Summary
Core beliefs are a person’s most central ideas about themselves, other people and the world. The term comes from cognitive therapy, developed by Aaron T. Beck from the 1960s, whose model has three levels of belief: passing automatic thoughts, intermediate beliefs, and beneath both, core beliefs. Therapist Aid, a resource site for clinicians, says they “act like a lens through which every situation and life experience is seen”.
That is why two people in the same situation can think, feel and act quite differently. A core belief can be inaccurate and still shape what someone sees, so in therapy it is brought into the open and tested against the evidence.
Rationale
A neighbour, not a twin. Cognitive therapy finds core beliefs in one person’s history and tests them against evidence; the dispositions we describe are shared, and “held in place by many different aspects of our lives”.