{"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/"}]}