Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Increasingly, people encounter health-related claims made by others on social media. When faced with conflicting information, an important question is how people decide which information to share. Selective sharing (e.g., passing on only posts that support a particular claim) may distort others' perceptions of the balance of opinion. Across two experiments, we examined how communicative goals shape information sharing by asking participants to choose sets of posts to share with different goals in mind. In Experiment 1, we found distinct sharing behaviours across goals, and that when given no explicit goal, people tended to share as if advocating for their preferred stance rather than conveying the balance of opinion in a more nuanced way. Experiment 2 replicated these results even when the balance of opinion opposed people's own beliefs. This research highlights how biases in information sampling may systematically distort social learning.