UMH Lecture Series
The Centre for Urban Mental Health, aims to unravel new pathways to improve urban mental health that takes into account the complexities and dynamics of mental health problems and mental health disorders in an urban environment.
In this lecture, Jonas Dalege will discuss his work on a general theory of attitude dynamics. In the first part of the lecture, he will focus on how elements of attitudes (i.e., beliefs, feelings, and behaviors) are connected within an individual’s mind and what these connections can tell us about the dynamics of attitudes (i.e., how do attitudes develop over time and how do they react to interventions).
This theory of personal attitude dynamics rests on two main principles. First, inconsistency of attitudes reflects the entropy – a term borrowed from statistical mechanics denoting randomness and disorder of a system – of an attitude network. Second, paying attention to and thinking about attitudes reduces entropy of the attitude network. Using a formal model, he will show that many well-established effects in the attitude literature follow from these principles.
The second part of the lecture will focus on his recent work extending our model of personal attitude networks to the social realm. By this, the aim is to develop an integrative theory of personal and social attitude dynamics. Two main tenets of this integrative theory are that dissonances between attitude elements can arise either at the personal or social level and that attention allocation determines whether we accurately perceive attitudes of people in our social environment. Jonas will present some modelling results based on this integrative theory and a few first empirical tests of this theory.
The lecture will end with a discussion about some possible avenues for research integrating my work on attitude networks with urban mental health.
Jonas Dalege is an is assistant professor at the Developmental Psychology department at the University of Amsterdam and also affiliated with the Centre for Urban Mental Health. During his PhD at the University of Amsterdam, Jonas developed and tested a general network theory of attitude. During his postdoc at the Santa Fe Institute, Jonas combined this individual-level theory with social network dynamics. Jonas’ current research focuses on applying his network theory of attitudes to black-and-white thinking and self-concepts, and combining social networks with urban dynamics.
Please send an email in advance to assistent.umh@amsterdamumc.nl if you do not have access to the IAS building. The lecture will be held on the second floor, so when you arrive please join us there.