Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In both professional domains and everyday life, people mustintegrate their own experience with reports from social networkpeers to form and update their beliefs. It is therefore importantto understand to what extent people accommodate the statis-tical dependencies that give rise to correlated belief reportsin social networks. We investigate adults’ ability to integratesocial evidence appropriately in a political scenario, varyingthe dependence between the sources of network peers’ beliefs.Using a novel interface that allows participants to express theirprobabilistic beliefs visually, we compare participants against anormative Bayesian standard. We find that they distinguish thevalue of evidence from dependent versus independent sources,but that they also treated social sources as substantially weakerevidence than direct experience. The value of our elicitationmethodology and the implications of our results for modelinghuman-like belief revision in social networks are discussed.