Getting to the source of the illusion of consensus

Abstract

Consensus between informants is a valuable cue to a claim's epistemic value, when informants' beliefs are developed independently of each other. Recent work (Yousif et al., 2019) described an illusion of consensus such that people did not generally discriminate between the epistemic warrant of true consensus, where a majority claim is supported by multiple independent sources, and false consensus arising from repetition of a single source's claim. Four experiments tested a novel account of the illusion of consensus; that it arises when people are unsure about the independence of the primary sources on which informant claims are based. When this independence relationship was ambiguous we found evidence for the illusion. However, when steps were taken to highlight the independence between data sources in the true consensus conditions, and confidence in a claim was measured against a no consensus baseline (where there was an equal number of reports supporting and opposing a claim), more weight was given to claims based on true consensus than false consensus. These findings show that although the illusion of consensus is prevalent, people do have the capacity to distinguish between true and false consensus.