Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Sequential testimonies where more or less reliable sourcesargue about an issue are central to public debates. Often, themajority of sources may argue that a hypothesis is true whilea minority dissenter may claim the opposite (e.g. scientistsand lobbyists in the climate change debate).In this paper, we show that people are sensitive to sourcereliability as well as the structural relationship between thesources. Participants follow Bayesian predictions for revisingbelief in the hypothesis and the reliability of the competingsources given majority consent, minority dissent, and sharedreliability between sources. Shared reliability and dissent is akey issue for public debate and belief revision. The paperprovides novel insight into the workings of these aspects.