Complexity Explorer Santa Few Institute

Dynamics of belief networks

mentors: Mirta Galesic & Henrik Olsson

This project is part of our larger quest to understand how belief networks and social networks interact and produce different patterns of belief change. We have developed a theoretical framework to begin understanding this in Dalege et al., 2023 (reference below). We would now like to investigate further aspects of belief dynamics in any of the following ways:

1) Analyzing networks of beliefs expressed in discussions on news sites at different sides of the political spectrum, from Gateway Pundit to Mother Jones. We have already collected this data and extracted topics of discussion using BERTopic, and the related sentiments. The student would use different measures of network structure and change to compare belief networks from different sites and over time.

2) Implementing model code in Matlab, rerunning existing simulations and conducting new ones, in particular to investigate how the structure of belief networks influences their resilience and robustness to new information.

3) Analyzing survey data that we have collected on people’s attitudes towards various science topics (GM food, vaccination, and others), extracting belief networks and studying their robustness and resilience over time.

Dalege, J., Galesic, M., & Olsson, H. (2023). Networks of Beliefs: An Integrative Theory of Individual- and Social-Level Belief Dynamics. https://osf.io/368jz/download