University of New South Wales, Australia.
University of New South Wales, Australia.
Cognition. 2022 Jun;223:105023. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105023. Epub 2022 Feb 8.
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.
当信息提供者的信念是相互独立发展的时候，信息提供者之间的一致性是对主张的认识价值的一个有价值的线索。最近的研究（Yousif 等人，2019）描述了一种共识错觉，即人们通常无法区分真正共识的认识依据和虚假共识，前者是指多数主张得到多个独立来源的支持，而后者则是由于单一来源的主张重复而产生的。四项实验检验了共识错觉的一种新解释；当人们对信息提供者主张所依据的主要来源的独立性不确定时，就会产生这种错觉。当这种独立性关系不明确时，我们发现了这种错觉的证据。然而，当采取措施突出真正共识条件下数据源之间的独立性，并根据无共识基线（支持和反对主张的报告数量相等）来衡量对主张的信心时，基于真正共识的主张比基于虚假共识的主张受到更大的重视。这些发现表明，尽管共识错觉很普遍，但人们确实有能力区分真正的共识和虚假的共识。
