A) Conceptual depiction of the inverse planning model and B) schematic of model simulations. In each pair of simulations, two subgroups initially hold different beliefs about a topic, but hold shared beliefs about the authority's accuracy motive and bias. After observing each of the authority's debunking decisions (i.e. debunking the claims from one perspective), observers use their mental model of the authority's decision-making to simultaneously update their beliefs about the perspective (i.e. its truth) and the authority's accuracy motive and bias. Observers' posterior beliefs after each debunking decision then serve as the prior beliefs for judging the next decision.

Contexts in source publication

Context 1

... expected consequences of debunking or not debunking (i.e. each option's utilities), and how much the authority values and pursues those consequences (i.e. their motives), in choosing whether or not to debunk a claim. The inverse planning model (of observers' inferences) thus begins with a generative planning model (of authority's choices) (Fig. 1A). Note that for this approach, the planning model need not be a correct or complete model of the authority's actual planning process; it only has to capture the planning process as imagined by the observers ...

Context 2

... Critically, observers in both subgroups initially have shared beliefs about an authority. Everyone then observes the authority sequentially debunk five claims from the same perspective. After each time the authority chooses to debunk a claim, observers in both subgroups rationally update their beliefs about the causes of the authority's choice (Fig. 1B). We simulate and study the resulting evolution of observers' beliefs about the topic (i.e. the distribution of likelihoods that any given claim from that perspective is true) and about the authority's accuracy motive and ...

Context 3

... as "only Nixon could go to China," so have studies found that debunking efforts and other persuasive claims carry more weight when the identity of the person making the correction or claim is a surprise (e.g. (16, 52, 55)), although this effect is not always found among the strongest partisans (e.g. (54)). ...

Context 4

... standard deviation (i.e. un Figure S1 shows the belief distributions with these parameters. These initial belief distributions served as the prior beliefs for the first debunking action (in the figures, they are depicted as beliefs when debunking actions = 0). ...