Collective beliefs follow patterns and obey certain laws, just like stricter physical phenomena.

Social transmission protocol: collect at least 10 million public or authorized posts in about 10 languages, along with a belief panel of about 10,000 people, tracking for 18-24 months; compare complex contagion, threshold, and self-exciting point process models; control for homophily selection, recommendation algorithms, bots, common news shocks, translation measurement invariance, and exposure opportunities; assess prediction using held-out cultures; embed randomized exposure experiments to identify causation. Random number protocol: deploy 3 independent hardware random number generators in each of about 20 regions, with approximately 300 residents per region measuring belief intensity and synchronized attention weekly for 24 consecutive months; fix primary deviation statistics, time windows, and lags; control for temperature, power supply, electromagnetic environment, geomagnetic activity, device batch, network packet loss, and autocorrelation; set no-event time windows and negative controls; and conduct within-region randomized collective attention interventions. Effective sample size depends on independent regions and events; massive bit counts cannot be treated as independent replicates.

Cross-Cultural Belief Dynamics and Hardware Randomness: Pre-registered Tests of Social Transmission and Physical Covariation

Social transmission regularities need not overturn mainstream assumptions; only a random number effect that survives after excluding physical confounds would challenge the conditional independence hypothesis that, given device state and environment, random number output is independent of distant group beliefs.

[Damon Centola，University of Pennsylvania，Network Dynamics Group](https://www.asc.upenn.edu/people/faculty/damon-centola-phd?page=1); [Jay J. Van Bavel，New York University，Social Identity and Morality Lab](https://www.jayvanbavel.com/); [HeartMath Institute，Global Consciousness Project 2.0](https://www.heartmath.org/research/research-library/coherence/global-consciousness-project-2/)

The statement that collective beliefs have patterns is too broad; it offers no quantitative predictions for network structure, transition thresholds, cultural differences, or random number deviations, and is less specific than modern social contagion models.

'Supported' refers only to the existence of quantifiable statistical regularities in collective beliefs and conventions; their universality akin to physical laws is not established; the extended hypothesis that beliefs alter random numbers should be listed separately as 'contested,' and search popularity cannot directly substitute for belief intensity.