Knowledge Central: A Central Role for Knowledge Attributions in Social Evaluations

Turri, J., Friedman, O., & Keefner, A. (2017). Knowledge central: a central role for knowledge attributions in social evaluations. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 70(3), 504–515. 

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."