This question can inspire levels of fury beyond my understanding, which is why I couldn’t have casually posed it on Reddit. This seems like a more good faith kind of crowd so I’ll ask it here.
This is a question I’ve put a lot of thought into for myself since 2020. I’m interested in my ideas being criticized and perhaps to criticize the ideas of others (Note: Not criticizing people or their character. Only ideas). I’m going to post my own answer in the comments.
I’m not really sure you can choose or provide a process for what you believe. I certainly don’t say “I’m going to believe proposition X” and then do some set of things to believe it. I think belief just happens or doesn’t.
Your post sounds a little more like how I’d define knowledge. I can believe things for just about any reason, from intuition to desires to random chance. Knowledge for me requires mostly “justified true belief” though this is a philosophically squishy definition, it’s also the best shorthand I’m currently aware of. And I try to be pretty clear if challenged or prompted on what is belief and what I’d call knowledge.
Knowledge acquisition works basically like you say.
So, why this pedantry? Well, I’d say it’s because you can actively work to gain knowledge, and there’s also generally an ability to have percentage confidence levels in a way I don’t think works with belief. I generally find belief mostly binary.
To take an example - I can be forced to believe or disbelieve something, and that can happen via knowledge acquisition as to truth or falsehood. For instance, I don’t believe aliens have visited Earth. But if “First Contact” happened and a ship landed in front of me an an alien walked out - I’d immediately change my belief. Then of course I’d start the knowledge acquisition to try and be sure I wasn’t being pranked in a very expensive hidden camera show or something.
On the other hand, if I believed that a bear was tipping over my trash every night, but many other people said it was a raccoon, I’d reevaluate that belief. It’s wouldn’t be an active process though, my belief is just shaken, so I then begin to try and get knowledge.
TL;DR: I think belief is subconscious and not directly under our control.
I absolutely agree that to a large degree this is a subjective process which depends on the nature and nurture of the individual forming the belief. It’s likely that the vast majority of the things I believe gained that status due to an automatic process which I am unaware of.
I should specify that the process I detailed is what I would intentionally apply to form a basis for highly consequential personal or political decisions. When it was first posed to me and upon studying the psychology involved, I have wondered whether I would have behaved like the average German did in 1938 despite the official ideology being so obviously vulnerable to scrutiny of any kind. I observe a similar method of epistemology being deployed now notoriously against certain minority groups today which I might have gotten caught up in as a teenager due to my upbringing but know better than to fall for now. I may edit my post to specify forming a belief when one is aware they are forming a belief when multiple interpretations of reality are present which may not even be based on the same set of “facts.”