Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

As web media, such as social networking services (SNS), become more prevalent, the formation of false beliefs through fake news and propaganda has become a significant problem. This study focuses on the cognitive process of users as actively information-seeking agents in web media exploration and proposes WEB-FEP, a computational model of users forming specific beliefs through interactions with web media. WEB-FEP specifically attempts to computationally reproduce confirmation bias in web media exploration by formalizing the trade-off between belief-confirmatory and exploratory actions inspired by active inference. WEB-FEP is validated by comparing the results of simulations with user experiments conducted on a virtual SNS. The results indicate that the initial belief distributions and learning rates modeled in WEB-FEP can successfully reproduce the diverse behaviors of users including confirmatory exploration.