Investigating the Effect of Social Structure on Group Reasoning

Abstract

Any group of individuals can be viewed as a graph where people represent nodes and relationships among people are viewed as edges. Spread of information in the network of individuals is an important phenomenon that received significant attention, due to its importance to the functioning of society, and its ability to make rational collective decisions. Despite many studies done on decision making in networks, most work focuses on information propagation and behavior propagation. No one investigated the propagation of ‘processing style'. In my thesis I aim to investigate whether social interaction affects the way people engage reflective versus intuitive reasoning. I found evidence that processing style does not propagate in networks. This is despite the fact that people imitate others' answers when they can easily recognize them as correct, but they fail to switch processing style in their subsequent reasoning tasks. This suggests that a world with increasing connectivity offers us a trade-off between useful access to easily verifiable facts, and impaired learning of the kind of knowledge that requires scrutiny and analytic evaluation.

Date of Award	2013
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Iyad Rahwan (Supervisor)