Structure of individual beliefs

Abstract

Any actor involved in a social system holds certain subjective beliefs about his physical, social and institutional environment as well as about his own characteristics. These beliefs, expressed in a linguistic form, are evaluated in terms of their internal logical consistency, but even more in terms of their external suitability to the gathered information. The actor’s view of the system is evaluated by reference to the modeler’s view, which includes the actors’ beliefs and is considered by construction as perfect and complete. In contrast, the actor only has a noisy and partial model of the system, or even a wrong model of it, since he has to deal with limited information and bounded cognitive rationality.