Seminar Abstract

Thursday, July 10, 2008 • 12:15 PM • Medium Conference Room, SFI

Charles Efferson SFI Postdoctoral Fellow

Behavior Discussion Group - The Social Foundations of Shared Delusions

Social psychology has a long tradition of experimental research showing that corrupting social influence can lead people to state inaccurate beliefs in the face of countervailing evidence. These findings, however, seem to depend entirely on the use of deception by the experimenter, and thus they tell us little about how inaccurate social traditions emerge endogenously. In contrast, we conducted an experiment showing that inaccurate social traditions can develop on their own without the use of deception when individuals are learning from each other about the the state of their environment. Inaccurate social traditions are especially likely when the costs of being wrong are state-dependent and when agents exhibit certain cognitive biases that distort the learning process. This talk will present preliminary results.

Hosts: Dan Hruschka and Willemien Kets