CAREER: Individual differences and cognitive processes underlying belief revision

People’s ability to revise their beliefs by considering evidence is vital for the quality of both individual and collective decision-making in economics, health, politics, and day-to-day life. Yet despite the importance of forming veridical beliefs, there is considerable debate about whether human belief revision is fundamentally rational, or whether beliefs are frequently distorted by non-rational influences and motivations, such as the desire to feel positively or to maintain one's social identity.

This project examines how individuals differ in their susceptibility to different influences, and what makes people revise their beliefs more rationally. Insights from this project promise to improve scientific and health communication as well as promote better individual and collective decision-making.

This project seeks to understand the latent associations and cognitive processes driving people's belief revision by quantifying four types of belief revision distortions: valence-driven distortions (i.e. “good/bad news”), identity-driven distortions, self-serving distortions (e.g. beliefs about one’s own intelligence), and conservatism (too-weak updating). Prior studies examining these influences have often focused on estimating an average effect of a single form of distortion in flawed or contentious behavioral paradigms.

Advancing over this prior work, the current project quantifies distinct distorting influences at the level of individual participants, with independent verification of these measurements across multiple, controlled tasks supporting comparison of human behavior against a well-defined rational standard. By measuring at the individual level, and with verification across tasks, this project hopes to determine whether individuals reliably differ from one another in the rationality of their belief revision and explore the latent factor structure of these differences.

Through these advances in measurement, the project develops a platform for the rigorous examination of the correlates of rationality in belief revision, and for examining the evidential and cognitive processes underlying belief revision.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.