Who Taught You to Think That Way?
Written by Miss K, Founder & Host of Uncaged Mind
Miss K is the founder and host of Uncaged Mind, a platform for fearless conversations that challenge conventional thinking and question what we are taught to accept. Guided by "Where Curiosity Leads", she is creating a space where no topic is off-limits, no question is too bold, and curiosity refuses to be caged.
Have you ever questioned where your strongest beliefs actually came from? We often assume our opinions, values, and ideas are entirely our own, yet the way we think is shaped by far more than conscious choice. Childhood, culture, social conditioning, repetition, cognitive biases, personal experiences, and the information we consume can all influence what eventually feels true to us. Understanding how beliefs are formed does not mean doubting everything you know. It means learning to recognise what shaped your thinking so you can decide what still deserves your belief.
How are beliefs formed?
Before we learn how to question the world, we learn how to exist within it. As children, we are constantly observing. We notice what receives praise, what causes disappointment, which behaviours are encouraged, what adults describe as good or bad, and what seems to make us accepted. At that age, we are not analysing every message or asking whether there is enough evidence to support it. We are simply learning about the world from the world available to us.
As we grow older, that world expands. School, friendships, culture, religion, relationships, media, workplaces, and our own experiences introduce us to different ideas. Today, social media and the enormous amount of information we consume online have become another major part of that environment.
This does not mean we are passive products of our surroundings. Two people can grow up in the same household and develop very different beliefs. Personality, temperament, experiences, relationships, and individual choices all matter. Belief formation is complex, and there is rarely one neat explanation for why someone thinks the way they do.
What interests me is what happens after those beliefs begin to form. We absorb ideas about success, relationships, gender, beauty, money, happiness, status, and even our own worth long before we have examined all of them critically. Some of those ideas will change as we grow. Others can remain with us for years without ever being revisited.
We begin forming a picture of the world before we are old enough to ask who painted it. The question is whether, at some point, we go back and examine the picture for ourselves.
How does childhood influence the way we think?
Childhood is one of the earliest places where we begin developing assumptions about ourselves and the world around us. Much of this learning does not happen through formal lessons. Children observe patterns. They notice how adults respond to failure, conflict, money, emotions, achievement, appearance, and relationships, and these repeated experiences can contribute to the expectations they carry forward.
Imagine a child who consistently receives the most attention when they achieve something. Nobody necessarily sits that child down and says, “Your worth depends on your achievements.” Yet over time, the child may begin connecting achievement with approval. Years later, constantly striving, struggling to rest, or feeling inadequate after failure may simply feel like part of their personality.
Another child might repeatedly hear that certain careers are respectable while others are a waste of potential. Someone else may grow up hearing very specific ideas about how women should behave, how men should express emotion, when people should marry, or what a successful life should look like.
Not every childhood message becomes an adult belief, and childhood should never be used as a simple explanation for everything a person becomes. We continue developing throughout life. However, our earliest environments matter because they provide some of the first reference points through which we understand ourselves and other people.
The interesting part is that beliefs learned early can feel so familiar that we may not recognise them as beliefs at all.
Why can repetition make something feel true?
One of the most interesting things I came across while researching this article was the relationship between repetition and perceived truth.
Psychologists have studied a phenomenon known as the illusory truth effect, which describes the tendency for repeated information to be judged as more truthful than information encountered for the first time. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Nature Communications examined 182 studies, 366 effect sizes, and 31,184 participants. The researchers found a small but robust effect in which repetition increased perceived truth, although the strength of the effect depended on the type of information and the circumstances in which it was encountered.
This does not mean that hearing something repeatedly automatically makes us believe it. Human thinking is far more complicated than that. What the research does show is that familiarity can influence our judgment, which gives us a good reason to pay attention to the ideas we encounter repeatedly.
Think about statements such as, “You should be married by this age,” “A successful person should have achieved this by now,” “Women are supposed to behave this way,” “Men are naturally like that,” or “People like us don’t do things like that.” The exact messages differ across families, communities, and cultures, but when an idea is repeated often enough, it can begin to sound less like an opinion and more like common sense.
Something can feel familiar because it is true, but something can also feel true because it is familiar. Learning to recognise the difference is an important part of critical thinking.
How does society shape our beliefs?
Culture gives us language, traditions, community, and a sense of belonging, but it also gives us reference points for what is considered normal. Every society carries ideas about success, relationships, gender, beauty, family, status, respectability, and acceptable behaviour.
