Factors influencing the update of beliefs regarding controversial political issues

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Kube

When updating beliefs in light of new information, people preferentially integrate information that is consistent with their prior beliefs and helps them construe a coherent view of the world. Such a selective integration of new information likely contributes to belief polarisation and compromises public discourse. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the factors that underlie biased belief updating. To this end, I conducted three pre-registered experiments covering different controversial political issues (i.e., Experiment 1: climate change, Experiment 2: speed limit on highways, Experiment 3: immigration in relation to violent crime). The main hypothesis was that negative reappraisal of new information (referred to as “cognitive immunisation”) hinders belief updating. Support for this hypothesis was found only in Experiment 2. In all experiments, the magnitude of the prediction error (i.e., the discrepancy between prior beliefs and new information) was strongly related to belief updating. Across experiments, participants’ general attitudes regarding the respective issue influenced the strength of beliefs, but not their update. The present findings provide some indication that the engagement in cognitive immunisation can lead to the maintenance of beliefs despite disconfirming information. However, by far the largest association with belief updating was with the magnitude of the prediction error.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Kube ◽  
Lukas Kirchner ◽  
Gunnar Lemmer ◽  
Julia Glombiewski

Aberrant belief updating has been linked to psychopathology, e.g., depressive symptoms. While previous research used to treat belief-confirming vs. -disconfirming information as binary concepts, the present research varied the extent to which new information deviates from prior beliefs and examined its influence on belief updating. In a false feedback task (Study 1; N = 379) and a social interaction task (Study 2; N = 292), participants received slightly positive, moderately positive or extremely positive information in relation to their prior beliefs. In both studies, new information was deemed most reliable if it was moderately positive. Yet, differences in the positivity of new information had only small effects on belief updating. In Study 1, depressive symptoms were related to difficulties in generalizing positive new learning experiences. The findings suggest that, contrary to traditional learning models, the larger the differences between prior beliefs and new information, the more beliefs are not updated.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alyssa Hannah Sinclair ◽  
Matthew Stanley ◽  
Paul Seli

When confronted with information that challenges our beliefs, we must often learn from error in order to successfully navigate the world. Past studies in reinforcement learning and educational psychology have linked prediction error, a measure of surprise, to successful learning from feedback. However, there are substantial individual differences in belief-updating success, and the psychological factors that influence belief updating remain unclear. Here, we identify a novel factor that may predict belief updating: Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), which is characterized by a desire for order, structure, and preservation of social norms. We hypothesized that, because people who score high on RWA are motivated to preserve entrenched beliefs, they may often fail to successfully update their beliefs when confronted with new information. Using a novel paradigm, we challenged participants’ false beliefs and misconceptions to elicit prediction error. In two studies, we found consistent evidence that high-RWA individuals were less successful at correcting their false beliefs. Relative to low-RWA individuals, high-RWA individuals were less likely to revise beliefs in response to prediction error. We argue that RWA is associated with a relatively closed-minded cognitive style that negatively influences belief updating.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Kube ◽  
Julia Glombiewski

People update their beliefs selectively in response to good news and disregard bad news, referred to as the optimism bias. Yet, the precise cognitive mechanisms underlying this asymmetry in belief updating are largely unknown. In three experiments, we tested the hypothesis that cognitive immunisation against new information contributes to optimistic belief updating (e.g. through questioning the reliability of new information). In each study, participants received new information in relation to their prior beliefs, and we examined the influence of cognitive immunisation on belief updating by using a three-group modulation protocol: In one group, cognitive immunisation against new information was promoted; in another group, cognitive immunisation was inhibited; and a control group received no manipulation. This modulation protocol was applied to beliefs about the self, i.e. performance expectations (Experiment 1&2; N=99 and N=93), and beliefs about climate change (Experiment 3; N=227) as an example of factual beliefs. The results of Experiments 1&2 showed that the cognitive immunisation manipulation had no influence on the update of performance-related expectations. In Experiment 3, we did find significant group differences in belief updating, and this effect interacted with participants’ general attitudes towards climate change: people who were sceptical about man-made climate change lowered their estimates of the projected temperature rise particularly if they perceived scientific information on climate change as being fraught with uncertainty. These findings suggest that the importance of cognitive immunisation in belief updating may depend on the content of beliefs (i.e. self-related vs. factual) and participants’ attitudes to the subject in question.


