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The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities—the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics—has been a focus of interest for decades, both from theoretical and modelling points of view. Regarding modelling attempts, an entire scientific field—opinion dynamics—has emerged in order to study this and related phenomena. Within this framework, agents’ opinions are usually represented by a scalar value which undergoes modification due to interaction with other agents. Under certain conditions, these models are able to reproduce polarization—a state increasingly familiar to our everyday experience. In the present paper, an alternative explanation is suggested along with its corresponding model. More specifically, we demonstrate that by incorporating the following two well-known human characteristics into the representation of agents: (1) in the human brain beliefs are interconnected, and (2) people strive to maintain a coherent belief system; polarization immediately occurs under exposure to news and information. Furthermore, the model accounts for the proliferation of fake news, and shows how opinion polarization is related to various cognitive biases.

Scientific interest in the cognitive underpinnings of religious belief has grown in recent years. However, to date, little experimental research has focused on the cognitive processes that may promote religious disbelief. The present studies apply a dual-process model of cognitive processing to this problem, testing the hypothesis that analytic processing promotes religious disbelief. Individual differences in the tendency to analytically override initially flawed intuitions in reasoning were associated with increased religious disbelief. Four additional experiments provided evidence of causation, as subtle manipulations known to trigger analytic processing also encouraged religious disbelief. Combined, these studies indicate that analytic processing is one factor (presumably among several) that promotes religious disbelief. Although these findings do not speak directly to conversations about the inherent rationality, value, or truth of religious beliefs, they illuminate one cognitive factor that may influence such discussions.

Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? This study breaks from much previous research and attempts to explain conspiratorial beliefs with traditional theories of opinion formation. Specifically, we focus on the reception of informational cues given a set of predispositions (political and conspiratorial). We begin with observational survey data to show that there exists a unique predisposition that drives individuals to one degree or another to believe in conspiracy theories. This predisposition appears orthogonal to partisanship and predicts political behaviors including voter participation. Then a national survey experiment is used to test the effect of an informational cue on belief in a conspiracy theory while accounting for both conspiratorial predispositions and partisanship. Our results provide an explanation for individual-level heterogeneity in the holding of conspiratorial beliefs and also indicate the conditions under which information can drive conspiratorial beliefs.

We use data from a nationally representative survey to analyze anti-atheist sentiment in the United States in 2014, replicating analyses from a decade earlier and extending them to consider the factors that foster negative sentiment toward other non-religious persons. We find that anti-atheist sentiment is strong, persistent, and driven in part by moral concerns about atheists and in part by agreement with cultural values that affirm religiosity as a constitutive moral grounding of citizenship and national identity. Moral concerns about atheists also spill over to shape attitudes toward those who are spiritual but not religious (SBNRs) and influence evaluations of the recent decline in religious identification. Americans have more positive views of SBNRs than of atheists, but a plurality of Americans still negatively evaluate the increase in the percentage of Americans who claim no religious identification (nones). Our analyses show the continuing centrality of religiously rooted moral boundary-making in constituting cultural membership in the American context.

Although the positive association between religiosity and life satisfaction is well documented, much theoretical and empirical controversy surrounds the question of how religion actually shapes life satisfaction. Using a new panel dataset, this study offers strong evidence for social and participatory mechanisms shaping religion's impact on life satisfaction. Our findings suggest that religious people are more satisfied with their lives because they regularly attend religious services and build social networks in their congregations. The effect of within-congregation friendship is contingent, however, on the presence of a strong religious identity. We find little evidence that other private or subjective aspects of religiosity affect life satisfaction independent of attendance and congregational friendship.

This review examines the role of religion, for better and worse, in marital and parent-child relationships according to peer-reviewed studies from 1999 to 2009. A conceptual framework of relational spirituality is used (a) to organize the breadth of findings into the 3 stages of formation, maintenance, and transformation of family relationships and (b) to illustrate 3 indepth sets of mechanisms to delve into the ways religion shapes family bonds. Topics include union formation, fertility, spousal roles, marital satisfaction and conflict, divorce, domestic violence, infidelity, pregnancy, parenting children, parenting adolescents, and coping with family distress. Conclusions emphasize moving beyond markers of general religiousness and identifying specific spiritual beliefs and practices that prevent or intensify problems in traditional and nontraditional families.