There is nothing inherently wrong with being influenced by culture. None of us develops in isolation, and cultural influence can provide meaning, connection, and identity. Questioning a cultural belief does not require rejecting your culture either. I think those two things are often unnecessarily treated as opposites.
The problem begins when an influence becomes so familiar that we stop recognising it as an influence. If an idea has surrounded you from childhood and almost everyone around you appears to accept it, you may experience it not as one possible way of seeing the world but simply as reality.
This is particularly interesting when we look across cultures. Something considered completely normal in one society may seem unusual in another. Expectations around marriage, family roles, careers, independence, emotional expression, and gender can vary enormously. That alone should make us curious about how much of what we call “normal” is universal and how much has been socially constructed around us.
Sometimes the beliefs most worth examining are not the ones somebody forced upon us. They are the ones we never realised were open to questioning.
When does a belief become part of your identity?
Questioning beliefs becomes much harder when they are connected to identity.
A belief about success, for example, may begin as an idea about achievement but eventually become connected to self-worth. If someone has spent years measuring themselves through academic results, career progress, income, or recognition, questioning that belief may no longer feel like a simple intellectual exercise. It can bring up a much more personal question, "If I stop proving myself through achievement, how will I know that I am enough?"
The same thing can happen with beliefs connected to family, morality, relationships, gender, culture, politics, religion, status, or community. At that point, changing an opinion can feel as though we are changing something about who we are or separating ourselves from people with whom we belong.
This may help explain why conversations about deeply held beliefs can become emotional so quickly. We are not always debating isolated pieces of information. Sometimes we are defending the identity, relationships, and sense of certainty attached to them.
That is why I don’t think having strong opinions is evidence by itself that someone thinks independently. The more interesting question is whether we understand why we hold those opinions so strongly.
How does social media influence our opinions?
The way beliefs are shaped becomes even more complicated in the digital age.
We now have access to an extraordinary amount of information. We can encounter people, cultures, research, and perspectives that would once have been completely outside our immediate world. In many ways, that is incredibly valuable. But having access to more information does not automatically mean we examine information more carefully.
Every day, we move quickly through headlines, videos, opinions, advertisements, arguments, and other people’s lives. We choose who to follow and which content to interact with, while digital platforms learn from those behaviours and continue showing us material they predict will keep our attention.
Over time, it can become easy to think, “Everyone thinks this way,” when what we may really mean is that everyone we repeatedly encounter online seems to think this way.
That distinction matters. If we repeatedly hear the same interpretation of an issue, familiarity can easily be mistaken for consensus. We may become extremely informed about one side of an argument while barely encountering the strongest evidence or reasoning from another.
The internet has given us more access to information than ever before. What it cannot do for us is decide how thoughtfully we process it.
What are cognitive biases and how do they affect our thinking?
Cognitive biases are patterns in human judgment that can affect how we interpret information and make decisions. They are important to understand because critical thinking is not simply a matter of intelligence. Intelligent, educated, and well-informed people are still human beings, and none of us becomes automatically immune to bias because we know more.
Confirmation bias is one familiar example. We may be more receptive to information that supports what we already believe and more critical of information that challenges it. Motivated reasoning can also influence how we evaluate evidence when we have a personal or emotional investment in reaching a particular conclusion. As discussed earlier, repetition and familiarity can affect how truthful information appears.
Knowing that these processes exist does not make them disappear. You can understand confirmation bias perfectly well and still catch yourself looking for information that confirms your position.
For me, that is one of the most useful lessons from studying how people think. Critical thinking does not begin with assuming you are rational and trying to identify everyone else’s biases. It begins with accepting that your own thinking deserves examination too.
Being able to genuinely say, “I could be wrong,” is much harder than it sounds.
What does it mean to think for yourself?
Thinking for yourself does not mean rejecting everything your parents, teachers, culture, community, or society taught you. It also does not mean deliberately choosing the unpopular opinion. Automatically disagreeing with everyone else is not necessarily more independent than automatically agreeing with them.
Independent thinking is more about understanding how you reached a conclusion and being willing to test it.
When I notice myself holding a particularly strong opinion, I find it more useful to go backwards before searching for information that proves me right. Where did I first encounter this idea? Which experiences reinforced it? Have I seriously looked at credible evidence that challenges it? Am I applying the same standard of evidence to information I agree with and information I dislike?
One question I find especially useful is, “What would it take for me to change my mind?”
