Confidence of others trumps confidence of self in social information use

Abstract

Humans live in a fundamentally social world. The behavior and judgments from friends, colleagues, television hosts and social media feeds drive our purchase decisions, induce lifestyle changes, and determine voting preferences. People tend to be more sensitive to social information when they are unsure about their own beliefs, and assign more weight to social information when its source is highly confident. However, little is known about the relative impact of the confidence of self and others on social information use, and how they jointly shape social transmission. Here we show with two incentivized decision-making experiments that the confidence of others had a substantially larger impact on social information use than people’s own confidence. In tasks involving perceptual decisions (experiment 1; N=203) and US election predictions (experiment 2; N=213), participants could adjust their initial judgments upon observing judgments of others and were rewarded for accuracy. Adjustments were most strongly impacted by the confidence of others, particularly when participants’ own confidence was low. Furthermore, confidence also affected adjustment heuristics: confident others prompted participants to compromise more often, rather than to stick with their initial judgments. Our results highlight how giving more weight on the confidence of others can be a double-edged sword: it can accelerate learning when confidence is related to accuracy, but it also leaves people vulnerable to sources who confidently share misinformation.

Social learning across adolescence: A Bayesian neurocognitive perspective

“…A demonstrator’s performance or reliability, for example, indeed are important factors for social information use ( Morgan et al, 2012 , Olsen et al, 2019 , Gradassi et al, 2022 ). In addition to a demonstrator’s objective performance, conveyed performance or subjective confidence statements heavily influence copying behavior, such that more confident people, or people who state that they are more confident, exert more influence over both group and individual decisions ( Gradassi et al, 2022 , no date; Zarnoth and Sniezek, 1997 ; Morgan et al, 2012 ; Moussaïd et al, 2013 ), as do more extreme opinions ( Price and Stone, 2004 , da Silva Pinho et al, 2021 ). Moreover, decisions of multiple individuals yield a larger impact when they are in high agreement versus when they substantially differ from each other ( Molleman et al, 2020 ).…”