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Plädoyer für einen kritischen Agnostizismus.

In this stimulating dialogue these two great men, who stand on opposite sides of the church door, discuss some of the most controversial issues of the day. One is a respected scholar and one of the pre-eminent ecumenical churchmen of Europe; the other the world famous author of The Name of the Rose , a scholar, philosopher and self-decalred secularist, a man who writes with equal ease about Thomas Aquinas and James Joyce, computers and the medieval Templars. Often adversarial but always amicable, their debate will fascinate many

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 belief 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 be 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 revision approaches on the one hand and voting on the other, but also opens up a number of interesting questions.

Despite regular reference to conspiracy theories as a "belief system," few studies have attempted to explore the structure and organization of conspiracy beliefs beyond an examination of correlations between those beliefs. Employing unique data from two national surveys that includes respondent beliefs in 27 conspiracy theories, we decipher the substantive dimensions along which conspiracy beliefs are organized, as well as subgroupings within those dimensions. We find that variation in these conspiracy beliefs can be accounted for with two dimensions: the first regards partisan and ideological identities, while the other is composed of anti-social orientations, such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and acceptance of political violence. Importantly, these two dimensions are uncorrelated. We also find that conspiracy beliefs group together by substantive content, such as those regarding partisan actors or science/medicine. Our findings also demonstrate that inferences about the correlates of conspiracy beliefs are highly contingent on the specific conspiracy theories employed by researchers. We provide suggestions for future research in this vein.

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.