Language is not only used to inform. 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 new pragmatic explanation for why weakly favorable arguments may backfire, a phenomenon known as the weak evidence effect. Critically, our model predicts a relationship between belief updating and speaker expectations: weak evidence should only backfire when speakers are expected to act under persuasive goals, implying the absence of stronger evidence. We introduce a simple experimental paradigm called the Stick Contest to measure the extent to which the weak evidence effect depends on speaker expectations, and show that a pragmatic listener model accounts for the empirical data better than alternative models. Our findings suggest potential avenues for rational models of social reasoning to further illuminate decision-making phenomena.
翻译:语言不仅被用来提供信息。 我们常常试图通过支持特定观点来说服人。 说服会给传统信仰更新描述带来一些挑战, 因为信息不能以表面价值来看待。 在纳入新信息时, 听众应该如何解释演讲者的“ 隐蔽议程 ”? 在这里, 我们推广最近的循环社会推理的概率模型, 以便实现有说服力的目标, 并表明我们的模型提供了一个新的务实的理论解释, 说明为什么弱小的有利论点可能会反弹, 一种被称为虚弱的证据效应的现象。 关键是, 我们的模式预测了信仰更新与演讲者期望之间的关系: 弱的证据应该只在演讲者预期在有说服力的目标下采取行动时才反弹, 意味着缺乏更强有力的证据。 我们引入了一个简单的实验模式, 称为“ 棍争斗”, 以衡量弱证据效应在多大程度上取决于演讲者的期望, 并表明务实的倾听者模型将经验数据描述得胜于其他模式。 我们的发现为合理的社会推理模式提供了进一步说明决策现象的潜在途径。