Abstract
Despite limited information and knowledge, we personally form beliefs about certain properties of objects encountered in our daily life-popularity of a newly released movie, for example. Since such beliefs are prone to error, we often revise our initial beliefs according to the beliefs of others to improve accuracy. Optimal revision requires modulating the degree of accepting others' beliefs based on various cues for accuracy-number of opinions, for example-such that the more accurate others' beliefs are, the more we accept them. Although previous studies have shown that such accuracy cues can influence the degree of acceptance during social revision, they primarily investigated problems with 'factually correct' answers, and rarely problems with 'socially correct' answers. Here we examined which accuracy cues are objectively useful (utility of cues), and how those cues are used (use of cues), in the social revision of people's beliefs about problems with 'socially correct' answers. We asked people to estimate the 'shared preferences (SPs)' for sociocultural items, the answers to which are determined by socially aggregated beliefs-how popular an abstract painting will be among a large crowd, for example-and then to revise their initial estimates after being exposed to other people's estimates about the same items. We considered 'confidence', 'agreement among estimates', and 'number of estimates' as accuracy cues. We found that, while all three cues validly signaled the accuracy of SP estimates, only the 'number' cue has a significant utility, but the other cues are much less useful for optimal revision. Nevertheless, people used the cues of 'agreement' and their own 'confidence' to the extent comparable to that of the 'number' cue. Our findings suggest that the utility and use of accuracy cues for problems with 'socially correct' answers differ from those with 'factually correct' answers, as follows: (i) confidence does not have a significant utility and (ii) but people use their own confidence while ignoring others' confidence.
Highlights
People have different tastes in many things in life
The current study investigated i) whether the candidate accuracy cues have ‘utility’ for optimal revision of opinions on problems with ‘socially correct’ answers and ii) whether people effectively use those cues in such revisions
As for the first question, we found that, while all those cues validly predicted the accuracy of shared preferences (SPs) estimates, Social learning of crowd preferences only the number cue had a significant utility for SP revision, but the remaining cues had only moderate or negligible degrees of utility compared to the number cue
Summary
People have different tastes in many things in life. Some prefer Chardonnay to Sauvignon blanc, while others have different preferences altogether. Making decisions in social contexts often requires us to gain access to the representative preferences of a crowd of interest, which is called “shared preferences” (SP) [1,2,3]. Laboratory Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT of South Korea Grant numbers are NRF-2015M3C7A1031969, NRF2017M3C7A1047860 for the Brain Research Programs and NRF-2018R1A4A1025891 for the Basic Research Laboratory Program. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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