Own and others’ confidence in social information use

The behaviour of friends, colleagues, television hosts and social media feeds affects what we buy, how we dress, and who we vote for. People tend to be more sensitive to social influence when unsure about their beliefs and when the source is highly confident. Less is known about the relative impact of the confidence of self and others’ on social information use, and how they jointly shape social transmission. We present results of two incentivized decision-making tasks (N=203 and N=213, samples from the U.S.A.) where participants could adjust their initial estimates upon observing estimates of peers and their confidence. Adjustments were most sensitive to the confidence of others when participants’ own confidence was low. Confidence also affected heuristic strategies: confident others prompted participants to compromise and copy social information more often, rather than to stick with their initial estimates. We discuss how following confident others when uncertain can improve decision-making, but also leaves people vulnerable to sources of misinformation.