The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 12: Benefits of Unfounded Belief

Another troubling angle on all of this is that people can sometimes latch onto a belief system whose claims are unfounded or causally misconceived, and yet experience real improvements they had not found otherwise. Those improvements can entrench the belief further, because the person now has what feels like lived proof: It worked for me. The mechanism is similar to the self-deception dynamic Trivers describes, and also similar to the way psychoanalysis could help some people even when much of its causal theory was exaggerated, overstated, or wrong.

For example, some people latch onto an extremely rigorous diet with a spurious rationale, and yet end up stabilizing a prior eating problem, bingeing pattern, or weight problem. Often what makes the diet “work” is not the theory, but the frame: the diet becomes a totalizing structure, a rule-set, a ritual, a commitment device, sometimes even a moral identity. Strong belief in the diet’s narrative can increase adherence—sometimes dramatically—especially when the belief is reinforced by “spiritual” practices, authoritative texts, a charismatic leader, and enthusiastic support from fellow adherents. The resulting improvement may have little to do with the supposed mechanism (“toxins,” “energy,” “impurity,” or whatever the myth is) and much to do with ordinary behavioral ingredients: reduced ultra-processed food, fewer calories, more routine, more attention to quantities and timing, and stronger social accountability. In other words, the distinguishing features of the theory may be fictional, while the behavior change is real.

This is an extension of the nonspecific-factors argument, but with an important twist: people may become more loyal to the false theory because the surrounding practices genuinely helped them. And expectancy itself matters. In psychotherapy, patients’ early outcome expectations are associated with better outcomes, and placebo research shows that ritual and a warm practitioner relationship can produce real symptom change. In some settings, even open-label placebos—interventions people are told are inert—can still help. That matters here because it shows that the human benefit does not necessarily require the theory to be true. In some cases it does not even require deception.

It is tempting to treat these forays into unfounded belief as harmless whenever they produce visible gains. But there is a dark side. Some dietary regimens are medically dangerous; some aggravate eating disorders; and some cultivate a loyalty to the framework that discourages critical thinking. Social media can intensify the problem, especially when health-focused communities reward purity, rigidity, and bodily control.

When a person’s identity becomes fused with a belief system, they may reject better treatments when those treatments are indicated—especially if a setback is interpreted as evidence of insufficient “faith,” insufficient purity, or insufficient devotion. The harms here are not merely theoretical. In patients with curable cancers, complementary medicine use has been associated with greater refusal of conventional treatment and worse survival, with the excess mortality appearing to be mediated by delay or refusal of effective care. 

These frameworks also often come packaged with community. People who join one cluster of unusual health beliefs can sometimes be pulled, by social gravity, into neighboring clusters: new spiritual doctrines, anti-vaccine attitudes, conspiratorial styles of explanation, and monetized ecosystems of coaching, supplements, retreats, and memberships. The pattern is not inevitable, but it is real enough to take seriously. 

And there is another distortion worth naming: we mostly hear from the success stories. The people for whom the diet failed, harmed them, or simply became an expensive obsession rarely become public evangelists. The community’s narrative therefore becomes skewed toward “miracles,” while the quiet attrition and collateral damage remain largely invisible.

Finally, just as in religions, the next step is often proselytizing. People who believe they have found salvation—whether dietary, medical, or spiritual—tend to recruit. They may pressure friends and family to “convert,” and disparage outsiders as ignorant, impure, or closed-minded. In the context of fad diets and alternative medicine, that can do real harm to public health.

So the point is not that unfounded belief never “helps.” The point is that when it helps, it often does so through common human mechanisms—structure, community, meaning, identity, expectancy, and accountability—while smuggling in risks that are easy to deny and hard to reverse once the belief becomes an emblem of belonging. The deeper problem is not merely that the belief is false. It is that the felt benefit is then misread as proof that the belief was true all along.

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