Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

With the advent of social media, the last decade has seen pro-found changes to the way people receive information. This hasfueled debate about the ways (if any) changes to the nature ofour information networks might be affecting voters’ beliefsabout the world, voting results, and, ultimately, democracy. Atthe same time, much discussion in the public arena in recentyears has concerned the notion that ill-informed voters havebeen voting against their own self-interest. The research report-ed here brings these two strands together: simulations involvingagent-based models, interpreted through the formal frameworkof Condorcet’s (1785) Jury Theorem, demonstrate how changesto information networks may make voter error more likely eventhough individual competence has largely remained unchanged .