Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive science often views human learning as rational. Why then do false beliefs arise, and why are they resistantto change? False beliefs might arise when people (1) lack knowledge in some domain, (2) adopt beliefs aligning withimplicit causal theories, or (3) encounter, through media or social networks, sets of beliefs that strongly covary. To testthese hypotheses we composed a survey assessing beliefs about matters of fact across a wide range of knowledge domainsand collected responses from 500 MTurkers. We then conducted a factor analysis to determine which false beliefs co-vary together, clustered respondents to find groups that adopt comparable false belief sets, and used regression to identifysociodemographic and media-consumption features that predict susceptibility to different kinds of false beliefs. The resultssuggest that some kinds of false belief may arise and persist merely from covariance in the opinions learners encounter insocial life.