Seminar Trust, Vigilance, and Knowledge: Who Benefits from Tracking Source Accuracy?

Abstract: Humans face a trust dilemma: trust others and risk being misled, or remain skeptical and risk missing valuable information. Evolutionary psychologists propose that epistemic vigilance—our ability to evaluate sources and adjust trust accordingly—evolved to help resolve this trade-off. While well understood at the individual level, it remains unclear how such vigilance shapes both individual and collective knowledge once individuals interact within a social network. In this talk, we use an agent-based model in which agents calibrate trust based on sources’ past accuracy. We show that while skepticism is particularly risky in small groups, blind trust is more detrimental in large communities. Calibrated trust consistently maximizes collective knowledge by organizing the network around reliable sources. However, individuals can benefit from free-riding on others’ vigilance, particularly in large groups. We further demonstrate that vigilance based on past accuracy fails in dynamic networks, highlighting the limitations of epistemic vigilance in unstable environments.