Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although research in the area of belief updating has flourished in the last two decades, most studies do not treat beliefs as part of a complex and interactive network. In this study, we investigate humans' use of auxiliary hypotheses as a mechanism to avoid belief updating in light of conflicting information. In Experiment 1, we replicate an unpublished study by Kahneman and Tversky, introducing two additional domain conditions (N=119). Participants construct an initial model, express a prior belief, and face conflicting information. They are then prompted to provide an explanation. Across three domains, only 37% of responses demonstrate belief updating, by attributing the information conflict to the original report being unreliable or invalid. In Experiment 2 (N=29), a within-participants manipulation of credibility shows no effect on generating auxiliary hypotheses. Even in the presence of credibility cues to explain away information conflicts by invoking the reliability of either source, participants instead generated auxiliary hypotheses to resolve them in 27% of the cases.