2021 ◽  
pp. 216770262110246
Author(s):  
Tobias Kube ◽  
Lukas Kirchner ◽  
Gunnar Lemmer ◽  
Julia Anna Glombiewski

Previous research on expectation updating in relation to psychopathology used to treat expectation-confirming information and expectation-disconfirming information as binary concepts. Here, we varied the extent to which new information deviates from prior expectations and examined its influence on expectation adjustment in both a false-feedback task (Study 1; N = 379) and a social-interaction task (Study 2; N = 292). Unlike traditional learning models, we hypothesized a tipping point in which the discrepancy between expectation and outcome becomes so large that new information is perceived as lacking credibility, thus entailing little updating of expectations. Consistent with the hypothesized tipping point, new information was deemed most valid if it was moderately positive. Moreover, descriptively, expectation update was largest for moderate expectation violations, but this effect was small (Study 2) or even nonsignificant (Study 1). The findings question the assumption of traditional learning models that the larger the prediction error, the larger the update.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Hird

Computational cognitive theory proposes that our experiences represent an optimisation between new information and prior beliefs, which are updated to best reflect reality. However, experiences can be biased. One example is the placebo response (PR), where a persistent belief in the effectiveness of a treatment relieves symptoms, even though the ‘treatment’ is an inert sugar pill. Another example is psychosis, which is characterised by unusual percepts and beliefs in the form of hallucinations and delusions. Antipsychotic medication, the primary treatment for psychosis, is often ineffective and accompanied by severe side-effects, but we have not identified an effective alternative. This is likely because the large and heterogenous placebo response in psychosis is likely to create noise in trials and so disrupts attempts to identify new treatments. This well-recognised issue could be solved if we can predict how an individual is likely to respond to placebo treatment and account for placebo responses. Importantly, biomarkers predicting the placebo response have been identified chiefly in pain and depression, but not in psychosis. Quantifying individual belief-updating, and tendency to rely on prior beliefs versus new information, would provide a sensitive method to predict the PR in psychosis.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben M Tappin ◽  
Gordon Pennycook ◽  
David Gertler Rand

A surprising finding from U.S. opinion surveys is that political disagreements tend to be greatest among the most cognitively sophisticated opposing partisans. Recent experiments suggest a hypothesis that could explain this pattern: cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing of new information. However, the designs of these experiments tend to contain several limitations that complicate their support for this hypothesis. In particular, they tend to (i) focus on people’s worldviews and political identities, at the expense of their other, more specific prior beliefs, (ii) lack direct comparison with a politically unbiased benchmark, and (iii) focus on people’s judgments of new information, rather than on their posterior beliefs following exposure to the information. We report two studies designed to address these limitations. In our design, U.S. subjects received noisy but informative signals about the truth or falsity of partisan political questions, and we measured their prior and posterior beliefs, and cognitive sophistication, operationalized as analytic thinking inferred via performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test. We compared subjects’ posterior beliefs to an unbiased Bayesian benchmark. We found little evidence that analytic thinking magnified politically biased deviations from the benchmark. In contrast, we found consistent evidence that greater analytic thinking was associated with posterior beliefs closer to the benchmark. Together, these results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing. We discuss differences between our design and prior work that can inform future tests of this hypothesis.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-514
Author(s):  
Christophe Van Eecke

When Ken Russell's film The Devils was released in 1971 it generated a tidal wave of adverse criticism. The film tells the story of a libertine priest, Grandier, who was burnt at the stake for witchcraft in the French city of Loudun in the early seventeenth century. Because of its extended scenes of sexual hysteria among cloistered nuns, the film soon acquired a reputation for scandal and outrage. This has obscured the very serious political issues that the film addresses. This article argues that The Devils should be read primarily as a political allegory. It shows that the film is structured as a theatrum mundi, which is the allegorical trope of the world as a stage. Rather than as a conventional recreation of historical events (in the tradition of the costume film), Russell treats the trial against Grandier as a comment on the nature of power and politics in general. This is not only reflected in the overall allegorical structure of the theatrum mundi, but also in the use of the film's highly modernist (and therefore timeless) sets, in Russell's use of the mise-en-abyme (a self-reflexive embedded play) and in the introduction of a number of burlesque sequences, all of which are geared towards achieving the film's allegorical import.


