Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We describe two different cognitive process models of a wellknown experiment on social influence (Salganik, Dodds, &Watts, 2006). One model, the social influence model,reproduced the choices that participants took by modelingboth the cognitive processes the participant engaged in andthe social influences that the participant saw. The secondmodel, the pure cognitive model, used only cognitivecapabilities and did not model any social influences that theparticipant saw. Somewhat surprisingly, the two modelsshowed no difference in quality of fit (the pure cognitivemodel actually fit slightly better than the social influencemodel), suggesting that social influence models should takecognitive functions into account in their theories.