.......Talk to the management at leading technology firms in the same market, and the similarities in opinions are striking. Most hold roughly the same set of opinions, beliefs, and ideas about how specific actions lead to successful business outcomes. For lack of a better phrase, I call this the ‘‘prevailing view.’’ The prevailing view is an important aspect of every market. It can persist for...

Detection of fine-grained opinions and beliefs holds promise for improved social media analysis for social science research, business intelligence, and government decision-makers. While commercial applications focus on mapping landscapes of opinions towards brands and products, our goal is to map “sociostructural” landscapes of perceptions of social groups. In this work, we focus on the detecti...

We study learning in a setting where agents receive independent noisy signals about the true value of a variable and then communicate in a network. They näıvely update beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of neighbors’ opinions. We show that all opinions in a large society converge to the truth if and only if the influence of the most influential agent vanishes as the society grows. W...

In the face of disagreement in the expressed probabilities of one or more individuals on some proposition, it has been suggested that we should revise our beliefs by adopting a linear average of the expressed opinions on it. Is such belief revision compatible with Bayesian conditionalisation? In this paper I look at situations in which full or partial deference to the expressed opinions of othe...

Understanding the causal impact of beliefs on contributions in Threshold Public Goods (TPGs) is particularly important since the social optimum can be supported as a Nash Equilibrium and best-response contributions are a function of beliefs. Unfortunately, investigations of the impact of beliefs on behavior are plagued with endogeneity concerns. We create a set of instruments by cleanly and exo...

CONTEXT Most research on heterosexual transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) has focused on women. However, heterosexual transmission of STDs cannot be prevented without a better understanding of men's, as well as women's, sexual beliefs and behaviors. METHODS Heterosexually active men's beliefs about four methods of STD prevention--abstinence, mutual monogamy, use...

According to recent popular narrative, Americans and the politicians they support are developing increasingly extreme opinions across a wide range of issues, and, as a result, citizens and their representatives are much less likely to interact and collaborate with those with whom they disagree. Many have gone so far as to vilify others who identify with the opposite party, further hampering soc...

Opinion dynamic models frequently assume an opinion to be a onedimensional concept and only sometimes vectors of opinions are considered. Contrary, psychological attitude theory considers an attitude to be a multidimensional concept, where each dimension is composed of beliefs and evaluative components. In this article we extend classic basic models of opinion dynamics such that they can captur...