📋 Tender Overview
IDENTITY-ERROR
Grant agreement ID: 101220950
DOI
10.3030/101220950
EC signature date
3 November 2025
Start date
1 January 2026
End date
31 December 2030
Funded under
European Research Council (ERC)
Total cost
€ 1 499 093,00
Objective
Understanding how people discern the truthfulness of information is of fundamental importance to science. However, the complexity of dynamic information processing in social environments has made it convenient to silo research at different levels of analysis (neurological, psychological, social). To overcome this, we need end-to-end modeling that explains when and why people are vulnerable to falsehoods and mistruth.
IDENTITY-ERROR pursues a new methodological framework that integrates a social-identity approach with recent advances in computational modeling to socially embed the emotional and cognitive elements of epistemic processing. I propose that the experienced truthfulness of information is determined by a recursive process from individual (affect, cognition) to social (identity-structured information). A process of social-self-evidencing fits evidence to models in an identity-congruent manner by error-tuning, either rejecting evidence (common) or models (less common). Identity-imbued models of reality manage error, and in some conditions, objectively incorrect models are very effective error sinks (i.e. they allow good evidence to be easily rejected).
This breakthrough will be advanced by harnessing the identity structure of social information to make predictive processing models scalable at the social level. This allows the parallel computation of (i) information reliability alongside (ii) the social costs of accepting it as true (i.e. social evidencing). Importantly, error dynamics in these models enable the integration of emotional influence.
IDENTITY-ERROR will establish a new field of psycho-social identity modeling, optimized for understanding the social functions of maintaining falsehoods and conspiracies, and providing a firm basis for socially grounded health and science communication that is resilient to conspiracy theory and misinformation.
