Are Your Beliefs Ready to Each Other?

In a large society, the beliefs you have follow much more constraints than if you live in a very small community. Your own beliefs don't only depend on your other beliefs you have, but also on the beliefs of the people around you. For example, even for something like democracy to work, it has to be that basically, our beliefs all have to be constrained to a given level,. And i think that is something that xo society kind of accomplishes... People are a kind of o you can, you can argue within this set of beliefs, but not outside of that.

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Human relationships are often described in the language of “chemistry” — does that make the beliefs and attitudes of individuals a kind of “physics”? It is, at least, a fascinating avenue of inquiry. In particular, the field of statistical mechanics offers potent tools for understanding how exactly people form their views and change their minds. From this perspective, everyone is a dynamic network of opinions and values, in a tense and ever-changing balance both with others and ourselves. The “chemistry” of social life, then, arises from multilevel interactions in our noisy minds and how they influence each other.

Welcome to Complexity, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

In this conversation, we speak with SFI Postdoc Jonas Dalege about how his research uses physics models to understand the emergence of higher-level behaviors from lower-level behaviors, both within and between people. We discuss the role of entropy in the formation of individual beliefs; statistical approaches to the study of ambivalence and cognitive dissonance; the wisdom (and challenge) of tolerating ambiguity; and the social consequences when we try to minimize internal conflict…

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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Key Links:

Jonas’s Website | Google Scholar Page

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