
## 2. A Critique To Existing Approaches 2.1. **Social Psychology: Individualistic Fallacy**

In section 5 some conclusions are drawn and future directions are suggested.

The understanding of opinions requires to take into account two levels of explanation: the individual and the social level. As mental representations, opinions are created within agents' minds and they need to be integrated with the existing network of beliefs, data, information, memories and evaluations. However, in opinion change the social influence plays a major role and the sharedness of an opinion can heavily affect its persistence and resistance to change. These **two dimensions** are tightly linked and their interplay is one of the defining features of **opinions,**
but social psychology and computer science are usually interested **in tackling only**
one of these two aspects, without studying them in combination. We **claim that**
developing a cognitive theory of opinions allows us to combine the micro- and the macro-level, understanding how macro-social phenomena emerge, unintentionally, from micro-elements and their interactions. In this way we can see that opinions derive from agents' cognitive representations and states but they also exist in the social space, in which they are transmitted and shared, and this social process affects, in turn, individuals' opinions. This complex loop requires a non-reductionist approach in order to deal with both levels, without giving preeminence to one or the other.

Social psychology mainly focuses on the individual side, trying to describe how opinions are generated within the mind, devoting much attention to define attitudes and evaluations, but paying little attention to the socially interactive **dimension of**
opinions. On the other hand, scholars from computer science and physics have tried to explain how different opinions can coexist or how they are modified through communication, treating opinions as mere objects that are exchanged and revised according to certain mechanisms that are quite far from the reality **of cognitive and** social processes. In both cases there is a reductionist fallacy that works in different ways but in both cases results in a downgrading of a complex issue into **either a**
set of unrelated specific elements or a unidimensional object that is **far from the**
complexity of a cognitive representation. Social psychologists have devoted much attention to the study of **opinions' formation**
and spreading, but a comprehensive and definite model allowing for an operational and generative account is still missing. Providing a comprehensive review of social psychology literature is beyond the scope of this work, but in this section we will discuss some of the main theories in order to underline how partial is the picture of opinions emerging from these studies.

In general, opinions are treated as synonyms for different mental **objects, as**
beliefs [21], or more frequently, attitudes. Opinions are often conceptualized as attitudes [20], [16], [22] or they are used as interchangeable terms that have in common