This article analyses the changing and declining influence of the Johanne Marange Apostolic Church’s doctrine and belief system over its members’ behaviour and conduct. It appears, that this is as a result of the impact of the systematic roll-out of the broad-based biomedical health system, and sexual and reproductive health and rights conscientisation and interventions, by both civil society faith-based organisations and government agencies. Despite the dominance of the more than 70 year old church doctrine (since 1912), its hegemony over its church members has been increasingly challenged over the last two to three decades. Furthermore, this social pressure on the church’s beliefs and doctrines, has resulted in what, for the purposes of this article, I call, the emergence of a ‘dual doctrine system’. The church beliefs and doctrine were once regarded as impenetrable by outside beliefs, and highly fortified against rival doctrines and their related practices. Yet, it now appears that broad-based health conscientisation and health awareness programmes are systematically eroding the church’s doctrine and belief system. They also impact individual members, in so far as some have even been leaving the church. However, the challenge of the hegemony of the church’s doctrine and belief system has also seen some, who defend, uphold, and hold fast to their church traditions.

As the consequences of opinion polarization effect our everyday life in more and more aspect, the understanding of its origins and driving forces becomes increasingly important. Here we develop an agent-based network model with realistic human traits: individuals in our simulations are endowed with an internal belief system which they attempt to keep as coherent as possible. This desire – to reassure existing attitudes while avoiding cognitive dissonance – is one of the most influential and widely accepted theories in social psychology by now. Our model shows that even in networks that start out completely uniform (from a society of clones), this effort leads to fragmentation and polarization, reflected both by the individual beliefs (attitudes) and the emerging communities in the social network. By fine-tuning two parameters: (i) “dissonance penalty”, measuring the strength with which agents attempt to avoid cognitive dissonance, and (ii) “triadic closure affinity”, the parameter reflecting agents’ likelihood to connect with friends of friends, a wide range of possible community structures are observed.

Religion is becoming increasingly salient in and around, but not confined to, the American workplace. The rise of openly faith-based organizations and discourse surrounding the role and importance of spirituality are just a couple of the indicators that religion, in its various guises, is playing a role in organizational life. With few exceptions, however, scholarly research has sidestepped the issue of religion, and, perhaps unwittingly, discourse surrounding spirituality seems to imply that religion is a benign and positive force. Rather than implicitly or explicitly assuming that religion is a benign, positive force in organizations, in this paper, we suggest that organizational scholars need to rigorously address the potential consequences of religion at work in a dispassionate manner that acknowledges both the benefits/adaptive outcomes and the challenges/maladaptive outcomes. Specifically, adopting primarily a psychological approach, we theorize about two fundamental tensions produced by contemplations about religion and the concept of God at work and the conditions under which benefits versus challenges may prevail. These exemplary tensions, virtuousness versus \"more-virtuous-than-thou\" and prosociality and ethicality versus egocentrism, highlight the fact that religion has the potential to result in both adaptive and maladaptive outcomes for organizations and their members. Importantly, for each tension, we theorize about the initial conditions under which beneficial/adaptive or challenging/maladaptive outcomes will prevail. We also explore the critical role that the wider context plays in understanding these tensions and how religion affects organizational life.

Objective To understand belief in a specific scientific claim by studying the pattern of citations among papers stating it.Design A complete citation network was constructed from all PubMed indexed English literature papers addressing the belief that β amyloid, a protein accumulated in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease, is produced by and injures skeletal muscle of patients with inclusion body myositis. Social network theory and graph theory were used to analyse this network.Main outcome measures Citation bias, amplification, and invention, and their effects on determining authority.Results The network contained 242 papers and 675 citations addressing the belief, with 220 553 citation paths supporting it. Unfounded authority was established by citation bias against papers that refuted or weakened the belief; amplification, the marked expansion of the belief system by papers presenting no data addressing it; and forms of invention such as the conversion of hypothesis into fact through citation alone. Extension of this network into text within grants funded by the National Institutes of Health and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act showed the same phenomena present and sometimes used to justify requests for funding.Conclusion Citation is both an impartial scholarly method and a powerful form of social communication. Through distortions in its social use that include bias, amplification, and invention, citation can be used to generate information cascades resulting in unfounded authority of claims. Construction and analysis of a claim specific citation network may clarify the nature of a published belief system and expose distorted methods of social citation.