Collective dynamics of belief evolution under cognitive coherence and social conformity

Human history has been marked by social instability and conflict, often driven by the irreconcilability of opposing sets of beliefs, ideologies, and religious dogmas. The dynamics of belief systems has been studied mainly from two distinct perspectives, namely how cognitive biases lead to individual belief rigidity and how social influence leads to social conformity. Here we propose a unifying framework that connects cognitive and social forces together in order to study the dynamics of societal belief evolution. Each individual is endowed with a network of interacting beliefs that evolves through interaction with other individuals in a social network. The adoption of beliefs is affected by both internal coherence and social conformity. Our framework explains how social instabilities can arise in otherwise homogeneous populations, how small numbers of zealots with highly coherent beliefs can overturn societal consensus, and how belief rigidity protects fringe groups and cults against invasion from mainstream beliefs, allowing them to persist and even thrive in larger societies. Our results suggest that strong consensus may be insufficient to guarantee social stability, that the cognitive coherence of belief-systems is vital in determining their ability to spread, and that coherent belief-systems may pose a serious problem for resolving social polarization, due to their ability to prevent consensus even under high levels of social exposure. We therefore argue that the inclusion of cognitive factors into a social model is crucial in providing a more complete picture of collective human dynamics

2007 Annual Performance Report

Based on Irvine's Performance Assessment Framework, reports on program impact -- grantmaking, outcomes, and lessons learned -- and institutional effectiveness -- leadership, constituent feedback, and financial and organizational health

How Do Research Projects Influence the Design of Local Policies for Environmental and Natural Resource Management?

This paper documents and analyzes interactions between environmental and natural resource (ENR) management research and local governance. It draws from the experiences of the Philippine-based Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program (SANREM CRSP) to address the following questions: How do research projects influence ENR policy and design? What are the institutional arrangements necessary to sustain interactions between research and governance? The authors offer important methodological insights as well as lessons for practical efforts to link research and policy.environmental and natural resource management, research-policy relationship

Signs of universality in the structure of culture

Understanding the dynamics of opinions, preferences and of culture as whole requires more use of empirical data than has been done so far. It is clear that an important role in driving this dynamics is played by social influence, which is the essential ingredient of many quantitative models. Such models require that all traits are fixed when specifying the "initial cultural state". Typically, this initial state is randomly generated, from a uniform distribution over the set of possible combinations of traits. However, recent work has shown that the outcome of social influence dynamics strongly depends on the nature of the initial state. If the latter is sampled from empirical data instead of being generated in a uniformly random way, a higher level of cultural diversity is found after long-term dynamics, for the same level of propensity towards collective behavior in the short-term. Moreover, if the initial state is randomized by shuffling the empirical traits among people, the level of long-term cultural diversity is in-between those obtained for the empirical and uniformly random counterparts. The current study repeats the analysis for multiple empirical data sets, showing that the results are remarkably similar, although the matrix of correlations between cultural variables clearly differs across data sets. This points towards robust structural properties inherent in empirical cultural states, possibly due to universal laws governing the dynamics of culture in the real world. The results also suggest that this dynamics might be characterized by criticality and involve mechanisms beyond social influence.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures; the same results as in version 3, but a shorter Introduction, Discussion and Conclusio

Building a Birth-to-College Model: Professional Learning Communities

The newest in a planned series of case studies on building a birth-to-college model of education released by the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute (UEI) and the Ounce of Prevention Fund this case study outlines how to create professional learning communities (PLCs) of teachers, administrators and family support staff spanning the early childhood to K-12 spectrum. The intent of the PLCs is to create environments where practitioners take the lead in collaboratively studying and piloting effective, developmentally informed practices that prepare children for college, beginning at birth.This teaching case study is intended to illustrate the evolutionary process of PLC development by UEI and the Ounce and inform the work of others interested in building similar birth-to-college systems to benefit children and families. It is based on interviews of 25 participants in the Birth-to-College Partnership, observations of PLC and other Birth to-College Partnership meetings over the six-month period between January 2012 and June 2012, and a review of Birth-to-College meeting notes and other documents dating back to June 2010

Interdisciplinary Research That Demonstrates the Role of Nurses in Improving the Quality of Care

Describes RWJF's Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research initiative, which conducted forty studies into practices, processes, and work environments to determine nurses' impact on patient care quality. Profiles nurse-led quality improvement projects

Local Convergence and Global Diversity: The Robustness of Cultural Homophily

Recent extensions of the Axelrod model of cultural dissemination (Klemm et al 2003) showed that global diversity is extremely fragile with small amounts of cultural mutation. This seemed to undermine the original Axelrod theory that homophily preserves diversity. We show that cultural diversity is surprisingly robust if we increase the tendency towards homophily as follows. First, we raised the threshold of similarity below which influence is precluded. Second, we allowed agents to be influenced by all neighbors simultaneously, instead of only one neighbor as assumed in the orginal model. Computational experiments show how both modifications strongly increase the robustness of diversity against mutation. We also find that our extensions may reverse at least one of the main results of Axelrod. While Axelrod predicted that a larger number of cultural dimensions (features) reduces diversity, we find that more features may entail higher levels of diversity.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figures, Submitted for presentation in Mathematical Sociology Session, Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA), 200