Dartmouth Events

Please join us in Moore BO3 on Friday, March 6, 2020, at 3:30 p.m., as Mirta Galesic, Professor and Cowan Chair in Human Social Dynamics at Santa Fe Institute, presents "An Integrative Framework for Modeling Belief Dynamics."

Abstract:   Understanding human belief dynamics is a crucial problem for our society. Many different approaches have been used to understand and predict how individual beliefs form and spread. Some approaches investigate how social network mechanisms promote or impede spread of beliefs. Others focus on cognitive mechanisms underlying belief spread, including strategies for belief updating, network updating, and representation of social environments. I will describe a modular framework that integrates these different mechanisms using the theory of cognitive dissonance and the formalism of statistical physics models. The framework enables specifying and comparing different models of belief dynamics that have been so far studied independently. It can reproduce established empirical and theoretical findings about belief dynamics, and help understand belief change in the real world. 

A reception will follow outside of Moore 202.