This article presents an alignment model of cultural formation, arguing that belief systems become increasingly constrained from earlier periods of life-course to adulthood. I show that the pairwise correlations between cultural beliefs increase and the structure of personal culture becomes relatively more aligned before entering adulthood. Moreover, the rate of personal change slows down with each year of age, suggesting that the alignment process is most prevalent in specific socialization periods. Using four waves of data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, I test these propositions through an analysis of religious belief networks. I find that the results are robust to sampling variability, population heterogeneity, and item selection.

This article presents an alignment model of cultural formation, arguing that belief systems become increasingly constrained from earlier periods of life-course to adulthood. I show that the pairwise correlations between cultural beliefs increase and the structure of personal culture becomes relatively more aligned before entering adulthood. Moreover, the rate of personal change slows down with each year of age, suggesting that the alignment process is most prevalent in specific socialization periods. Using four waves of data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, I test these propositions through an analysis of religious belief networks. I find that the results are robust to sampling variability, population heterogeneity, and item selection.

No abstract

This article presents an equilibrium model of belief alignment. In this model, an individual's cultural beliefs are formed in earlier periods of life-course and remain relatively stable afterwards. I present the formation and organization of belief systems as central channels that facilitate this stabilization. Since cultural beliefs form webs of implications that become more connected with similar experiences until an equilibrium point is reached, correlations between beliefs should become stronger and the changes in the structure of personal culture should decrease with age. Using four waves of nationally representative data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, I test these propositions through an analysis of religious belief networks from adolescence to emerging adulthood.

Studies on mass opinion conceptualize political ideology as an interrelated network of attitudes, beliefs and values. Drawing from the emerging literature on belief network analysis, I formalize this conceptualization to investigate different ways of organizing political ideologies among 76 countries. Using the joint dataset of European Values Study and World Values Survey collected between 2017 and 2020, I construct networks of belief correlations and examine the variations in the organization of political beliefs in the cross-national context. Consistent with the theories of social constraint, I find that in countries with high institutionalization of political parties, the organization of political beliefs is more likely to be dense and consolidated. These patterns are robust to a variety of predictors between-countries, and the results are not sensitive to sampling variability, variable selection, or item properties.