The "Bigler Believability Factor" is the amount of "believability" that is passed on during the retelling of a story. A person's believability factor (expressed as a fraction, 0 < BF < 1) is the amount of truth which the person passes on as he/she recounts the story. The amount of truth left in a story is the product of the believability factors of everyone that story has passed through.
If you don't know the believability factors of all of the people through whom a story has passed, 0.8 is a good guess. Hence, the believability of a story that has passed through n people can be approximated as 0.8^n. E.g., a first-person account is probably 80% true; a second-person account is probably 64% true; a third-person account is probably 51% true.
Last modified: 1996/02/11 17:23:36 by jcb@mit.edu