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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.

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.

The use of disinformation in political campaigns is not a new phenomenon, but the issue has acquired renewed attention because digital media makes it relatively easier to spread disinformation. Through a cross-sectional survey (N = 1,820) on the 2019 Indonesian national elections, we analyze the relationship among belief in misinformation, social media use, and partisanship. The analysis shows that although the political use of social media is not associated with belief in misinformation, partisanship is strongly associated with belief in various types of misinformation, depending on whether their own candidate or the opposing candidate is targeted. The findings are interpreted through the concept of selective belief. This study contributes to theoretical debates on the association among belief in misinformation, social media use, and partisanship, and addresses the role of disinformation in electoral politics in Indonesia.

Preprint de : Loli Burgueño, Robert Clarisó, Jordi Cabot, Sébastien Gerard and Antonio Vallecillo. "Belief Uncertainty in Software Models." In Proc. of the 11th Workshop on Modelling in Software Engineering (MiSE'2019) at ICSE 2019, Montreal, Canada, May 26-27, 2019. ACM ; This paper discusses the representation of Belief Uncertainty in software models. This kind of uncertainty refers to the situation in which the modeler, or any other belief agent, is uncertain about the behavior of the system, or the statements that the model expresses about it. In this work, we propose to assign a degree of belief to model statements (let they be constraints, or any other model expression), which is expressed by a probability (called credence, in statistical terms) that represents a quantification of such a subjective degree of belief. We discuss how it can be represented using current modeling notations, and how to operate with it in order to make informed decisions. ; PGC2018-094905-B-I00 TIN2016-75944-R CEA in the context of the Modelia initiative and the ECSEL RIA 2016 MegaM@Rt2 project by the European Union's Horizon 2020 under grant No 737494. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech.

In this paper, we provide a notion of structure preserving maps (i.e. knowledge-belief morphisms) between knowledge-belief spaces. Then we show that-under the condition that the knowledge operators of the players in a knowledge-belief space operate only on measurable subsets of the space-there is a unique (up to isomorphism) universal knowledge-belief space to which every knowledge-belief space can be mapped by a unique knowledge-belief morphism. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ; This work was supported by the European Union via a Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship (CORE), and later by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia via a Ramon y Cajal Fellowship (IAE-CSIC) and a Research Grant (SEJ 2004-07861), as well as the Fundación Ramón Areces and Barcelona Economics (XREA). ; Peer Reviewed

The debate on the epistemology of disagreement has so far focused almost exclusively on cases of disagreement between individual persons. Yet, many social epistemologists agree that at least certain kinds of groups are equally capable of having beliefs that are open to epistemic evaluation. If so, we should expect a comprehensive epistemology of disagreement to accommodate cases of disagreement between group agents, such as juries, governments, companies, and the like. However, this raises a number of fundamental questions concerning what it means for groups to be epistemic peers and to disagree with each other. In this paper, we explore what group peer disagreement amounts to given that we think of group belief in terms of List and Pettit's (Econ Philos 18:89–110, 2002; Group agency: the possibility, design, and status of corporate agents, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011) 'belief aggregation model'. We then discuss how the so-called 'equal weight view' of peer disagreement is best accommodated within this framework. The account that seems most promising to us says, roughly, that the parties to a group peer disagreement should adopt the belief that results from applying the most suitable belief aggregation function for the combined group on all members of the combined group. To motivate this view, we test it against various intuitive cases, derive some of its notable implications, and discuss how it relates to the equal weight view of individual peer disagreement.

In today's globalised world languages interact in ways that were not possible a century or even three decades ago. Within the last eight years the European Union has grown from 15 to 27 member countries, and this has added 12 working languages to it. Business has gone global with small companies now able to extend their reach beyond their national or traditional markets to new ones in any country on any continent. For such expansion communication is essential. In addition to these institutional and economic uses of languages, the Internet has made it possible for the private citizen from any part of the world to communicate face to face in real time with others as well as to post individual statements of positions about their life or beliefs via blogs, social networks etc. In such a changing world, language users are constantly adapting to and changing the way language and languages are used. In particular, young people today are at home with digital technology and use it creatively to interact with others. They are, in fact, the first generation to have grown up with it and have been called "digital natives". It is therefore of interest to know what these young people think about language and the language(s) they are using. What beliefs and attitudes do they hold? ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Jewish Americans' opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict influence both the Israeli and the U.S. governments. Consequently, the Jewish American diaspora can act to promote or inhibit the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. Several different sociopsychological beliefs have been postulated to lead individuals to support the perpetuation of conflict. Among these beliefs are a sense of collective victimhood, dehumanization and delegitimization of the other side, a zero-sum view on the conflict, and a monolithic narrative about the conflict. In this exploratory study we examined the role of these beliefs in predicting Jewish Americans' rejection or support of compromise solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A survey study of 176 Jewish Americans shows that a monolithic view on the conflict, dehumanizing and delegitimizing of the other side, and a zero-sum view on the conflict played an important role in predicting opposition to compromise solutions for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Beliefs about collective victimhood did not predict support for compromise solutions. Findings are discussed in terms of the centrality of narrative misrecognition in preventing agreement to concessions toward the other side. © 2013 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.

