Related papers: The Fake News Effect: Experimentally Identifying M…
When people choose what messages to send to others, they often consider how others will interpret the messages. A sender may expect a receiver to engage in motivated reasoning, leading the receiver to trust good news more than bad news,…
People often receive good news that makes them feel better about the world around them, or bad news that makes them feel worse about it. This paper studies how the valence of news affects belief updating, absent functional and ego-relevant…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
Motivated reasoning - the idea that individuals processing information may be motivated to either arrive at accurate beliefs or arrive at desired conclusions - has been well-explored as a human phenomenon. However, it remains unclear…
Men and women systematically differ in their beliefs about their performance relative to others; in particular, men tend to be more overconfident. This paper provides support for one explanation for gender differences in overconfidence,…
Common sense suggests that when individuals explain why they believe something, we can arrive at more accurate conclusions than when they simply state what they believe. Yet, there is no known mechanism that provides incentives to elicit…
News articles of varying degrees of truthfulness and political alignment, and their influences on the political opinions of the media consumers are modeled as a Bayesian network incorporating a mixture of ideas from dual-reasoning models of…
The human mind is capable of extraordinary achievements, yet it often appears to work against itself. It actively defends its cherished beliefs even in the face of contradictory evidence, conveniently interprets information to conform to…
Most fact checking models for automatic fake news detection are based on reasoning: given a claim with associated evidence, the models aim to estimate the claim veracity based on the supporting or refuting content within the evidence. When…
We study how motivated reasoning affects the provision of climate policy in an electoral competition framework. Voters experience anticipatory disutility when future outcomes appear grim and may therefore distort beliefs in response to…
We study how social image concerns shape information sharing among peers. Individuals receive a signal about a binary state of the world characterized by both a direction and a veracity status. While the direction is freely observable,…
This work is a technical approach to modeling false information nature, design, belief impact and containment in multi-agent networks. We present a Bayesian mathematical model for source information and viewer's belief, and how the former…
Automatic fake news detection models are ostensibly based on logic, where the truth of a claim made in a headline can be determined by supporting or refuting evidence found in a resulting web query. These models are believed to be reasoning…
We propose a belief-formation model where agents attempt to discriminate between two theories, and where the asymmetry in strength between confirming and disconfirming evidence tilts beliefs in favor of theories that generate strong (and…
A modelling framework, based on the theory of signal processing, for characterising the dynamics of systems driven by the unravelling of information is outlined, and is applied to describe the process of decision making. The model input of…
Background: Confirmation bias is the tendency to acquire or evaluate new information in a way that is consistent with one's preexisting beliefs. It is omnipresent in psychology, economics, and even scientific practices. Prior theoretical…
It has been observed people tend to have opinions that are far more internally consistent than it would be reasonable to expect. Here, we study how that observation might emerge from changing how agents trust the opinions of their peers in…
Language is not only used to transmit neutral information; we often seek to persuade by arguing in favor of a particular view. Persuasion raises a number of challenges for classical accounts of belief updating, as information cannot be…
Recent advancements in natural language generation has raised serious concerns. High-performance language models are widely used for language generation tasks because they are able to produce fluent and meaningful sentences. These models…
This paper presents a plausible reasoning system to illustrate some broad issues in knowledge representation: dualities between different reasoning forms, the difficulty of unifying complementary reasoning styles, and the approximate nature…