Beyond Belief Updating: A Framework for Self-Belief Formation

From early childhood, we form self-beliefs about where we belong, what we are good at, or who loves us. Despite extensive psychological research on self-beliefs, the fundamental question of how they initially form has received surprisingly little attention. Existing work on self-belief updating overlooks two critical limitations. First, it treats self-related learning as arising from isolated events, ignoring that self-beliefs typically emerge from sequences of meaningfully connected experiences. Second, because updating paradigms operate in familiar domains, participants already hold precise prior beliefs intertwined with established motives and emotional states making it impossible to study belief formation from a genuinely uninformed starting point. We propose that studying novel experiential domains addresses both problems: individuals enter such domains with neutral, imprecise self-beliefs, enabling formation of “artificial” self-beliefs through repeated feedback in a controlled setting. As a concrete implementation, we introduce the Learning Of Own Performance (LOOP) task, in which participants form beliefs about their abilities in a novel performance domain. Extensions of this approach could illuminate broader aspects of self-belief formation, including personality and identity. This Perspective bridges psychology, computational neuroscience, and sociology around a foundational question: how do we come to think about ourselves the way we do?