Web-based information and beliefs

Today's post is about how Web-based information influences beliefs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/us/some-mormons-search-the-web-and-find-doubt.html?hp

The NYT article is about Mormon believers who encounter challenging -- heretical, to them -- information on the Web. We all encounter -- seek -- information on the Web. And there is always the general question of how people update their beliefs in response to information (e.g. under- (or over-) weighting prior beliefs, as studied by Kahneman and Tversky). But there are also more specific questions. First, is there anything peculiar about the extent to which Web-based information influences our beliefs, as compared with other information sources? Conceptualizing this, this question really becomes, what are the characteristics of information that make it more influential on our beliefs? Prior research gives some ideas. For example, communications research has studied Source Credibility as one such factor. In Information Systems, theories such as Elaboration Likelihood Model have been used to characterize the process whereby information may influence beliefs.

But what is special about the case being described in this article, is that it represents the reader's first encounter with alternative views, i.e. to beliefs that that person had previously taken as axioms. In this case, the information that is encountered does not represent one more piece of information to a perennial stream. It doesn't just carry its informational message. It also carries an implied meta-informational message, namely, that there exist multiple competing points of view on the given issue. It is interesting to consider how this meta-message is processed, and the characteristics of meta-messages such as this that might make it more influential. In other words, are the characteristics that are important for a message to convince us to adopt a particular side or position (e.g. in ads), also important for a meta-message to convince us that an issue *has* debatable sides?

Leaving aside this academic question, the article hits home to many of us who have developed ways of 'coping' with the tensions between information and religious tradition. Here's a personal anecdote. My wife was brought up without any of the belief systems we associate with religion. Soon after we'd moved to Israel and she'd begun to study about Judaism for her later conversion, we visited the Bible Lands museum (http://blmj.org/en/), a wonderful private museum that is scientific in its "methodology" but whose content is the study of the lands (e.g. Mesopotamia, etc.) and cultures from Biblical times. Anyhow, my wife came across a timeline display. It was a long horizontal affair with color-coded events (ancient city so-and-so) depicted on glass. Somewhere about halfway through the timeline, was the event -- one among many -- "creation of the universe". As someone brought up in a Jewish-observant but modern family, this barely registered. But my wife had never had to deal with this kind of dissonance, and I will never forget the unfolding look on her face. Having just begun to open her mind to studying about the Bible, and without much practice in -- how to call it? -- constructive ambiguity, she was seriously shaken up; nothing made sense anymore. Until it did again.

Information is not only the stuff of economic decisions. Religion is not science, but it is surely a real phenomenon. And how people with religious beliefs process information -- especially dissonant information, and meta-information -- is amenable to scientific study. More-information, as provided by the Internet, is not going to lead to the demise of religious belief. But it may very well influence it to be more questioning, as this NYT article describes.