Overview
Within the context of psychology, “core beliefs” often refer to “self-related core beliefs” for which the American Psychological Association cites a 2025 study for a definition:
“Self-related core beliefs describe what individuals think about themselves. They usually develop due to experiences individuals make while striving for goals or interacting with their environment. In this study, a structural model was developed that describes what kind of core beliefs individuals hold. It can be used to measures self-related core believes, give feedback, or change core beliefs, for example in coaching.” 1
That sounds simple enough, but the actual identification and taxonomic categorization of these beliefs proves to be extremely complex tasks:
“The present research started with a thorough review of the literature, identifying nearly 800 self-related core beliefs that were described in the literature. In a two-step process, using natural language processing and empirical data, these beliefs were analyzed and integrated in a hierarchical model.” 1
History and Etymology
The ideas behind the significance self-related core beliefs are at least as old as Sigmund Freud, whose focus on the unconscious aspects of human existence as a source of base drives attempted to identify internalized scripts from childhood dynamics that we replay. Alfred Adler, a peer of Freud who shared a deterministic perspective of the human mind where behaviors could be mapped to unconscious mental structures, coined the term “Basic Mistakes” in reference to the flawed foundations a person might hold that produces phenomena like an inferiority complex. Schema theory in the mid-20th century was further developed by Sir Frederic Bartlett, who coined the term “schema” for the templates that brains use to facilitate efficient interpretation of external input from the world, and Jean Piaget, who began applying schemas into developmental and child psychology. In 1955, Albert Ellis proposed Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy, which argued that emotional suffering isn’t produced by experiences themselves but from flawed frameworks that are applied to the interpretation of those experiences.
Aaron T. Beck developed Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as a response to experiments he led in the 1960s that contradicted many assumptions common to Freud-inspired psychoanalysis that assumed negative thoughts within patients were the result of masochistic self-directed hostility. Instead, Beck grew to believe that depressive symptoms were the result of a disorder of information processing in which patients were engaging in conscious dialogue with themselves (what we might sometimes call the “internal monologue”) that featured negative automatic thoughts. It’s no coincidence that this was a period in which computer science and psychology were moving towards a model of the world’s entities as information-processing systems rather than black boxes containing a whirlwind of unconscious drives. Within this framework, Beck postulated that these internal dialogues were rooted in a patient’s schemas about the world, which then became known as “core beliefs.” A child could form the core belief that “I always have to be proving that I am worth loving,” which in adulthood could manifest as a strong bias against accepting unconditional love while seeking conditional or transactional relationships. That adult might then dismiss affection from their partners or believe setting up any boundaries at all would risk abandonment.
Commentary
I’m inclined to feel towards Beck what many feel towards Freud, that he was undoubtedly influential in moving the fields of clinical psychotherapy and philosophy of the mind forward, but many of his core ideas are worthy of intense scrutiny from both theoretical standpoints and empirical studies.
In 1991, a study published in Psychology Bulletin found evidence that depressive thinking was associated with increased negative self-perception, hopelessness, themes of loss, and mood incongruence, but depressive thinking was not especially illogical or irrational. It was more likely that people expressing depressive system had a realistic, even if harsh or negative, evaluation of their lives and environment rather than irrational core beliefs. They stop short of condemning the theoretical foundations of cognitive therapies outright, however:
“We thus find little convincing support for causal hypotheses of cognitive theory, but at the same time it would be premature to abandon them. For example, the idea that dysfunctional beliefs are stable rests uneasily beside the findings from research on remitted depressives, and longitudinal research has generally not supported the onset hypothesis. Given that most of these studies have not used procedures suitable for printing latent beliefs, though, the hypotheses remain viable. Similarly, initial studies have yielded inconsistent results concerning hypothesized interactions between personality modes and specific stressors in predicting depression recurrence.”
This is one of the reasons I remain highly skeptical of positive psychology and New Age spirituality that attributes an almost magical power to optimistic mindsets that allegedly manifest outcomes through intentionality alone. While a patient might still be able to make better or healthier choices as a result of therapeutic discussions,
In 1995, Michael Mahoney published Cognitive and Constructive Psychotherapies: Theory, Research, and Practice, in which he took issue with the theoretical foundations of CBT as reducing humans with “crude computationalism” into flowcharts of thoughts and emotions instead of adopting a fluid, holistic perspective of how humans assemble experiences into schemas. One of Beck’s students Jeffrey Young argued that the concept of “core beliefs” was an intellectualized oversimplification of what he termed Early Maladaptive Schemas (EMS), which were too ingrained to be addressed through pointing out logical errors or irrationality.
More recently, trauma-informed critiques from those like Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, argue that core beliefs stem from deeply ingrained memories of experiences that have been reinforced through the nervous system each time it was reconsolidated.