ArticlePloS one2016
Collective Dynamics of Belief Evolution under Cognitive Coherence and Social Conformity.
Article in PloS one, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- The desire to avoid cognitive dissonance drives community formation in a social network model.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Sherlock Holmes Doesn't Play Dice: The Mathematics of Uncertain Reasoning When Something May Happen, That You Are Not Even Able to Figure Out.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- A semantic embedding space based on large language models for modelling human beliefs.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- A Model for the Formation of Beliefs and Social Norms Based on the Satisfaction Problem (SAT).Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Emergence of simple and complex contagion dynamics from weighted belief networks.Science advances · 2024Article
- Spatiotemporal evolution of urban populations and housing: A dynamic utility-driven market-mediated model.PloS one · 2023Article
- Novel idea generation in social networks is optimized by exposure to a "Goldilocks" level of idea-variability.PNAS nexus · 2022Article
- Opinion Polarization in Human Communities Can Emerge as a Natural Consequence of Beliefs Being Interrelated.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Using a cognitive network model of moral and social beliefs to explain belief change.Science advances · 2022Article
- Assessing rigid modes of thinking in self-declared abortion ideology: natural language processing insights from an online pilot qualitative study on abortion attitudes.Pilot and feasibility studies · 2022Article
- Empirical social triad statistics can be explained with dyadic homophylic interactions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- The Synergies Between Understanding Belief Formation and Artificial Intelligence.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
- Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Article
- Integrating social and cognitive aspects of belief dynamics: towards a unifying framework.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- Article
- "Mommy Blogs" and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2016Article
- Emergence of metapopulations and echo chambers in mobile agents.Scientific reports · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human history has been marked by social instability and conflict, often driven by the irreconcilability of opposing sets of beliefs, ideologies, and religious dogmas. The dynamics of belief systems has been studied mainly from two distinct perspectives, namely how cognitive biases lead to individual belief rigidity and how social influence leads to social conformity. Here we propose a unifying framework that connects cognitive and social forces together in order to study the dynamics of societal belief evolution. Each individual is endowed with a network of interacting beliefs that evolves through interaction with other individuals in a social network. The adoption of beliefs is affected by both internal coherence and social conformity. Our framework may offer explanations for how social transitions can arise in otherwise homogeneous populations, how small numbers of zealots with highly coherent beliefs can overturn societal consensus, and how belief rigidity protects fringe groups and cults against invasion from mainstream beliefs, allowing them to persist and even thrive in larger societies. Our results suggest that strong consensus may be insufficient to guarantee social stability, that the cognitive coherence of belief-systems is vital in determining their ability to spread, and that coherent belief-systems may pose a serious problem for resolving social polarization, due to their ability to prevent consensus even under high levels of social exposure. We argue that the inclusion of cognitive factors into a social model could provide a more complete picture of collective human dynamics.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.