How to change harmful beliefs

Norms and Beliefs: How Change Occurs

Societies are rife with negative, damaging practices, from open defecation to female genital cutting, endemic in many developing countries, to corruption and violence against women and children that we also witness in many Western societies. The theoretical and practical challenge we face is twofold. On the one hand, we want to explain what generates and supports such practices. On the other, w...

How to Change Factual Beliefs Using Laws and Dependence Information

We investigate how belief change operations can be eeec-tively constructed. To that end we suppose given a set of laws (alias integrity constraints) together with a relation of dependence between formulas.

Delusions as harmful malfunctioning beliefs

Delusional beliefs are typically pathological. Being pathological is clearly distinguished from being false or being irrational. Anna might falsely believe that his husband is having an affair but it might just be a simple mistake. Again, Sam might irrationally believe, without good evidence, that he is smarter than his colleagues, but it might just be a healthy self-deceptive belief. On the ot...

How to Change the Redox Potential of Guanine?

Due to some important applications of guanine electrode in scientific and technology research such as electro-chemical DNA based biosensors, and a problem of high redox potential of guanine (0.81 V), our research study concentrates on reducing guanine redox potential by substituting Cu, Ag, Au, CH3, C2H5 and Cl on sites of 1, 2 and 9 of guanine. A 5.0% reduction...

Dangerous mindsets: How beliefs about intelligence predict motivational change