  This paper presents an experimental study to investigate the learning and
decision making behavior of individuals in a human society. Social learning is
used as the mathematical basis for modelling interaction of individuals that
aim to perform a perceptual task interactively. A psychology experiment was
conducted on a group of undergraduate students at the University of British
Columbia to examine whether the decision (action) of one individual affects the
decision of the subsequent individuals. The major experimental observation that
stands out here is that the participants of the experiment (agents) were
affected by decisions of their partners in a relatively large fraction (60%) of
trials. We fit a social learning model that mimics the interactions between
participants of the psychology experiment. Misinformation propagation (also
known as data incest) within the society under study is further investigated in
this paper.
