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Challenges the conventional wisdom that 95+% or more of the US adult population believe in God as documented by the frequently cited Gallup Polls. Critical analysis of survey questions about the belief in God asked by various organizations, including Gallup, since the 1940s demonstrate that the simple, dichotomous form used by Gallup & other imitators -- "Do you believe in God or universal spirit?" -- has had the unintended consequence of concealing a downward trend in the certainty of beliefs in God since the 1950s, as well as shifts in the type of beliefs Americans have come to hold about the concept of God. It is concluded that the cultural effect of this methodological failure has been to use Gallup's 90% plus statistic to perpetuate the myth of the universality of Americans' belief in God, a statistic that has invariably been interpreted by various scholars, journalists, & political pundits as believing in a traditional, personal God without any qualification. What Americans believe about the idea of God is not nearly that simple. 1 Appendix, 20 References. Adapted from the source document.

My purpose is to offer an assessment of the scientific legacy of Converse's "Belief Systems" by reviewing five productive lines of research stimulated by his authoritative analysis & unsettling conclusions. First I recount the later life history of Converse's notion of "nonattitudes," & suggest that as important as nonattitudes are, we should be paying at least as much attention to their opposite: attitudes held with conviction. Second, I argue that the problem of insufficient information that resides at the center of Converse's analysis has not gone away, & that newly fashioned models of information processing offer only partial remedies. Third, I suggest that the concept of the "average voter" is a malicious action, as it blinds us to the enormous variation in political attention, interest, & knowledge that characterizes mass publics, in Converse's time as in our own. Fourth, I develop an affirmative aspect of Converse's analysis that has mostly been overlooked: namely, that if ideological reasoning is beyond most citizens' capacity & interest, they might fall back on a simple & reasonable alternative, which I will call "group-centrism." And fifth, I consider the possibility that while the majority of individual citizens falls short of democratic standards, the public as a whole might do rather well. Adapted from the source document.

Perceptions of the opinions of others are examined on a variety of issues using data from 3 sample surveys of metropolitan Detroit. A great deal of inaccuracy in such perception is evident. 3 broad tendencies or patterns can be discerned: (1) "looking glass perceptions," the general propensity to believe that others' opinions are the same as one's own, (2) "conservative bias," the belief that the population is more conservative on racial issues that it actually is, & (3) limited response to reality constraints. The overall findings suggest that perceptions of public beliefs & attitudes are personally & socially constructed to a much larger degree than is often assumed. 4 Tables. AA.

Prior research has attributed the socio-economic disparity in COVID-19 infections to differences in degrees of exposure or economic resources. This study proposes beliefs about COVID-19 as a potential additional explanation. We conducted a nationally representative US survey with six measures of COVID-19 beliefs. Socio-economic status was measured through educational level. Compared with less-educated respondents, highly educated respondents treat COVID-19 more seriously, including believing in (1) face mask use, (2) asymptomatic transmission, (3) media non-exaggeration, (4) the necessity of stay-at-home orders, (5) a likelihood of themselves being infected with COVID-19 and (6) no protection of God against COVID-19. The educational gradient in COVID-19 beliefs was largely explained by differential levels of belief in science across education. Our findings suggest that encouraging public trust in science can potentially reduce the educational gradient in COVID-19 infections in the USA.

In this paper, we consider a number of different ways of reasoning about voting as a problem of conciliating contradictory interests. The mechanisms that do the reconciliation are belief revision and be- lief merging. By investigating the relationship between different voting strategies and their associated counterparts in revision theory, we find that whereas the counting mechanism of the voting process is more easily done at the meta-level in belief merging, it can be brought to the object level in base revision. In the former case, the counting can b e tweaked according to the aggregation procedure used, whereas in base revision, we can only rely on the notion of minimal change and hence the syntactical representation of the voters' preferences plays a crucial part in the process. This highlights the similarities between the revi sion approaches on the one hand and voting on the other, but also opens up a numb er of interesting questions.

Examines the alternative belief systems which contemporary organizational actors live by and through which they seek to find meaning within the dominant (neo)capitalist social order. This volume marks an attempt to move the study of belief forward within management and organization studies

Beliefs govern how individuals interact with the world around them. Their pivotal role in decision-making processes has led to great interest in how they are formed and arguably of more importance, how they are changed. The conceptual framework of the neoclassical model relies on the assumption that individuals form their beliefs about an unobservable state of the world by incorporating all available information and that they process this information according to a normative updating rule. Together with the assumption that preferences are stable and egoistic, the resulting theoretical framework is in many cases a powerful predictor of human behavior. However, the simplicity of the model often does not live up to the complexity of human decision making and therefore produces predictions that are at odds with reality. The field of behavioral economics has sought to add depth to the neoclassical model by adapting the notions of maximization and preferences to incorporate systematic anomalies observed in the real world. A large literature within the field has also concerned itself with belief formation and persistence. Building on this literature, I endeavor to advance our understanding of human decision-making by studying the role of subjective beliefs. In particular, this thesis studies how biased beliefs can be changed and how they are formed. In chapter 1, I examine whether confronting people with contrasting viewpoints can change their beliefs about the people who hold those viewpoints. This question has grown in relevance as polarized beliefs, ensuing from a society in which individuals seek out information that predominantly confirms their beliefs, have risen to be a defining phenomenon of recent years. In chapters 2 and 3, I study how motives mold individuals' subjective beliefs. If individuals are motivated to protect certain beliefs, the normative updating rule of the neoclassical model is insufficient. To address these scenarios, this thesis utilizes multiple experimental methods and draws insights from the fields of psychology, political science, and sociology. A common thread of this thesis are the sources and consequences of distorted subjective beliefs and the question of how to thwart them. In the first chapter, I show that bringing together two contrary-minded individuals for a conversation can help to counteract negative consequences of rising political segregation by changing participants' beliefs about others and the state of the society. While biased beliefs were the point of origin in the first chapter, the following two chapters study the emergence of such beliefs. By exploring if individuals are willing to adopt extremely negative beliefs about an often marginalized group to justify selfish behavior, I test how far individuals are willing to go to protect desired beliefs. In the final chapter of this thesis, I suggest that individuals, in light of potentially damaging information, make self-serving attributions towards an external factor to uphold or even boost their self-view.

This study assesses two different approaches to measuring beliefs about work as a human activity. The first approach is a whole systems approach that asks for a response to five different concepts of work expressed in paragraphs on a questionnaire. The second approach involves responses to individual belief statements that are then factor analyzed to form the same five dimensions expressed in the paragraphs. The computation of results shows a significant difference in scores between the two methods of measuring beliefs, thus making the question of which method measures "true" belief a crucial one for future research.