The importance of shared reality emerges early in human development. Infants and young children notice when others share their beliefs, and information about shared beliefs influences their social judgments. This article reviews recent research on the importance of shared beliefs in three domains that have been widely investigated over the past several years-opinions, moral views, and religious...

Objective: The aim of the current study was to investigate the role of fusion beliefs and metacognitions in obsessive–compulsive symptoms in the general population. Methods: A sample of 200 students of Kharazmi University was selected from various faculties and completed the following questionnaires: Metacognitions Questionnaire-30 (MCQ-30), Thought-Fusion Instrument (TFI) and Maudsley Obses...

BACKGROUND People hold a wide variety of beliefs concerning the causes of illness. Such beliefs vary across cultures and, among immigrants, may be influenced by many factors, including level of acculturation, gender, level of education, and experience of illness and treatment. This study examines illness causal beliefs in Turkish-immigrants in Australia. METHODS Causal beliefs about somatic a...

OBJECTIVES This study explores associations between metacognitive beliefs and beliefs about voices in patients with severe auditory verbal hallucinations, and their hypothesized relationship with levels of depression and anxiety. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that metacognitive beliefs are better able to explain differences in levels of depression and anxiety, than beliefs about voices. DE...

One of the most interesting puzzles in formalizing belief contexts is the fact that many belief reports can be given both an opaque and a transparent readings. A traditional explanation is that the two readings are related to the failure and success of the principle of sub-stitutivity respectively, and this in turn is explained with the de re/de dicto distinction. We propose an alternative anal...

OBJECTIVE To characterize smoking beliefs among Thai and Malaysian youth and to examine associations with gender, antismoking media exposure, and smoking status. METHODS Nationally representative samples of youth completed self-administered questionnaires. RESULTS A substantial proportion of youth reported positive beliefs about smoking. Those reporting positive beliefs were more likely to ...

Belief elicitation is an important methodological issue for experimental economists. There are two generic questions: 1) Do incentives increase belief accuracy? 2) Are there interaction effects of beliefs and decisions? We investigate these questions in the case of finitely repeated public goods experiments. We find that belief accuracy is significantly higher when beliefs are incentivized. The...