Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People’s beliefs and attitudes about social and scientificissues, such as capital punishment and climate change, appearto form complex but generally coherent networks.Understanding the nature of these networks is a prerequisitefor designing interventions for changing beliefs on the basisof rational arguments and evidence. It is therefore importantto develop methods to represent and analyze the form andnature of belief networks, which may not be explicitlyverbalizable. Adopting an emerging approach that utilizescrowdsourcing to develop educational interventions, wemined discussions from the Reddit forum Change My View todetermine which beliefs and types of information underliepeople’s attitudes about capital punishment. By combiningcomputational analyses based on a topic model with morequalitative assessments of the extracted topics, we found thatmoral arguments are more prevalent than statistical ordata-based arguments. The present study serves as a test casefor the open sourced software crowdpy, a Python toolkit forrunning naturalistic studies on the web, which will enableother researchers to use crowdsourcing in their research. Thisapproach sets the stage for research exploring potentialinterventions to change people’s beliefs.