Jewish Americans' opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict influence both the Israeli and the U.S. governments. Consequently, the Jewish American diaspora can act to promote or inhibit the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. Several different sociopsychological beliefs have been postulated to lead individuals to support the perpetuation of conflict. Among these beliefs are a sense of collective victimhood, dehumanization and delegitimization of the other side, a zero-sum view on the conflict, and a monolithic narrative about the conflict. In this exploratory study we examined the role of these beliefs in predicting Jewish Americans' rejection or support of compromise solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A survey study of 176 Jewish Americans shows that a monolithic view on the conflict, dehumanizing and delegitimizing of the other side, and a zero-sum view on the conflict played an important role in predicting opposition to compromise solutions for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Beliefs about collective victimhood did not predict support for compromise solutions. Findings are discussed in terms of the centrality of narrative misrecognition in preventing agreement to concessions toward the other side. © 2013 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.

D.W. was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie (MSCA) grant agreement no. 665501 and the Flemish Science Foundation (FWO) grant FWO.KAN.2019.0023.01. E.C. was supported by FWO grants FWO18/PDO/049 and 12U0322N. C.G.-G. was supported by MSCA grant no. 835767 and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation grant IJC2019-040208-I. M.B. was supported by the Einstein Foundation Berlin (Einstein Strategic Professorship). References ; Most people believe in free will, which is foundational for our sense of agency and responsibility. Past research demonstrated that such beliefs are dynamic, and can be manipulated experimentally. Much less is known about free will attitudes (FWAs; do you value free will?), whether they are equally dynamic, and about their relation to free will beliefs (FWBs). If FWAs were strongly positive, people might be reluctant to revise their beliefs even in the face of strong evidence to do so. In this registered report, we developed a novel measure of FWAs and directly related FWBs and attitudes for the first time. We found FWBs and attitudes to be positively related, although to a lesser degree than determinism or dualism beliefs/attitudes. Nevertheless, an experimental manipulation technique aimed at reducing FWBs (Crick text) showed remarkably specific effects on FWBs only, and no effects on FWAs. Overall, these results provide valuable new insights into laypeople's views on free will by including a novel measure of FWAs. They also provide evidence for the validity of a common experimental technique that has been rightfully criticized in the literature lately. ; European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie (MSCA) 665501 ; FWO FWO.KAN.2019.0023.01 FWO18/PDO/049 12U0322N MSCA 835767 ; Spanish Government IJC2019-040208-I ; Einstein Foundation Berlin (Einstein Strategic Professorship)

In real-life elections, voters do not have full information over the policy platforms proposed by political parties. Instead, they form (imprecise) beliefs. I propose a new model of partisan competition to represent the interaction of these beliefs with platform selection. Both parties gain more from appealing to the voters with more precise beliefs over their platform. Minority candidates viewed with less precision overall gain relatively more from outliers. Therefore, the Median Voter Theorem is recovered if and only if voters' policy preferences are uncorrelated with the precision of their beliefs about each candidate, and preferences are distributed symmetrically. Otherwise, even election-motivated parties diverge away from each other. As the population becomes polarized in how they form beliefs about politics, they will become polarized on political grounds as well, providing a new explanation for recent political polarization in the United States which, under reasonable assumptions, is more in line with the stylized facts than models with perfect observability. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

We perform an incentivized experiment designed to assess the accuracy of beliefs about characteristics and decisions. Subjects are asked to declare some specific choices and characteristics with different levels of observability from an external point of view, and typically formed through real world experiences. From the less observable mobile phone purchasing decisions, hypothetical restaurant choices, political views, happiness to the fully observable height and weight; after they are asked to report beliefs on statistics over the same items concerning other individuals living in the same environment. We test two main hypotheses: (i) whether for items not perfectly observable, individuals suffer of some type of bias in these beliefs; (ii) whether this bias would disappear for weight and height, when the information is perfectly available. We find a powerful and ubiquitous bias in perceptions that is "self-centered" in the sense that those at extremes tend to perceive themselves as closer to the middle of the distribution than is the case. Albeit weaker, this bias does not disappear when the information is readily available as in height and weight. We present evidence from our experiment that limited attention and self-serving deception can provide explanations for this bias and present important economic applications.

This paper uses newly available data to describe the distribution of crime victimization and other criminal activities (including drug trafficking and corruption) around the world. The paper then documents a negative (positive) correlation between measures of criminal activity and happiness and measures of positive (negative) emotions. The paper also studies the correlation between ideological beliefs and criminal activity, finding that crime victims are more likely to believe that hard work does not pay and that the government should increase the amount of redistribution to the poor.