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Obstacles to the spread of unintuitive beliefs

Many socially significant beliefs are unintuitive, from the harmlessness of GMOs to the efficacy of vaccination, and they are acquired via deference toward individuals who are more confident, more competent or a majority. In the two-step flow model of communication, a first group of individuals acqu...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Mercier, Hugo, Majima, Yoshimasa, Claidière, Nicolas, Léone, Jessica
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Cambridge University Press 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10427286/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37588403
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2019.10
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author Mercier, Hugo
Majima, Yoshimasa
Claidière, Nicolas
Léone, Jessica
author_facet Mercier, Hugo
Majima, Yoshimasa
Claidière, Nicolas
Léone, Jessica
author_sort Mercier, Hugo
collection PubMed
description Many socially significant beliefs are unintuitive, from the harmlessness of GMOs to the efficacy of vaccination, and they are acquired via deference toward individuals who are more confident, more competent or a majority. In the two-step flow model of communication, a first group of individuals acquires some beliefs through deference and then spreads these beliefs more broadly. Ideally, these individuals should be able to explain why they deferred to a given source – to provide arguments from expertise – and others should find these arguments convincing. We test these requirements using a perceptual task with participants from the US and Japan. In Experiment 1, participants were provided with first-hand evidence that they should defer to an expert, leading a majority of participants to adopt the expert's answer. However, when attempting to pass on this answer, only a minority of those participants used arguments from expertise. In Experiment 2, participants receive an argument from expertise describing the expert's competence, instead of witnessing it first-hand. This leads to a significant drop in deference compared with Experiment 1. These experiments highlight significant obstacles to the transmission of unintuitive beliefs.
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spelling pubmed-104272862023-08-16 Obstacles to the spread of unintuitive beliefs Mercier, Hugo Majima, Yoshimasa Claidière, Nicolas Léone, Jessica Evol Hum Sci Research Article Many socially significant beliefs are unintuitive, from the harmlessness of GMOs to the efficacy of vaccination, and they are acquired via deference toward individuals who are more confident, more competent or a majority. In the two-step flow model of communication, a first group of individuals acquires some beliefs through deference and then spreads these beliefs more broadly. Ideally, these individuals should be able to explain why they deferred to a given source – to provide arguments from expertise – and others should find these arguments convincing. We test these requirements using a perceptual task with participants from the US and Japan. In Experiment 1, participants were provided with first-hand evidence that they should defer to an expert, leading a majority of participants to adopt the expert's answer. However, when attempting to pass on this answer, only a minority of those participants used arguments from expertise. In Experiment 2, participants receive an argument from expertise describing the expert's competence, instead of witnessing it first-hand. This leads to a significant drop in deference compared with Experiment 1. These experiments highlight significant obstacles to the transmission of unintuitive beliefs. Cambridge University Press 2019-10-14 /pmc/articles/PMC10427286/ /pubmed/37588403 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2019.10 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Mercier, Hugo
Majima, Yoshimasa
Claidière, Nicolas
Léone, Jessica
Obstacles to the spread of unintuitive beliefs
title Obstacles to the spread of unintuitive beliefs
title_full Obstacles to the spread of unintuitive beliefs
title_fullStr Obstacles to the spread of unintuitive beliefs
title_full_unstemmed Obstacles to the spread of unintuitive beliefs
title_short Obstacles to the spread of unintuitive beliefs
title_sort obstacles to the spread of unintuitive beliefs
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10427286/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37588403
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2019.10
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