arXiv subjects

Niccolo Pescetelli

Publications and source records attributed to Niccolo Pescetelli.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Private Noise and Public Error in Collective Information Acquisition

Collective information acquisition requires groups to combine personal evidence with social information while remaining coupled to the external state. Communication noise can affect this process, but the role of noise remains unclear. In an online experiment, 600 participants worked in four-person human groups estimating a room temperature across 25 rounds while receiving either faithful social information, comprehension noise in which each receiver saw independently perturbed social information, or production noise in which perturbations were stored before display and could be seen by multiple receivers. The thermometer cue was objectively veridical, but its reliability was subjectively uncertain and the unitless 50--250 room-temperature range created a task-induced conflict between displayed evidence and everyday temperature expectations. Production-noise groups spent more rounds tightly clustered around a wrong value than comprehension-noise groups (\(p=0.016\), group-level permutation). Production noise more often created a wrong common signal (\(p=0.025\), Fisher's exact test) and made that signal persist across more rounds (\(p=0.004\), permutation). Dynamic update models showed that production noise was not more harmful because people followed peers more strongly, but because the same peer influence acted on more correlated production-noise perturbations. Exploratory human analyses linked the mechanism to psychological patterns while a GPT-agent experiment clarified a boundary condition: GPT agents registered uncertainty through reduced confidence without reproducing human-scale production-noise vulnerability. Overall, noise did not simply degrade collective information acquisition. Comprehension noise could sometimes improve correction relative to the faithful control, whereas production noise could turn perturbations into common evidence and stabilize consensus on error.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

A new sociology of humans and machines

From fake social media accounts and generative artificial intelligence chatbots to trading algorithms and self-driving vehicles, robots, bots and algorithms are proliferating and permeating our communication channels, social interactions, economic transactions and transportation arteries. Networks of multiple interdependent and interacting humans and intelligent machines constitute complex social systems for which the collective outcomes cannot be deduced from either human or machine behaviour alone. Under this paradigm, we review recent research and identify general dynamics and patterns in situations of competition, coordination, cooperation, contagion and collective decision-making, with context-rich examples from high-frequency trading markets, a social media platform, an open collaboration community and a discussion forum. To ensure more robust and resilient human-machine communities, we require a new sociology of humans and machines. Researchers should study these communities using complex system methods; engineers should explicitly design artificial intelligence for human-machine and machine-machine interactions; and regulators should govern the ecological diversity and social co-development of humans and machines.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Mobilizing Waldo: Evaluating Multimodal AI for Public Mobilization

Advancements in multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's GPT-4o, offer significant potential for mediating human interactions across various contexts. However, their use in areas such as persuasion, influence, and recruitment raises ethical and security concerns. To evaluate these models ethically in public influence and persuasion scenarios, we developed a prompting strategy using "Where's Waldo?" images as proxies for complex, crowded gatherings. This approach provides a controlled, replicable environment to assess the model's ability to process intricate visual information, interpret social dynamics, and propose engagement strategies while avoiding privacy concerns. By positioning Waldo as a hypothetical agent tasked with face-to-face mobilization, we analyzed the model's performance in identifying key individuals and formulating mobilization tactics. Our results show that while the model generates vivid descriptions and creative strategies, it cannot accurately identify individuals or reliably assess social dynamics in these scenarios. Nevertheless, this methodology provides a valuable framework for testing and benchmarking the evolving capabilities of multimodal LLMs in social contexts.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2019

The role of decision confidence in advice-taking and trust formation

In a world where ideas flow freely between people across multiple platforms, we often find ourselves relying on others' information without an objective standard to judge whether those opinions are accurate. The present study tests an agreement-in-confidence hypothesis of advice perception, which holds that internal metacognitive evaluations of decision confidence play an important functional role in the perception and use of social information, such as peers' advice. We propose that confidence can be used, computationally, to estimate advisors' trustworthiness and advice reliability. Specifically, these processes are hypothesized to be particularly important in situations where objective feedback is absent or difficult to acquire. Here, we use a judge-advisor system paradigm to precisely manipulate the profiles of virtual advisors whose opinions are provided to participants performing a perceptual decision making task. We find that when advisors' and participants' judgments are independent, people are able to discriminate subtle advice features, like confidence calibration, whether or not objective feedback is available. However, when observers' judgments (and judgment errors) are correlated - as is the case in many social contexts - predictable distortions can be observed between feedback and feedback-free scenarios. A simple model of advice reliability estimation, endowed with metacognitive insight, is able to explain key patterns of results observed in the human data. We use agent-based modeling to explore implications of these individual-level decision strategies for network-level patterns of trust and belief formation.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

Towards a new social laboratory: An experimental study of search through community participation at Burning Man

The "small world phenomenon," popularized by Stanley Milgram, suggests that individuals from across a social network are connected via a short path of mutual friends and can leverage their local social information to efficiently traverse that network. Existing social search experiments are plagued by high rates of attrition, which prohibit comprehensive study of social search. We investigate this by conducting a small world experiment at Burning Man, an event located in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, USA, known its unique social systems and community participation. We design location-tracking vessels that we routed through Burning Man towards the goal of finding a particular person. Along the way, the vessels logged individual information and GPS data. Two of fifteen vessels made it to their designated people, but a month after Burning Man. Our results suggest possible improvements to limit rates of attrition through community participation and a design methodology that emphasizes cultural practices to aid social experimentation.

cs.SI↗