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11:00 - 12:30
Parallel sessions 2
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11:00 - 12:30
Room: HSZ - N9
Chair/s:
Maren Mayer, Tobias Rebholz
Beyond the more traditional paradigm of advice taking, which is at the center of the symposium “New advances in advice taking research: Cognitive, social, and algorithmic perspectives”, this symposium highlights paradigms and cases in which dependency among individuals is less structured. In five talks, we present and discuss evidence from paradigms featuring dependent judgments and belief updating and highlight how others influence individuals’ judgments and beliefs in various ways.

The first contribution highlights how planned missing data designs can help us measure belief updating when no initial judgment is elicited. The second contribution draws on sequential collaboration, a method for aggregating estimates that does not include initial judgments, and examines whether contributors are influenced by social information about others. The third contribution investigates how framing and repetition of information systematically influence not only subjective truth judgments but also confidence, which in turn has been associated with reduced information seeking. In the fourth contribution, belief updating to scientific hypotheses is compared under different ordering and under either sequential or simultaneous presentation of evidence. Finally, the last contribution examines how trust in science shapes individuals’ belief updating for scientific evidence considering both source expertise and ambiguity of evidence.
Submission 254
Effects of Scientific Evidence Presentation Formats Point to a Memory-Sampling Mechanism in Evidence-Based Belief Updating
SymposiumTalk-04
Presented by: Marcel R. Schreiner
Marcel R. Schreiner 1, Tobias R. Rebholz 2, Julian Quevedo Pütter 3, Asheley R. Landrum 4
1 University of Würzburg, Germany
2 Duke University, United States
3 University of Mannheim, Germany
4 Arizona State University, United States
The aim of the scientific enterprise is to foster the accumulation of a reliable body of knowledge on which we can base our beliefs about the world. This typically entails the synthesis of different pieces of evidence obtained in individual scientific studies. We investigated the impact of different evidence presentation formats on laypeople’s belief updating regarding psychological hypotheses. Participants from a diverse sample of 930 U.S. residents were presented several psychological hypotheses. For each hypothesis, we assessed their prior beliefs, presented fictitious study outcomes, and then assessed participant’s posterior beliefs. Crucially, we manipulated the presentation format and order of the presented study outcomes. Participants exhibited more belief updating when study outcomes were presented simultaneously compared to a sequential presentation format. In addition, the higher participants’ prior beliefs, the more they updated their beliefs when confirmatory evidence was presented after disconfirmatory evidence, compared to a reversed or alternating order. We further investigated influences of participant-internal factors on belief updating and found a negative effect of subjective expertise regarding the hypothesis topic, and positive effects of trust in science and scientific literacy. Our results provide practical implications for science communication and point towards serial position effects in belief updating. They thus point to a memory-based sampling mechanism underlying belief updating based on scientific evidence rather than a continuous updating mechanism, such that participants represent individual pieces of evidence, which they retrieve and aggregate when having to construct a judgment.