The beliefs we hold develop from a posh dance between our internal and external lives. Our personal-level cognition and our relationships with others work in concert to shape our views of the world and influence how likely we’re to update those views once we encounter recent information. Prior to now, these two levels of belief have been studied largely in isolation: psychologists have modeled the individual-level cognitive processes while researchers in fields from computational social science to statistical physics have offered insights into how beliefs spread and alter inside a society.
“This disconnect when different disciplines are doing parallel work limits progress,” says Jonas Dalege, a former SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow and current Marie Curie Fellow on the University of Amsterdam.
In a study published on September 19 in Psychological Review, Dalege and co-authors present the Networks of Beliefs theory, which integrates the interplay of individual- and social-level belief dynamics, and in addition incorporates social beliefs: how individuals perceive the beliefs of those around them.
“An important point about our model is that it’s about perceptions,” says Dalege, “You never actually know what an individual thinks. For those who discover very strongly as a Democrat, as an illustration, you would possibly assume that your mates do as well. It will probably take quite a bit to shift those perceptions.”
The Networks of Beliefs theory “is the primary to explicitly differentiate between personal, social, and external dissonances,” write the authors. “To totally understand when and why individuals change their beliefs, we’d like to know how these dissonances together result in different social phenomena.”
The Networks of Beliefs theory is built around three primary premises.
The primary is that beliefs will be represented as two interacting classes of networks: internal and external. The inner network is made up of assorted related beliefs — an individual’s beliefs about vaccines, as an illustration, could also be related to their beliefs about science, economics, and religion — in addition to social beliefs. The external network describes how someone’s social beliefs relate to a different’s actual beliefs and vice versa.
The second premise is that individuals want to cut back the dissonance of their beliefs, personally, socially, and externally. Someone might feel personal dissonance once they hold two conflicting beliefs — perhaps that vaccines are effective but in addition unsafe. Social dissonance arises when someone’s beliefs conflict with what they think people around them consider. External dissonance occurs when someone’s social beliefs — their perceptions of others — are out of sync with others’ actual beliefs.
The third premise is that the quantity of dissonance an individual feels relies on how much attention they pay to inconsistencies of their beliefs. This could vary widely based on personal and cultural preferences and depending on the difficulty at hand.
The authors then used an analogy with statistical physics to create a quantitative model of their recent theory. “We map psychological concepts onto statistical physics concepts,” says SFI External Professor Henrik Olsson, a co-author on the paper and researcher at Complexity Science Hub in Austria. “We represent potential dissonance as energy and a focus as temperature. This permits us to capitalize on well-known formalisms in statistical physics to model the complex dynamics of belief networks.”
The Networks of Belief theory allows researchers to model the interplay of people and the people around them, of perceived and actual beliefs, and of assorted levels of attention. And, it describes how beliefs change once we concentrate to different parts of our belief system.
“Sometimes we pay more attention to our personal dissonance and wish to be certain that that our beliefs are in tune with our own values,” says SFI Professor Mirta Galesic, who can also be a co-author on the paper and a researcher at Complexity Science Hub. “Sometimes, perhaps if we’re in a socially sensitive situation, we pay more attention to the dissonance between ours and others’ beliefs. In such situations, we would change our beliefs to evolve to the perceived social pressure.”
The model, which the authors validated in two large surveys, might be applied to a wide range of real-world problems. It could, as an illustration, offer recent tools for tackling the rise in polarization around the globe. “To know and find a way to do something about polarization, we now have to look beyond just the person or social answer,” says Dalege. “Partial answers can result in dangerous policies. You would possibly get the alternative effects of what you are in search of.”
