Gabriel, Nathan and O'Connor, Cailin
(2024)
Can Confirmation Bias Improve Group Learning?
[Preprint]
Abstract
Confirmation bias has been widely studied for its role in failures of reasoning. Individuals exhibiting confirmation bias fail to engage with information that contradicts their current beliefs, and, as a result, can fail to abandon inaccurate beliefs. But although most investigations of confirmation bias focus on individual learning, human knowledge is typically developed within a social structure. We use network models to show that moderate confirmation bias often improves group learning. However, a downside is that a stronger form of confirmation bias can hurt the knowledge producing capacity of the community.
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