Epistemic incentives and sluggish updating

Abstract

Epistemic incentives can motivate individuals to misreport their beliefs and engage in sluggish updating. When evaluating epistemic virtue, comparing individuals’ beliefs to their own future beliefs provides a more reliable estimate than directly comparing them to reality. However, individuals may strategically report their beliefs to preserve their credibility, such as avoiding updates that contradict their past estimates. This creates an incentive for sluggish updating, where beliefs adjust slowly to avoid appearing unreliable. Sluggish updating can lead to an underestimation of the actual change in beliefs, resulting in biases in epistemic evaluations. Remedies include avoiding the use of belief changes as direct evidence, predicting others’ belief changes explicitly, and fostering social disapproval of sluggish updating. – AI-generated abstract.