consensus

How convincing is a crowd? Quantifying the persuasiveness of a consensus for different individuals and types of claims

Both knowability of a topic and independence of testimonials matter, but people differ in how much

The impact of engagement and partisan influence campaigns in an isolated social media environment

Despite growing concerns about the effect of social media engagement on people’s beliefs and behavior, estimating the actual impact is difficult. Here we present preliminary results from our own isolated social media platform named Magpie Social. In …

Sensitivity to online consensus effects within individuals and claim types

When reasoning about a claim, it makes sense to be more persuaded if lots of other people agree. But, there are many factors that make weighing the evidence behind a consensus complicated. For example, a consensus might be more or less informative …

Social meta-inference and the evidentiary value of consensus

In a twitter-like experimental environment, we show that people are more influenced by the number of distinct posts than the number of distinct people, and hardly at all by the diversity of points made