This result showed that when the students had lots of connections to peers they could recognise where they had given a wrong answer and swap it for the right one, proving to the scientists that well-connected networks can help us get the right answer because we can copy from our peers.

The scientists compared how well the volunteers faired in the three consecutive questions to see if the volunteers were actually getting better at figuring out the problems themselves or just at copying the right answers.

They found that there was no improvement from one question to the next; even when individuals had realised in the first round of questions that finding the solutions required deeper thought, in the next question they were back at square one.

The team said the results show that whilst social networks helped the volunteers choose better answers they didn't prime them to answer more logically themselves, showing that "social learning does not seem to help individuals bypass their bias in favour of intuition but rather help society as a whole thrive despite this bias."

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