New model for predicting belief change
Santa Fe Institute
A
study in Science Advances presents a framework to accurately
predict if a person will change their opinion about a certain topic. The
approach estimates the amount of dissonance, or mental discomfort, a person has
from holding conflicting beliefs about a topic.
Santa
Fe Institute Postdoctoral Fellows Jonas Dalege and Tamara van der Does built on
previous efforts to model belief change by integrating both moral and social
beliefs into a statistical physics framework of 20 interacting beliefs.
They
then used this cognitive network model to predict how the beliefs of a group of
nearly 1,000 people, who were at least somewhat skeptical about the efficacy of
genetically modified foods and childhood vaccines, would change as the result
of an educational intervention.
Study participants were shown a message about the scientific consensus on genetic modification and vaccines. Those who began the study with a lot of dissonance in their interwoven network of beliefs were more likely to change their beliefs after viewing the messaging, but not necessarily in accordance with the message. On the other hand, people with little dissonance showed little change following the intervention.
"For
example, if you believe that scientists are inherently trustworthy, but your
family and friends tell you that vaccines are unsafe, this is going to create
some dissonance in your mind," van der Does says. "We found that if
you were already kind of anti-GM foods or vaccines to begin with, you would
just move more towards that direction when presented with new information even
if that wasn't the intention of the intervention."
While
still in an early stage, the research could ultimately have important
implications for communicating scientific, evidence-based information to the
public.
"On the one hand you might want to target people who have some dissonance in their beliefs, but at the same time this also creates some danger that they will reduce their dissonance in a way that you didn't want them to," Dalege says. "Moving forward, we want to expand this research to see if we can learn more about why people take certain paths to reduce their dissonance."
