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Accepted manuscript

The Emergent Basis of Expert Trust

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2025

Igor Douven
Affiliation:
SND/CNRS/Sorbonne University, Paris, France, igor.douven@sorbonne-universite.fr.
Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
Affiliation:
Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University, NYC, USA, nk2765@columbia.edu.
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Abstract

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Goldman (2001) asks how novices can trust putative experts when background knowledge is scarce. We develop a reinforcement-learning model, adapted from Barrett, Skyrms, and Mohseni (2019), in which trust arises from experience rather than prior expertise labels. Agents incrementally weight peers who outperform them. Using a large dataset of human probability judgments as inputs, we simulate communities that learn whom to defer to. Both a strictly individual-learning variant and a reputation-sharing variant yield performance-sensitive deference, the latter accelerating convergence. Our results offer an empirically grounded account of how communities identify and trust experts without blind deference.

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Type
Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Philosophy of Science Association