If the genuine answer is “nothing,” then I am probably no longer investigating the belief. I am protecting it. That does not automatically mean the belief is wrong, but it should make me curious about why I need it to remain untouched.
Thinking independently is not about reaching a point where nobody can influence you. That is probably impossible. It is about becoming more conscious of influence and more responsible for what you choose to continue believing.
How can you question your own beliefs?
Questioning your beliefs does not mean waking up tomorrow and doubting everything you know. That would not be particularly useful, and it certainly would not make someone a better critical thinker. A much more realistic approach is to choose one belief that feels completely normal to you and examine it properly.
It could be something you believe about success, relationships, money, beauty, gender, career, marriage, happiness, failure, or even yourself. Before deciding whether the belief is right or wrong, try tracing it backwards. Think about where you first encountered the idea, who reinforced it, and which experiences made it feel true. Then ask yourself whether you have ever actually investigated it or whether it has simply been present for so long that you stopped noticing it.
The next part is more uncomfortable but probably more valuable, look for the strongest credible argument against your position. Not an exaggerated version that is easy to dismiss, but the argument an intelligent and informed person who genuinely disagrees with you would make. Pay attention not only to the information but to your own reaction. If you immediately become defensive, ask yourself why. Sometimes discomfort tells us that an idea is touching something deeper than the evidence itself.
It can also help to imagine encountering your belief for the first time today. If somebody presented the claim to you without the years of familiarity surrounding it, what evidence would you require before accepting it? Would you use the same standard if the claim supported something you already disliked?
The purpose is not to replace one unquestioned belief with another. It is very easy to leave one echo chamber and enter a different one, or reject one rigid worldview only to become equally rigid about its opposite. The goal is not to believe nothing. The goal is to understand why you believe what you do and to make your beliefs earn the confidence you place in them.
Why is curiosity important for critical thinking?
Curiosity and critical thinking are closely connected because curiosity keeps a question open long enough for us to examine it.
We sometimes treat certainty as strength and questioning as weakness, but I see it differently. You can hold strong values and still examine the ideas surrounding them. You can respect your culture while questioning parts of what you inherited. You can believe something deeply while remaining open to evidence that could refine or even change your position.
There is nothing intellectually embarrassing about changing your mind. If you encounter stronger evidence and adjust your position because of it, that does not mean your thinking failed. It means thinking actually took place.
Curiosity does not require us to abandon conviction. It asks us to understand where our convictions came from and whether they can survive honest examination. In that sense, curiosity is not the opposite of knowing what you believe. It may be one of the ways we discover whether we truly believe it for ourselves.
Start questioning what feels obvious
None of us has a completely uninfluenced mind. We are shaped by childhood, culture, education, relationships, experiences, books, conversations, communities, successes, failures, and the enormous digital environments we now spend so much of our lives inside. Influence is part of being human, and the aim should never be to somehow eliminate it.
What we can change is how consciously we respond to those influences. Some beliefs will survive examination and become stronger because we finally understand why we hold them. Others may need to change. Some may turn out to be ideas we carried for years simply because nobody, including ourselves, ever asked us to look at them closely.
The next time you find yourself completely certain about something, resist the immediate urge to prove yourself right. Go back to the beginning and ask yourself where the belief came from, what evidence supports it, and whether you would still choose it if you were encountering it for the first time today.
Then ask the question that started this entire article, "Who taught me to think that way?"
You might be surprised by where the answer leads.
Continue the conversation with Uncaged Mind
Curiosity has never stayed in one lane for me, and neither does Uncaged Mind. It is a space where I explore ideas, experiences, questions, and real-world issues that we often accept, overlook, or live with without ever stopping to examine them deeply. No topic is off-limits when there is something worth questioning, understanding, or seeing from another perspective.
If this article made you stop and question even one thing you had always considered obvious, continue the conversation with Uncaged Mind – Where Curiosity Leads.
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Read more from Miss K
Miss K, Founder & Host of Uncaged Mind
Miss K is the founder and host of Uncaged Mind, a platform built to challenge conventional thinking through fearless, curiosity-led conversations. When questioning is often replaced by simply accepting, she is promoting critical thinking and bringing voices from vastly different fields into conversations that dare to go deeper. Beyond the microphone, Miss K stands for something deeply personal, encouraging women to own their voices and question the narratives handed to them. Through Uncaged Mind, she is building a space where curiosity is power, bold thinking is celebrated, and no meaningful question is off-limits.
