At one extreme all the people in the network were connected directly to all the others, and at the other extreme there were no connections at all.

To test how these networks helped the people in them to learn, the scientists quizzed the volunteers with a "cognitive reflection test", a series of questions which rely on analytical reasoning to overcome incorrect intuition.

To see if the social networks helped the people in them to improve their answers the volunteers were asked each of the questions 5 times.

The first time the volunteers had to figure it out on their own, the next 5 times they were allowed to copy the answer from their neighbours in the network.

The researchers found that in well connected networks volunteers copy-cats got better at giving the right answer the more times they were asked and the more opportunities they had to steal their neighbours' answers.

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