How People Use Social Information to Find out What to Want in the Paradigmatic Case of Inter-temporal Preferences
Fig 1
Uncertainty-relevance model of preference shift.
Before information about the ‘other’ is seen, beliefs about the reference distribution are uninformative and so the original beliefs about the self are proportional to the likelihood p(ds; ks). Once data do about the other are seen, the likelihood of ko combines with the conditional probabilities that ks and ko as they are drawn from the reference distribution; this combination multiplies the beliefs about the self to yield the posterior (shifted) ks. This is a schematic representation of Eq 5 (see e.g. its penultimate line).