Epistemic Networks, Collective Misperception, and the Manipulation of Social Knowledge
2026-08-26 • Social and Information Networks
Social and Information Networks
AI summaryⓘ
The authors study how people in a network think about what others believe and how these beliefs influence each other. They focus on the whole web of beliefs about beliefs, rather than just individual opinions. They identify three layers: private beliefs, public statements, and what people believe others should believe. Their work explains how social beliefs change and why groups sometimes misunderstand each other, including how social pressure can make these misunderstandings bigger. They also show that patterns like agreement, polarization, or confusion all come from the same underlying mathematical process in the social network.
interactive beliefsepistemic statemutual attributionpluralistic ignoranceepistemic influencesocial conformitycollective misperceptionhigher-order beliefepistemic network
Authors
Mihnea C. Moldoveanu, Joel A. C. Baum
Abstract
We investigate the structure of interactive beliefs in networks: the epistemic state in which agents hold, revise, and act on their models of the epistemic states of other agents. What a group believes depends on what each member agent takes the others to believe, and on what each takes the others to believe about still others. We posit that the proper unit of social-epistemic analysis is not the individual belief but the tensor of mutual attribution, the array that records what every agent takes every agent to believe. We separate three layers of this object: what is privately held, what is publicly expressed, and what is to be believed by others. Social belief evolves by contraction of the tensor against a signed matrix of epistemic influence. Collective misperception decomposes exactly into a component that observation dissolves and a component that observation cannot touch. Social conformity amplifies pluralistic ignorance without generating it. The stable forms of collective epistemic consensus, polarization, entrenched misperception, and instability are spectral regimes of a single operator. Higher-order belief reduces to walks in the epistemic network, under a stated assumption of cognitive consistency whose boundary we mark precisely.