Over this summer, I conducted preliminary literature reviews of four belief domains or psychological constructs: human agency, personal narratives, beliefs about the body, and beliefs about the future. In each of these domains, the importance of why beliefs matter is clearly emphasized. Under human agency, we analyzed how agency for men and women changed over the last 100 years and how it corresponds to progress in the United States. A book corpus and data corpus review were created using proxy variables to identify where women’s agency is high, and if it corresponded with real events. The goal is to support the idea that when agency is high, progress occurs, when it is low, stagnation occurs. For the personal narrative domain, comprehensive literature reviews were conducted to identify the nature in which humans narrate their life stories and what guides their formation.  We analyzed beliefs about the future through literature reviews to identify the mechanisms that drive future-thinking among people. Beliefs about the body was another domain explored through this project through literature reviews and twitter labeling. The twitter labeling gained insight about what beliefs may exist about one’s body in natural settings like that of social media spaces. Ultimately, it can be predicted that beliefs are vital to understanding because they guide behaviors and create the outlook we have on the world, ourselves, and any other existing entity. They can be easily influenced by the perceptions we hold in the exact moment, the society we developed and exist in, and a myriad of others. All of which drive us to understand why beliefs matter and question how they may influence our future.