How can you, to a high degree, tell if someone will change their beliefs about certain issues? Researchers are now working on a new model that could be of help in this regard.
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Researchers from the Santa Fe Institute have created a framework to aid in correctly predicting whether a person would shift from an opinion they hold on a particular topic.
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Working from previous efforts, Jonas Dalege and Tamara van der have built a statistical physics framework that takes into account moral and social beliefs for predicting belief change. The model features 20 interrelated beliefs and assesses a person’s level of dissonance.
Dissonance refers to the mental unease that a person feels when having differing beliefs about a topic.
This cognitive network model was reported in a study published in Science Advances. The researchers said it could help tell whether people will change their views on divisive scientific topics when evidence-based data is presented to them.
Predicting belief change
This research involved almost 1,000 participants who were to some extent doubtful about the usefulness of childhood vaccines and genetically modified (GM) foods. The scientists wanted to learn whether the opinions of these people would change if they were provided with evidence-based information.
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The team displayed a message on the consensus in the scientific community on vaccines and genetic modification to the participants. It then utilized the cognitive network model to predict the likelihood of these people changing their minds.
The researchers found that participants who had great dissonance in their interlinked belief network showed a greater likelihood of changing their opinions after seeing the message. They noted, however, that this belief shift was not necessarily about the instructive intervention.
The participants with little dissonance were little changed after being shown the message.
“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,” explained van der Does. “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.”
Dalege noted that there is a risk of people choosing to reduce their dissonance in a less-desirable way. He revealed that the researchers are looking to probe the reasons people take specific paths for reducing their dissonance.
This research is at an early stage for now. It could, however, have significant implications for conveying to people evidence-based scientific information.
References
Dalege, J., & van der Does, T. (2022). Using a cognitive network model of moral and social beliefs to explain belief change. Science Advances, 8(1), eabm0137. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abm0137
