A Pragmatic Account of the Weak Evidence Effect.

ABSTRACT: Language is not only used to transmit neutral information; we often seek to persuade by arguing in favor of a particular view. Persuasion raises a number of challenges for classical accounts of belief updating, as information cannot be taken at face value. How should listeners account for a speaker's "hidden agenda" when incorporating new information? Here, we extend recent probabilistic models of recursive social reasoning to allow for persuasive goals and show that our model provides a pragmatic account for why weakly favorable arguments may backfire, a phenomenon known as the weak evidence effect. Critically, this model predicts a systematic relationship between belief updates and expectations about the information source: weak evidence should only backfire when speakers a

SUBMITTER: Barnett SA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9692057 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature