Modeling how false beliefs spread

Abstract

Effective political decision-making requires actors to have accurate beliefs about the domain in which they are acting. But false beliefs about matters of fact are widespread. Such false beliefs are often explained by appeal to individual epistemic factors, such as personal reasoning biases. But these individual factors are only part of the story, as most of what we know, or believe, we have learned directly from other people. Recently, philosophers have begun to use formal methods, including mathematical models and computer simulations, to explore various aspects of social epistemology. This chapter will review the recent literature in the formal social epistemology of false belief. We introduce background work in social epistemology, explain how researchers use models to inform the science of false belief, and discuss what these models tell us about how politically or economically motivated actors shape public belief by exploiting social factors.