Marks, Joseph Alexander; (2022) How messenger characteristics influence expertise learning and information-seeking choices. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

When trying to form accurate beliefs and make good choices, people often turn to one another for information and advice. But deciding whom to listen to can be a challenging task. While people may be motivated to receive information from accurate sources, in many circumstances it can be difficult to estimate others’ task-relevant expertise. Moreover, evidence suggests that perceptions of others’ attributes are influenced by irrelevant factors, such as facial appearances and one’s own beliefs about the world. In this thesis, I present six studies that investigate whether messenger characteristics that are unrelated to the domain in question interfere with the ability to learn about others’ expertise and, consequently, lead people to make suboptimal social learning decisions. Studies one and two explored whether (dis)similarity in political views affects perceptions of others’ expertise in a non-political shape categorisation task. The findings suggest that people are biased to believe that messengers who share their political opinions are better at tasks that have nothing to do with politics than those who do not, even when they have all the information needed to accurately assess expertise. Consequently, they are more likely to seek information from, and are more influenced by, politically similar than dissimilar sources. Studies three and four aimed to formalise this learning bias using computational models and explore whether it generalises to a messenger characteristic other than political similarity. Surprisingly, in contrast to the results of studies one and two, in these studies there was no effect of observed generosity or political similarity on expertise learning, information-seeking choices, or belief updating. Studies five and six were then conducted to reconcile these conflicting results and investigate the boundary conditions of the learning bias observed in studies one and two. Here, we found that, under the right conditions, non-politics-based similarities can influence expertise learning and whom people choose to hear from; that asking people to predict how others will answer questions enhances learning from observed outcomes; and that it is unlikely that inattentiveness explains why we observed null effects in studies three and four.

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