Advancement to Candidacy Presentation: “Biased Beliefs with Heterogeneous Priors”, Dario Trujano Ochoa

Dario will be presenting his Advancement to Candidacy paper, “Biased Beliefs with Heterogeneous Priors”. To access the Advancement paper, you must have an active UCSB NetID and password.

Abstract

This research explores whether agents consider others’ biases in a belief-updating task where priors are known to be different. Deviations from Bayes’s rule are systematic, but how well people foresee those biases is still understudied. Furthermore, the awareness of heterogeneous prior beliefs can change how people expect others to update their beliefs. The difference between how people up- date their beliefs and how they expect others to react to the same information informs persuasive interaction, where people influence others’ behavior through changing beliefs. The present study implements a belief elicitation task to evaluate the difference between first and second-order belief updating in an abstract situation (boxes and marbles) and the potential effect in persuasion.