Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Much of what we know comes from other people, and thequantity of information provided is often constrained by timeor space. For a communicator, what information they chooseto convey depends not just on the nature of their topic, but alsoon the social inferences their listeners will make about thembased on what they say. For the listener, their interpretation ofinformation given to them depends not just on the informationitself, but also on what inferences they make about the bias andmotivations of the communicator they received it from. In thispaper we explore how and whether these social factors interactwith the “true” nature of the information being communicated.We find that stronger evidence does not always lead to strongerconclusions and often leads to increased perceived bias. Com-municators, perhaps for this reason and perhaps for others, of-ten modulate the evidence they present to be less unanimousthan warranted. This has implications for real-world situations,like communicating about climate change: in such situations,both communicators and listeners behave in what may be indi-vidually rational ways, but the end result is that the underlyingtruth gets distorted.