My theory on this is that it does use a bunch of wiring used for social behaviour. An important part of social behaviour is reputation and an important part of

My theory on this is that it does use a bunch of wiring used for social behaviour. An important part of social behaviour is reputation and an important part of reputation is how often we make incorrect statements. So when we're about to communicate some information to someone else, we run a bunch of extra checks on the information we are about to impart. If we didn't do so, we could lose reputation for accuracy (which could have negative implications socially). Basically I think we have all information in our heads tagged with meta-data which describes how confident we are in the information. We essentially check these tags when we pass on the info to other people. (This helps show up the invalid assumption which has been stalling our problem solving process). Interestingly, they'll label the trustworthiness of the information we give them with their own determination of our trustworthiness as an information source (possibly modified for topic etc). (And to add to the list of names people have for this widespread behaviour, I call it "debugging by confession")