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| Author(s): |
Jônatas Eduardo da Silva Cesar
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Física (IF/SBI) |
| Defense date: | 2014-02-13 |
| Examining board members: |
Nestor Felipe Caticha Alfonso;
Jose Raimundo Novaes Chiappin;
Osame Kinouchi Filho;
Marcelo Martinelli;
Carmen Pimentel Cintra do Prado
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| Advisor: | Nestor Felipe Caticha Alfonso |
| Abstract | |
Moral and political ideology are intrinsically related with learning processes, personality traits and individual cognitive strategies. Using an adaptive interacting Bayesian agent model we try to understand how characteristics of childhood and adolescent moral learning are related with ideology, personality traits, and cognitive strategies. We assume that the agents moral learning can be divided in two phases. The first phase is a mimic of the learning processes of individuals in childhood and adolescence, in this phase, the model resembles the Bayesian supervised learning, where the strategy to deal with new information changes with the total amount of received information. Later, in the second phase, agents with frozen cognitive strategies discuss public issues, with moral content, and change its opinion motivated to decrease the psychological cost of disagreement with its social partners. Comparing the statistical signatures of agents opinions in the second phase with similar signatures obtained from data of the Moral Foundations Theory Questionnaire, we conclude that our model presents several features that have experimental support. For example, the amount of moral information acquired in the first phase is positively correlated with liberalism. Moreover, agents which are statistically identified as liberal adapt more quickly to changes in society. We also found that with increase of the social pressure parameter, agents statistically identified as liberals will have statistical profiles more similar with conservatives. The methods used in this study, Monte Carlo simulations, mean field approximation, are typical of Statistical Mechanics. (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 08/10830-2 - Coletive dynamics of interecting adaptative systems |
| Grantee: | Jônatas Eduardo da Silva César |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate |