Communities of Knowledge in Trouble

Abstract

The community-of-knowledge framework explains the extraordinary success of the human species, despite individual members’ demonstrably shallow understanding of many topics, by appealing to outsourcing. People follow the cues of members of their community because understanding of phenomena is generally distributed across the group. Typically, communities do possess the relevant knowledge, but it is possible in principle for communities to send cues despite lacking knowledge—a weakness in the system’s design. COVID-19 in the United States offered a natural experiment in collective-knowledge development because a novel phenomenon arrived at a moment of intense division in political partisanship. We review evidence from the pandemic showing that the thought leaders of the two partisan groups sent radically different messages about COVID, which were, in turn, reinforced by close community members (family, friends, etc.). We show that although actual understanding of the individual plays a role in a key COVID-mitigation behavior (vaccination), it plays a smaller role than perceived understanding of thought leaders and beliefs about COVID-related behaviors of close community members. We discuss implications for theory and practice when all communities are in the same epistemic circumstance—relying on the testimony of others.

The Psychology of Collectives

“…Collectives can amplify or dampen individual emotions (Goldenberg, 2024), beliefs (Goldstone et al, 2024;Rabb et al, 2024;Vlasceanu et al, 2024;Warren et al, 2024), decision accuracy (Broomell & Davis-Stober, 2024;Martel et al, 2024), and cooperation tendencies (Fiedler et al, 2024).…”

“…Hahn (2024) demonstrates the importance of understanding the dependence of individuals' beliefs within their social context when attempting to explain collective phenomena such as group extremity and polarization. Rabb et al (2024) use the framework of community of knowledge, whereby people rely on knowledge in their groups to shape their own beliefs and behaviors, to show how this often useful tendency can backfire when one's community is wrongly perceived to possess valid knowledge about an issue. Vlasceanu et al (2024) describe a framework for understanding individual and collective beliefs as multilayer networks of evidence, beliefs, and perceived norms and show how the framework can account for empirical phenomena in belief dynamics.…”