Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many real-world situations involve learning entirely or mostlybased on the information provided by other people, which cre-ates a thorny epistemological problem: how does one deter-mine which of those people to trust? Previous work has shownthat even populations of rational Bayesian agents, faced withthis problem, polarise into “echo chambers” characterised bydifferent beliefs and low levels of between-group trust. In thisstudy we show that this general result holds even when thereasoners have a more complex meaning space and can com-municate about their beliefs in a more nuanced way. However,even a tiny amount of exposure to a mutually trusted “groundtruth” is sufficient to eliminate polarisation. Societal and psy-chological implications are discussed.