Sensitivity to shared information in social learning

In July we’re reading Whalen et al. (2017): Sensitivity to shared information in social learning.

In the study, three experiments are presented with regard to the source of informants’ knowledge in a situation of probabilistic reasoning for the “learner”. More precisely, participants are confronted with a (classic) setup of informants who have drawn coloured balls from one of two urns with known distributions of colours, and have to judge the probability of identifying the correct urn. The results of these experiments are compared to predictions derived from different Bayesian models of rational decisions. The authors conclude that people are sensitive to the amount of information provided by the informants, i.e. whether it derived from independent or dependent sources (“shared information”).

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