Epistemic Vigilance

Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remain...

Not Learning from Others

We study social learning using experiments where two people independently learn relevant information and can share it to make accurate private decisions. Across three experiments, people are substantially less sensitive to information others discover than to equally-relevant information they discovered themselves. This holds when they must learn information from others through discussion; when the experimenter perfectly communicates the information; and even when participants observe others’ information with their own eyes. Our results therefore stem not from a failure to elicit information from others but a systematic tendency to underweight it relative to one’s own information. Our findings illustrate a powerful barrier to social learning that might underlie many documented cases of failure to learn from others.

How We Pay Attention Changes the Very Shape of Our Brains

Imagine arriving at the airport just in time to catch a plane. Everything in your behavior betrays the heightened concentration of your attention. Your mind on alert, you look for the departures si…

Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom

When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be.

From Users to (Sense)Makers: On the Pivotal Role of Stigmergic Social Annotation in the Quest for Collective Sensemaking

The web has become a dominant epistemic environment, influencing people's beliefs at a global scale. However, online epistemic environments are increasingly polluted, impairing societies' ability to coordinate effectively in the face of global crises. We argue that centralized platforms are a main source of epistemic pollution, and that healthier environments require redesigning how we collectively govern attention. Inspired by decentralization and open source software movements, we propose Open Source Attention, a socio-technical framework for "freeing" human attention from control by platforms, through a decentralized eco-system for creating, storing and querying stigmergic markers; the digital traces of human attention.

Rethinking Trust

Reprint: R0906H Will we ever learn? We’d barely recovered from Enron and WorldCom before we faced the subprime mortgage meltdown and more scandals that shook our trust in businesspeople. Which raises the question: Do we trust too much? In this article, Stanford professor and social psychologist Kramer explores the reasons we trust so easily—and, often, so unwisely. He explains that genetics and childhood learning make us predisposed to trust and that it’s been a good survival mechanism. That said, our willingness to trust makes us vulnerable. Our sense of trust kicks in on remarkably simple cues, such as when people look like us or are part of our social group. We also rely on third parties to verify the character of others, sometimes to our detriment (as the victims of Bernard Madoff learned). Add in our illusions of invulnerability and our tendencies to see what we want to see and to overestimate our own judgment, and the bottom line is that we’re often easily fooled. We need to develop tempered trust. For those who trust too much, that means reading cues better; for the distrustful, it means developing more receptive behaviors. Everyone should start with small acts of trust that encourage reciprocity and build up. Having a hedge against potential abuses also helps. Hollywood scriptwriters, for instance, register their treatments with the Writers Guild of America to prevent their ideas from being stolen by the executives they pitch. To attract the right relationships, people must strongly signal their own honesty, proactively allay concerns, and, if their trust is abused, retaliate. Trusting individuals in certain roles, which essentially means trusting the system that selects and trains them, also works but isn’t foolproof. And don’t count on due diligence alone for protection; constant vigilance is needed to make sure the landscape hasn’t changed.

Overcoming information overload with circular attention economies - Cosmik Labs

AI Epistemic Risks: Emerging Mechanisms & Evidence

<p>Advances in artificial intelligence pose risks to humanity's collective capacity to form accurate beliefs, reason well, and maintain a healthy information en

Retraction Note: High replicability of newly discovered social-behavioural findings is achievable

Nature Human Behaviour - Retraction Note: High replicability of newly discovered social-behavioural findings is achievable

Copying Better: How To Acquire The Tacit Knowledge of Experts

Much of expertise is tacit: that is, it cannot be captured through words alone. We look at techniques, drawn from the field of Naturalistic Decision Making, designed to acquire the tacit knowledge of experts.

Reflective and Impulsive Determinants of Social Behavior - Fritz Strack, Roland Deutsch, 2004

This article describes a 2-systems model that explains social behavior as a joint function of reflective and impulsive processes. In particular, it is assumed t...

Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy

The attention economy is the economic system in which human attention is the scarce resource. This literature takes a particular passage in Herbert Simon’s seminal Chapter Designing Organization fo...

Sources on social media: Information context collapse and volume of content as predictors of source blindness - George Pearson, 2021

Although social media has become a primary news platform, the effects of social media features on users’ information processing remains under-explored. This stu...