• DOI:10.2139/ssrn.3973290
• Corpus ID: 235592945

Learning Versus Unlearning: An Experiment on Retractions

@article{Gonccalves2021LearningVU,
  title={Learning Versus Unlearning: An Experiment on Retractions},
  author={Duarte Gonccalves and Jonathan Libgober and Jack Willis},
  journal={SSRN Electronic Journal},
  year={2021}
}

• Duarte Gonccalves, Jonathan Libgober, Jack Willis
• Published 21 June 2021
• Computer Science
• SSRN Electronic Journal

Widely discredited ideas nevertheless persist. Why do people fail to “unlearn”? We study one explanation: beliefs are resistant to retractions (the revoking of earlier information). Our experimental design identi€es unlearning—i.e., updating from retractions—and enables its comparison with learning from equivalent new information. Across di‚erent kinds of retractions—for instance, those consistent or contradictory with the prior, or those occurring when prior beliefs are either extreme or moderate—subjects do not fully unlearn from retractions and update less from them than from equivalent new information. ‘is phenomenon is not explained by most of the well-studied violations of Bayesian updating, which yield di‚ering predictions in our design. However, it is consistent with diculties in conditional reasoning, which have been documented in other domains and circumstances.