Simulating Collective Misbelief

It appears that what the agents in a multiple agent system believe is typically partial, often wrong and often inconsistent, but that this may not be damaging to the system as a whole. Beliefs which are demonstrably wrong I call misbeliefs. Experiments are reported which have been designed to investigate the phenomenon of collective misbelief in artificial societies, and it is suggested that their results help us to understand important human social phenomena, notably ideologies