Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Consensus-based social learning strategies often outcompete other strategies in evolutionary models. But while formal proofs suggest that consensus’ reliability is compromised when individual judgments are not independent, this makes for a notoriously implausible assumption in the biological world: the people we learn from are constantly learning from each other as well. How do we avoid being misled by consensus? We present two experiments and a computational model examining commonsense reasoning about how people’s public and private judgments are influenced by the consensus and social status of those around them. Results suggest that while people realize that these two factors can cause others’ public and private judgments to diverge, their own trust in public consensus depends on how accurately they believe it reflects their informants’ true beliefs.