Predicting which people will change their minds about controversial scientific issues is a new kind of network model.
The framework for predicting if a person will change their opinion is presented in Science Advances. A person has from holding conflicting beliefs about a topic.
Both moral and social beliefs were integrated into a statistical physics framework to model belief change.
They used the cognitive network model to predict how the beliefs of a group of nearly 1,000 people would change as a result of an educational intervention.
People in the study were shown a message about the scientific consensus. The people who began the study with a lot of disgruntlement in their interwoven network of beliefs were more likely to change their beliefs after seeing the message. There was little change after the intervention.
If your family and friends tell you that vaccines are unsafe, this will make you question your beliefs about scientists. When presented with new information, you would just move more towards that direction if you were already kind of anti- GM foods or vaccines.
The research could 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 confusion in their beliefs, but at the same time this creates some danger that they will reduce their confusion in a way that you didn't want them to," Dalege says. We want to expand this research to see if we can learn more about why people do certain things.
More information: Jonas Dalege et al, Using a cognitive network model of moral and social beliefs to explain belief change, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm0137 Journal information: Science Advances
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