Some Ideas for Project 2

Below are some resources to help you start thinking about beliefs you could focus on in Project 2:

• Look back at the "This I Beleive" site and consider the beliefs that others have expressed there.
• Think of friends or relatives (or other cultures, other generations, other nationalities, other backgrounds) who hold beliefs different from yours.
• Visit some sites of political candidates or their parties, or political blogs. (This site about "Why People are Irrational about Politics" might be useful here.)
• Think of the reasons people hold their beliefs and work backwards from these reasons to a belief you question. (For instance, religion is the most common belief system that people question by looking at why people believe in it; this article might help here: "Why Do We Believe Impossible Things?".)
• Choose something you're invested in, but feel conflict over (i.e.e dissonance). For instance, if I was writing this paper, I would probably write about the belief that “everyone should go to college.” It’s a belief I see repeated over and over in the current presidential campaign, but about which I’m not sure. My paper does not need to deliver a final “yes” or “no” on this topic. Rather, my intent should be to first explore why this belief is so widespread. What is it about Americans that leads them to adhere to this belief? What changes in our economy have made such a belief more likely? What sort of evidence is there that confirms or denies this belief? You’ll probably find that any myth you look at has both evidence for it and against it. Those myths that persist with a large amount of evidence against them often appeal to us in other ways (like how the “everyone should go to college” belief appeals to the American ideal of equality that is embedded in the Declaration of Independence’s statement that all people are created equal).