Boudreau Cheryl, McCubbins Mathew D, Coulson Seana
Political Science Department, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2009 Mar;4(1):23-34. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsn034. Epub 2008 Oct 19.
To address the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie choices made after receiving information from an anonymous individual, reaction times (Experiment 1) and event-related brain potentials (Experiment 2) were recorded as participants played three variants of the coin toss game. In this game, participants guess the outcomes of unseen coin tosses after a person in another room (dubbed 'the reporter') observes the coin toss outcomes and then sends reports (which may or may not be truthful) to participants about whether the coins landed on heads or tails. Participants knew that the reporter's interests were aligned with their own (common interests), opposed to their own (conflicting interests) or opposed to their own, but that the reporter was penalized every time he or she sent a false report about the coin toss outcome (penalty for lying). In the common interests and penalty for lying conditions, participants followed the reporter's reports over 90% of the time, in contrast to <59% of the time in the conflicting interests condition. Reaction time results indicated that participants took similar amounts of time to respond in the common interests and penalty for lying conditions and that they were reliably faster than in the conflicting interests condition. Event-related potentials timelocked to the reporter's reports revealed a larger P2, P3 and late positive complex response in the common interests condition than in the other two, suggesting that participants' brains processed the reporter's reports differently in the common interests condition relative to the other two conditions. Results suggest that even when people behave as if they trust information, they consider communicative efforts of individuals whose interests are aligned with their own to be slightly more informative than those of individuals who are made trustworthy by an institution, such as a penalty for lying.
为了探究在收到来自匿名个体的信息后做出选择背后的神经认知机制，在参与者玩三种变体的抛硬币游戏时记录了反应时间（实验1）和事件相关脑电位（实验2）。在这个游戏中，参与者要猜测在另一个房间的人（称为“报告者”）观察到的未看到的抛硬币结果，然后报告者会向参与者发送关于硬币是正面还是反面落地的报告（报告可能真实也可能不真实）。参与者知道报告者的利益与他们自己的利益一致（共同利益）、与他们自己的利益相反（冲突利益），或者与他们自己的利益相反，但报告者每次发送关于抛硬币结果的虚假报告时都会受到惩罚（说谎惩罚）。在共同利益和说谎惩罚条件下，参与者超过90%的时间会听从报告者的报告，相比之下，在冲突利益条件下这一比例不到59%。反应时间结果表明，参与者在共同利益和说谎惩罚条件下做出反应的时间相似，并且他们在这两种条件下的反应速度明显快于冲突利益条件。与报告者的报告锁时的事件相关电位显示，共同利益条件下的P2、P3和晚期正复合波反应比其他两种条件下更大，这表明与其他两种条件相比，参与者的大脑在共同利益条件下对报告者的报告处理方式不同。结果表明，即使人们表现得好像他们信任信息，但他们认为利益与自己一致的个体的交流努力比那些通过机构变得值得信赖的个体（比如说谎惩罚）的交流努力更具信息量。
