Expecting to integrate additional information improves averaging of experience

TL;DR

People who expect to combine their own experiences with others' information are better at accurately averaging those experiences.

Contribution

The study shows that expecting to integrate social information improves the accuracy of averaging personal experiences.

Findings

Participants expecting to integrate bonus values with verbal information were more accurate in estimating the mean.

The expectation of integrating information facilitates abstract representation of personal experiences.

The effect may extend beyond social communication to other forms of information integration.

Abstract

Humans learn both directly, from own experience, and via social communication, from the experience of others. They also often integrate these two sources of knowledge to make predictions and choices. We hypothesized that when faced with the need to integrate communicated information into personal experience, people would represent the average of experienced exemplars with greater accuracy. In two experiments, Mturk users estimated the mean of consecutively and rapidly presented number sequences that represented bonuses ostensibly paid by different providers on a crowdsource platform. Participants who expected integrating these values with verbal information about possible change in bonuses were more accurate in extracting the means of the values compared to participants who did not have such expectation. While our study focused on socially communicated information, the observed effect may potentially extend to other forms of information integration. We suggest that expected integration of experience with additional information facilitates an abstract representation of personal experiences.

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