Pam’s note: Pleasure and pain are mechanisms which help ensure the stability required for prediction and control. Prediction and control within our peepdoms allows us to know not only that we can rely on each other, but also more specifically who we can rely on for what. My bestie knows that I am deathly allergic to nuts, and i) I know she knows of my allergy and ii) I know she knows I trust her to help keep me safe. Or, iii) I know my bestie is forgetful and so I never fail to bring my own lunch to her home, and iv) she knows I know she is forgetful and is never insulted that I do. I know that Ron can fix my car in much the way that Ralph can’t. And I know that Ralph can help me with formal logic in much the way that Ron can’t. If I couldn’t count on all of these things, I might respectively die, get stranded on a lone stretch of highway, or fail my course. 2019 (2025)

“Part of what it is to be a member of a community of knowledge is to be able to rely on largely unspoken, unarticulated assumptions about other people’s knowledge. Only when we enter a strange community or a stranger enters ours does this reliance become apparent.” 

• Welbourne, Michael. “The community of knowledge.” The Philosophical Quarterly (1950-) 31.125 (1981): 302-314. p 303 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2219401 (accessed Jan 16, 2025)

Prediction and control helps establish and maintain social stability within a peepdom, but it can be damaged, even lost, by times of change and strife. On the flip side, weathering rough spells together can, and often does, make our bonds even stronger. So prediction and control isn’t the whole story. We hold on to each other through chaos, through whatever storms come our way. And we learn how to respond to these new situations together, adjusting and maintaining social stability. So in our peepdoms there are all kinds of mechanisms that contribute to group resilience, to increase our chances for survival by keeping us together. I have your back, you have mine. You’ll tell me what I need to hear or bite your tongue until it bleeds for my sake. And I for yours. You’ll speak well of me, and I of you. You’ll give me the best information you have, and I will give you the best of mine. We trust each other.

The high degree of trust shared among peeps helps explain the devastating emotional consequences and sense of betrayal felt when this trust is breeched. I’ll think the shady mechanic who jerry-rigs my brakes with a cheap product then charges me full price a douche-bag. A close friend who does the same is no longer a friend. If ever he was. I’ll lose sleep wondering what happened, what I failed to see. I’ll try to make sense of the situation. If he needed money, why didn’t he ask. I’d have given it to him, surely he knows. Worse, It’s not the money. Why would my good friend risk my life with sh***y brakes?! Anger mingles with disbelief, amalgamating into a leaden burden of grief. My friend, my friend, why? When I see my erstwhile friend across the way, or hear his name in conversation, I feel empty. And if ever I meet his eyes, I miss the joy of recognition. I don’t know him anymore. Pam Lindsay, 2019 (2025)

Who are your peeps? Just name them. They’re with you all the time, patterned into billions of your brain cells. PL, 2019 (2025)