Comment by avs733

>They seem to disproportionately trust data read from the web.

I doubt LLM's have anything like what we would conceptualize as trust. They have information, which is regurgitated because it is activated as relevant.

That being said, many humans don't really have a strong concept of information validation as part of day to day action and thinking. Development theory talks about this in terms of 'formal operational' thinking and 'personal epistemology' - basically how does thinking happen and then how is knowledge in those models conceptualized. Learning Sciences research generally talks about Piaget and formal operational before adulthood and stages of personal epistemology in higher education.

Research consistently suggests that about 50% of adults are not able to consistently operate in the formal thinking space. The behavior you are talking about is also typical of 'absolutist' epistemic perspectives where answers are right or wrong and aren't meaningfully evaluated - just identifed as relevant or not. Evaluating the credibility of information is that it comes from a source that is trusted - most often an authority figure - it is not the role of the person knowing it.