Belief Dynamics
What changes someone's mind, turn by turn.
What is in this dataset?
Career transitions, mentorship conflict, relationships ending. Each turn carries the belief state and how it shifted, so the change of mind is data rather than something you infer from the text.
Every turn carries what the speaker intended, what they wanted, the communication act, what they believed at that moment and how the relationship moved — computed before the text was generated, not inferred from it afterwards.
Why does it exist?
Whether a conversation changed someone's mind is normally reconstructed afterwards by reading the text, which means the label agrees with whoever read it. Here the belief state is recorded as the conversation happens.
How was it built?
- Three scenarios: career transitions, mentorship conflict, relationship dissolution.
- Each turn records the belief state and the shift from the previous turn.
- The state is computed before the text, so it is not an interpretation of it.
What does it prove — and what does it not?
Persuasion and resistance as measurable trajectories.
The belief trajectory is the model's, produced by our engine. It is ground truth for what the system intended, which is what makes it useful for training — it is not a claim about human persuasion.
What can you use it for?
- Training or evaluating models that must track what a user currently believes.
- Studying persuasion and resistance as a trajectory instead of an outcome.
- Supervising an agent that has to notice when someone has changed their mind.
Data sources
Synthetic populations are conditioned on published demographic and psychometric distributions. We acknowledge the sources: national age structures from Eurostat (demo_pjan), IBGE (Censo Demográfico 2022), U.S. Census Bureau (Population Estimates Program) and CONAPO (Conciliación Demográfica and Proyecciones); marital status and children from the UN Population Division (World Marriage Data 2019) and the OECD Family Database; country personality norms from Schmitt et al. (2007); and given names from national statistics institutes.
What these are, and what they are not. Synthetic people are derived: we sample from the distributions these institutions publish. A synthetic person is not a record from Eurostat, IBGE, the Census Bureau, CONAPO or any statistics institute, and must not be presented or cited as one. None of these institutions endorses, certifies or is affiliated with StrataSynth.