As fundamental aspects, individual information processing and attitude development are shared by a variety of decision-making scenarios and have been an important concern in the fields of decision sciences, behavioral economics, psychology and social sciences in recent years. At meanwhile, human information processing is always carried out in specific social contexts, where the implicit, imaginary or real presences of others have potential impacts on human attitude formation and decision-making. Along with the rapid innovations in channels and interplaying patterns of social interactions especially facilitated by the ongoing growth of Internet technologies, the mechanisms of individual behavior under social impacts have become the frontiers and focuses of a variety of disciplines.

Most of the prior research regarding information processing, information distortion, cognitive biases and heuristics has technically ignored the influence of other individuals or groups, and the complex and dynamic evolution of this influence in a longer spatial and temporal context with different population compositions. At the same time, the majority of previous studies investigating social impacts at the collective scale of society laid too much emphasis on the dynamics of social networks by defining stylish individual rules which lack robust empirical validations. Therefore, to understand the distortion and biases in individual information processing under social impacts especially in specific application scenarios, a more reliable way is to delicately integrate the research line of individual information processing at the bottom level with the research line of social impacts and system dynamics at the top level. This is the very starting-point of the present research. It is also the major aspect the research attempts to breakthrough.

Based on a comprehensive scrutinization of a mass of cross-discipline literature, the current research elaborates a structural equation model to explain the procedural and causal mechanisms of individuals’ information processing and attitude development, grounded in the systematization of the potential affecting factors. The model incorporates attitude as an endogenous latent variable and includes the perceived quality of an incoming stimulus, source credibility, perceived usefulness and perceived reliability as exogenous latent variables. Particularly, the impact of cognitive conflicts between the prior attitude of an individual and the attitude advocated by the message is tentatively observed. The findings indicate that (1) perceived usefulness and cognitive conflicts affect attitude development significantly, (2) perceived quality, source credibility and perceived reliability affect perceived usefulness significantly, and (3) information quality and source credibility affect perceived reliability significantly. As the most important aspect of the current research, social computations are introduced to picture the information distortion and cognitive biases at a societal level. First, the measurements of information distortion and cognitive biases are delicately devised. Then an integrative model conceptualizing the causal and procedural relationships involved in individual information processing is elaborated, which is bridged with a social contagion model. These dual theoretical models are further translated into computations models, where the variables concerning society, agent population, message and external persuasion campaign, and the transitional functions reflecting the relationships among the variables are mathematically defined. Drawing upon the social computation results, the complexity of information distortion and cognitive biases situated in social impacts is unraveled. Major findings are as follows: (1) Without interacting with others, people keep silent and isolated, maintaining stable attitudes. When people interplay with connected others, their attitudes alter. (2) When the whole society manifests a skew towards an extreme, the substantial majority stand together in high agreements, and their attitudes soon polarise. Those limited dissenters who feel isolated and severe conflicts with the majority will champion their positions in a strongly distorted way. Furthermore, when a non-polarised majority dominates the minority, the former converts the latter while consolidating their own places. When there mixes with two matching opposite forces in a society, the effects of neutralization or negotiation govern the evolution of attitudes, the overall value of the society may converge to a point. (3) The null hypothesis asserted by most social psychologists only holds true in the condition where individuals will not distort the social information presented to them. However, in a reality where people often distortedly or biasedly processing the issue’s relevant information, it is a long way (or even no way) to reach uniformity and convergence, and there are substantial distortion and biases especially for the minority party. (4) A highly interconnected and fluid society entails active and frequent exchanges among the reshuffling members, leading to intensive changes in social states. The more interconnected society is, the less distortion and biases happen, and when social cognition converges, the distortion and biases, therefore, disappear, due to the reached agreement. (5) A homogeneous society is more likely to reach uniformity and convergence, whereas a heterogeneous society is more likely to end up with the chaos, antagonism, and polarisation. These findings deserve intensive attention. (6) Individuals are often exposed to external influencing information sources, such as mass media, lectures, promotions, and other kinds of persuasive campaigns while exchanging with people surrounding. These campaigns interplay with communicative social information, facilitate or suppress their cognition.

This research entertains the frontier concerns in associated fields and is expected to provide meaningful insights for theoretical and methodological research as well as practices.