Expecting to integrate additional information improves averaging of experience.

ABSTRACT: Humans learn both directly, from own experience, and via social communication, from the experience of others. They also often integrate these two sources of knowledge to make predictions and choices. We hypothesized that when faced with the need to integrate communicated information into personal experience, people would represent the average of experienced exemplars with greater accuracy. In two experiments, Mturk users estimated the mean of consecutively and rapidly presented number sequences that represented bonuses ostensibly paid by different providers on a crowdsource platform. Participants who expected integrating these values with verbal information about possible change in bonuses were more accurate in extracting the means of the values compared to participants who did not have su

SUBMITTER: Grinfeld G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11258318 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature