Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is an inherent part of communication across social networks that the same evidence can reach us by different paths. This creates the possibility of inadvertent double counting of evidence. Recent work has shown that some degree of double counting seems to be an inevitable part of group deliberation. This makes it imperative to understand what impact evidence-reduplication has on beliefs or opinions across social networks. In this paper, we use agent-based modelling to show how and why double counting gives rise to polarization.