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Utility and use of accuracy cues in social learning of crowd preferences

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...

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Autores principales: Lim, Jaeseob, Lee, Sang-Hun
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7592789/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33112896
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240997
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author Lim, Jaeseob
Lee, Sang-Hun
author_facet Lim, Jaeseob
Lee, Sang-Hun
author_sort Lim, Jaeseob
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-75927892020-11-02 Utility and use of accuracy cues in social learning of crowd preferences Lim, Jaeseob Lee, Sang-Hun PLoS One Research Article 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. Public Library of Science 2020-10-28 /pmc/articles/PMC7592789/ /pubmed/33112896 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240997 Text en © 2020 Lim, Lee http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Lim, Jaeseob
Lee, Sang-Hun
Utility and use of accuracy cues in social learning of crowd preferences
title Utility and use of accuracy cues in social learning of crowd preferences
title_full Utility and use of accuracy cues in social learning of crowd preferences
title_fullStr Utility and use of accuracy cues in social learning of crowd preferences
title_full_unstemmed Utility and use of accuracy cues in social learning of crowd preferences
title_short Utility and use of accuracy cues in social learning of crowd preferences
title_sort utility and use of accuracy cues in social learning of crowd preferences
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7592789/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33112896
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240997
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