Ideologies

Profiling People's Ideologies

Profiling Yourself: What do you believe in?

Metacognition: Knowledge about your own thoughts and the factors that influence your thinking.

Autoideography

Write an exhaustive list of all your ideas. Rate them by your degrees of belief. It is convenient to track your ideas on a profile sheet that has a great many ideas listed as well as many blank spaces to add new ones.

Belief Systems

Like genetically inherited characteristics, people are brought up with the belief systems of their culture. Communities make their prevalent ideas almost unavoidable. When profiling your ideas, your cultural belief systems provide starting points from which to base your own ideas.

You may differ from the norms of your culture on some ideas but think typically about other ideas.

Most of the our ideas come from our cultures. By growing up in an environment surrounded with similar ideas and their believers, we become socialized to think and feel like our peers. Mimicry of other people is an advantageous natural human learning behavior that harmonizes the members of a culture to work together effectively as a group. It also becomes a disadvantage for members of different cultures trying to work together because cultural differences can cause conflicts between people’s ideas.

The funny thing about belief is that it is often not the belief in one idea itself which gives it strength in our minds and makes us unwilling to change. We may think our convictions are rational and that we are open to changing our minds if someone convinces us otherwise. However, in many cases the combined weight of all the supporting ideas tied into a conviction constitute a belief system as strong as fanaticism.

Identifying Cultural Backgrounds

Backgrounds give you certain cultural ideas. If you want to remove your cultural ideas, you can reverse them at the cost of idea points. It takes effort to maintain ideas opposite to the society in which you live while bombarded by its messages.

Cultures are not necessarily organized groups. People may move in and out of different cultures over time, sometimes without even realizing it.

Multicultural Overlap

People are often members of many different cultures and subcultures that overlap. Cultures can be international or national, ethnic or multiethnic, religious or secular, modern or historic, musical or economic. From fans of hip-hop music to corporate executives, cultures are groups of people who share a common set of ideas.

Idea Interactions

Ideas interact with one another to cause complex human behaviors. Each idea has a number of related ideas which it may support. For example, Buddhism supports Vegeterianism and non-violence.

So you may realize you think americanism 50%, but you may not realize that it includes anti-communism 50% and interventionism 50% or corporations are friendly 50%.

Cultures

Cultures are overlapping groups of belief systems embodied in the people who believe them.

Ideology Meanings

• http://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/ideology.html Marxist definition is another definition but not the more broad idea we are referring to

"An ideology is an organized collection of ideas. The word ideology was coined by Count Destutt de Tracy in the late 18th century to define a "science of ideas." An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things (compare Weltanschauung), as in common sense (see Ideology in everyday society) and several philosophical tendencies (see Political ideologies), or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society. The main purpose behind an ideology is to offer change in society through a normative thought process (what the world ought to be). Ideologies tend to be abstract thoughts applied to reality and thus make this concept unique to politics."

How Audiences Perceive Things

• How Far Right Sees NYTimes