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{
    "pk": 50060,
    "title": "A Computational Account of Epistemic Vigilance: Learning from Selective Truths through Bayesian Reasoning",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Strategic actors often manipulate others' beliefs not by lying outright, but through selective truth-telling—also known as lying by omission or paltering—by withholding crucial details while avoiding falsehoods. For example, a pharmaceutical-funded investigator might truthfully report that some patients improved, while omitting that most did not. To guard against such selective disclosures, listeners must engage in epistemic vigilance: critically evaluating information in light of the speaker's potential agenda. In this work, we develop a Bayesian computational model of this process. We present three key findings: (1) credulous listeners who assume informative intent learn quickly in cooperative settings but are highly susceptible to persuasion; (2) vigilant listeners who account for potential bias more accurately recover the underlying true world states, even from purely persuasive speakers—albeit with slower convergence; and (3) this robustness stems from their ability to discount biased framings by reasoning about alternative utterances the speaker could have chosen otherwise.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Linguistics; Psychology; Language and thought; Reasoning; Social cognition; Theory of Mind; Bayesian modeling; Computational Modeling"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Abstracts with Poster Presentation (accepted as Abstracts)",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99z8j19z",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Ke",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Fang",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Stanford University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Robert",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Hawkins",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Stanford University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Charley",
            "middle_name": "M",
            "last_name": "Wu",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of TŸbingen",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Michael",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Franke",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of TŸbingen",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2025-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50060/galley/38022/download/"
        }
    ]
}