Knowledge central: A central role for knowledge attributions in social evaluations

ABSTRACT

Five experiments (N = 1710) demonstrate the central role of knowledge attributions in social evaluations. In Experiments 1–3, we manipulated whether an agent believes, is certain of, or knows a true proposition and asked people to rate whether the agent should perform a variety of actions. We found that knowledge, more so than belief or certainty, leads people to judge that the agent should act. In Experiments 4–5, we investigated whether attributions of knowledge or certainty can explain an important finding on how people act based on statistical evidence, known as “the Wells effect”. We found that knowledge attributions, but not certainty attributions, mediate this effect on decision making.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge
• theory of mind
• social evaluations
• decision making
• outside/inside evidence

Acknowledgement

For helpful conversation and feedback, we thank Wesley Buckwalter, Joshua Knobe, David Lagnado, and Angelo Turri.

Notes

¹Much of this research has compared knowledge to ignorance rather than to other representational mental states, such as belief or certainty. One concern with this approach is that the difference between knowledge and ignorance is stark and does not isolate knowledge per se. Someone with a true belief about a topic is not ignorant, yet not all true beliefs are viewed as knowledge (Starmans & Friedman, 2012). A further concern is that people make inferences about belief and certainty from knowledge judgments. People infer that someone who knows a proposition also believes it (Buckwalter et al., 2013), and people expect that someone who knows is extremely confident (Wesson & Pulford, 2009). If people are likely to infer belief or certainty from knowledge, then to isolate what knowledge attributions contribute to social evaluations, we should compare the effects of knowledge to those of certainty and belief.

²Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this variation of the case.

³We thank Associate Editor James Hampton for proposing this alternative.

⁴In keeping with all the other statistical reporting in this paper, this is the result of a two-tailed test, even though, in light of prior findings, we are entitled to a directional prediction. For a one-tailed test, the difference passes the conventional threshold for statistical significance.