Individual Representation in a Community of Knowledge

Rabb, Nathaniel; Fernbach, Philip M.; Sloman, Steven A.

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2019.07.011

Cited by 64 publications

(69 citation statements)

References 107 publications

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“…Our results also suggest that time and attention given to COVID-19 conspiracies may be misguided; describing or explaining the existence of COVID-19 conspiracies may ironically increase support for these accounts and undermine knowledge about, belief in, and willingness to engage in COVID-19 mitigation for those people already predisposed to believing in conspiracies. Instead, communications and recommendations from public health experts should focus, first and foremost, on increasing belief in and acceptance of consensus COVID-19 information and, secondarily, increasing understanding of this information (also see Rabb et al, 2019;Clark et al, 2020;Marsh et al, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Prior research suggests that laypeople's understanding of disease symptomology can shape their perception of effective treatment (Marsh and Zeveney, 2015;Marsh and Romano, 2016). Further, selfperceived causal understanding is closely tied to perceptions of causal understanding among scientists or experts (Sloman and Rabb, 2016;Rabb et al, 2019), the latter of which has been directly implicated in COVID-19 mitigation behaviors (Marsh et al, 2021). These findings suggest that perceived understanding, by both the self and scientists, of how COVID-19 spreads could translate to increased belief in and compliance with behavioral mitigation.…”

Section: Current Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Pandemic of Misbelief: How Beliefs Promote or Undermine COVID-19 Mitigation

Vitriol

Marsh

2021

Front. Polit. Sci.

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Sustained and coordinated social action is needed to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Health practitioners and governments around the world have issued recommendations and mandates designed to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 by influencing the social behaviors of the general public. Why and when are some people unwilling to take action to protect themselves and others from the effects of this public health crisis? We find that belief in COVID-19 consensus information (by the self or perceptions of scientists’ beliefs), are consequential predictors of COVID-19 mitigation behaviors. Importantly, support for COVID-19 conspiracy theories predicted decreased, whereas perceived understanding of COVID-19 predicted increased, belief in COVID-19 consensus information. We also implemented an Illusion of Explanatory depth paradigm, an approach to examining knowledge overestimation shown to reduce confidence in one’s understanding of complex phenomena. By requiring participants to elaborate upon COVID-19 conspiracies, we experimentally increased understanding of these theories, which led, in turn, to ironic increases in support for the conspiracy theories and undermined perceived understanding of COVID-19 information for a notable portion of our participants. Together, our results suggest that attention given to COVID-19 conspiracies may be misguided; describing or explaining the existence of COVID-19 conspiracies may ironically increase support for these accounts and undermine knowledge about and willingness to engage in COVID-19 mitigation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Current Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Pandemic of Misbelief: How Beliefs Promote or Undermine COVID-19 Mitigation

Vitriol

Marsh

2021

Front. Polit. Sci.

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“…Mechanism metadata also include a sense of what sorts of abstract causal patterns might be at the heart of a broad class of machines or organisms. People use this sense to navigate the division of cognitive labor (Keil et al, 2008) and to assess the likelihood that a group of experts could be a useful knowledge reservoir (Rabb et al, 2019). Do children and adults forget mechanistic details, notice them but choose not to learn them, or not even notice them at all?…”

Section: Abstraction and Metadatamentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Cause: The Development of Clockwork Cognition

Keil

Lockhart

2021

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

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Thinking of the world in mechanistic terms—how things work—is both cognitively natural and motivating for humans from the preschool years onward. Mechanisms have distinct structural properties that go far beyond mere causal facts. They typically contain layers of causal clusters and the systematic interactions between those clusters that give rise to the next level up. Following developments in the philosophy of science and studies on children’s questioning behaviors, recent research shows that, from an early age, people appreciate the informational and inductive potential of mechanistic information. People selectively notice and choose mechanistic explanations as especially useful opportunities for learning; but they also soon forget the details of what they encounter. We argue that enduring cognitive abstractions from such details provide powerful ways of accessing and evaluating expertise in other people.

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“…As is common in such contexts, the claims that participants had to judge in the YAK studies involved evaluating opposing majority and minority views by authorities who are assumed to have more expert knowledge than the participants (cf. Rabb, Fernbach & Sloman, 2019). Hence, the YAK illusion of consensus results have already had considerable impact -being cited as an explanation for the persistence of beliefs in fake news and anti-science views (e.g., Kozyreva et al, 2020;Schwartz & Jalbert 2020).…”

Section: Re-examining the Illusion Of Consensusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Getting to the source of the illusion of consensus

Desai¹,

Xie²,

Hayes³

2021

Preprint

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Consensus between informants is a valuable cue to a claim’s epistemic value, wheninformants’ beliefs are developed independently of each other. Recent work (Yousif et al., 2019) described an illusion of consensus such that people did not generally discriminate between the epistemic warrant of true consensus, where a majority claim is supported by multiple independent sources, and false consensus arising from repeated claims from the same sources. We re-examined this issue in two ways. First, a Bayesian re-analysis of the Yousif et al. (2019) results found that the evidence for the illusion of consensus was not as strong as originally claimed. Second, three experiments tested the hypothesis that the illusion of consensus only arises when people are unsure about the independence of the primary sources on which informant claims are based. When steps were taken to highlight the independence between data sources in the true consensus conditions, and confidence ina claim was measured against a no consensus baseline (where there was an equal number of reports supporting and opposing a claim), we eliminated the illusion of consensus. Under these conditions, more weight was given to claims based on true consensus than false consensus. These findings have implications for how people evaluate consensus and reason with dependent information. Our findings are relevant to the contemporary media context, where the (in)dependence of information sources can be obscured and lead to the appropriation of erroneous beliefs.

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Individual Representation in a Community of Knowledge

Cited by 64 publications

References 107 publications

A Pandemic of Misbelief: How Beliefs Promote or Undermine COVID-19 Mitigation

A Pandemic of Misbelief: How Beliefs Promote or Undermine COVID-19 Mitigation

Beyond Cause: The Development of Clockwork Cognition

Getting to the source of the illusion of consensus

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