The Contextual Activation of Belief Networks

How do people navigate a wide range of belief spaces? Conceptualizing a set of political attitudes as a network of correlations, this paper shows that major social events activate different core beliefs as cognitive heuristics to organize otherwise unassociated beliefs. Comparing belief networks from General Social Surveys during presidential election years from 2000 to 2016 to those from American National Election Studies, we find sharp differences in which belief lies at the core of political belief networks. In the ANES, liberal-conservative ideology occupies the center of belief networks. In contrast, the centrality of the gay rights issue has been highest in the GSS since 2008. Using a moving window approach based on survey timing, we show that the centrality of gay rights in the GSS peaked right after the major events related to gay rights such as the legalization of same-sex marriage, Pride Parade, and the Orlando shooting. These results suggest that the activation of core beliefs is context-dependent.