2020 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert L. Conner ◽  
Greg J. Boland ◽  
Chris L. Gillard ◽  
Yongyan Chen ◽  
Xuechan Shan ◽  
...  

Anthracnose, caused by the fungus Colletotrichum lindemuthianum (Sacc. & Magnus) Briosi & Cavara, is one of the most destructive diseases of dry bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) in the world. Between 2005 and 2015, commercial fields of dry beans in Manitoba and Ontario were surveyed to determine the frequency of occurrence of races of the anthracnose fungus. Throughout the study, race 73 was most prevalent in Manitoba and Ontario. However, three anthracnose races not previously reported in Canada also were identified. These three new races and four previously identified anthracnose races were used to screen 52 dry bean cultivars, as well as a mung bean and azuki bean cultivar from Ontario, for their seedling reactions to determine their patterns of race resistance. The dry bean cultivars were classified into a total of 19 resistance spectra based on the pattern of seedling reactions to the seven anthracnose races. The most common resistance spectrum was susceptible to the majority of the anthracnose races and no cultivar was resistant to all of the races. Many bean cultivars produced intermediate anthracnose ratings to races 31 and 105 and tests of 16 dry bean cultivars against those races indicated that all cultivars with intermediate ratings to a specific race were segregating in their seedling reactions and none of the cultivars produced plants with only intermediate anthracnose severity ratings. This study provides new information on the anthracnose reactions of common bean cultivars in Canada, which should be useful for the development of new bean cultivars with durable resistance.


Author(s):  
Ziqing Yao ◽  
Xuanyi Lin ◽  
Xiaoqing Hu

Abstract When people are confronted with feedback that counters their prior beliefs, they preferentially rely on desirable rather than undesirable feedback in belief updating, i.e. an optimism bias. In two pre-registered EEG studies employing an adverse life event probability estimation task, we investigated the neurocognitive processes that support the formation and the change of optimism biases in immediate and 24 h delayed tests. We found that optimistic belief updating biases not only emerged immediately but also became significantly larger after 24 h, suggesting an active role of valence-dependent offline consolidation processes in the change of optimism biases. Participants also showed optimistic memory biases: they were less accurate in remembering undesirable than desirable feedback probabilities, with inferior memories of undesirable feedback associated with lower belief updating in the delayed test. Examining event-related brain potentials (ERPs) revealed that desirability of feedback biased initial encoding: desirable feedback elicited larger P300s than undesirable feedback, with larger P300 amplitudes predicting both higher belief updating and memory accuracies. These results suggest that desirability of feedback could bias both online and offline memory-related processes such as encoding and consolidation, with both processes contributing to the formation and change of optimism biases.


Author(s):  
Ned Augenblick ◽  
Matthew Rabin

Abstract When a Bayesian learns new information and changes her beliefs, she must on average become concomitantly more certain about the state of the world. Consequently, it is rare for a Bayesian to frequently shift beliefs substantially while remaining relatively uncertain, or, conversely, become very confident with relatively little belief movement. We formalize this intuition by developing specific measures of movement and uncertainty reduction given a Bayesian’s changing beliefs over time, showing that these measures are equal in expectation and creating consequent statistical tests for Bayesianess. We then show connections between these two core concepts and four common psychological biases, suggesting that the test might be particularly good at detecting these biases. We provide support for this conclusion by simulating the performance of our test and other martingale tests. Finally, we apply our test to data sets of individual, algorithmic, and market beliefs.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document