Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Our beliefs about the world are generally not formed in isolation: the inherently social nature of human beings means that much of what we believe to know is based, at least in part, on information gained from others. Consequently, human knowledge and its acquisition cannot be fully understood by considering individuals alone. In this paper, we examine the belief dynamics in a group of networked participants engaged in a simple, factual estimation task. Specifically, we examine the extent to which participants revise their own judgments in light of others’ responses, and compare formal models of that process.