Do our social environments impact how we engage with information? Our work in this area sits at the intersection of social cognition and active learning. We test how individuals' perceptions of their social contexts changes how efficiently they search for information, what information they choose to gather, and which sources they trust.

In our Trust Quest experiments, we test how conflicting social motivations, like the competence of a source versus allegiance to a group, impact the types of sources individuals engage with. Participants play a game in which they are tasked with collecting particular items, but when there is a fork in the road the group must decide which of two leaders to follow. Before making a decision, participants can then choose whether or not to gather certain types of information and which leader to gather from.