Stabilising Generative Models of Attitude Change

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel actor-based simulation framework to operationalize and evaluate verbal psychological theories of attitude change, revealing dependencies and stabilisation challenges.

Contribution

It presents a new generative modelling workflow that renders verbal theories into executable simulations, enabling empirical testing and analysis.

Findings

Simulations produce behavioral patterns consistent with classic experiments.

Achieving stable reproduction requires resolving verbal account underdetermination.

Manual stabilisation uncovers operational and socio-ecological dependencies.

Abstract

Attitude change - the process by which individuals revise their evaluative stances - has been explained by a set of influential but competing verbal theories. These accounts often function as mechanism sketches: rich in conceptual detail, yet lacking the technical specifications and operational constraints required to run as executable systems. We present a generative actor-based modelling workflow for "rendering" these sketches as runnable actor - environment simulations using the Concordia simulation library. In Concordia, actors operate by predictive pattern completion: an operation on natural language strings that generates a suffix which describes the actor's intended action from a prefix containing memories of their past and observations of the present. We render the theories of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957), self-consistency (Aronson 1969), and self-perception (Bem 1972) as distinct decision logics that populate and process the prefix through theory-specific sequences of reasoning steps. We evaluate these implementations across classic psychological experiments. Our implementations generate behavioural patterns consistent with known results from the original empirical literature. However, we find that achieving stable reproduction requires resolving the inherent underdetermination of the verbal accounts and the conflicts between modern linguistic priors and historical experimental assumptions. We document how this manual process of iterative model "stabilisation" surfaces specific operational and socio-ecological dependencies that were largely undocumented in the original verbal accounts. Ultimately, we argue that the manual stabilisation process itself should be regarded as a core part of the methodology functioning to clarify situational and representational commitments needed to generate characteristic effects.