Changing Minds: The Psychology of Individual and Collective Beliefs

Understanding how people believe and how what they believe impacts their behavior has recently become a central topic across the social sciences. This recent interest was spurred by the recent misinformation epidemic that has been consuming our communities. How do people change their beliefs? What factors facilitate the endorsement of conspiracy theories? How do people influence each other's beliefs during communication? How do beliefs propagate through social networks? As part of this course, we will explore a multidisciplinary framework to understand the endorsement and propagation of true and false beliefs through social networks.