Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48106, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2012 Apr;23(4):391-6. doi: 10.1177/0956797611432179. Epub 2012 Mar 8.
What people feel shapes their perceptions of others. In the studies reported here, we examined the assimilative influence of visceral states on social judgment. Replicating prior research, we found that participants who were outside during winter overestimated the extent to which other people were bothered by cold (Study 1), and participants who ate salty snacks without water thought other people were overly bothered by thirst (Study 2). However, in both studies, this effect evaporated when participants believed that the other people under consideration held political views opposing their own. Participants who judged these dissimilar others were unaffected by their own strong visceral-drive states, a finding that highlights the power of dissimilarity in social judgment. Dissimilarity may thus represent a boundary condition for embodied cognition and inhibit an empathic understanding of shared out-group pain. Our findings reveal the need for a better understanding of how people's internal experiences influence their perceptions of the feelings and experiences of those who may hold values different from their own.
人们的感受塑造了他们对他人的看法。在本研究报告中，我们考察了内脏状态对社会判断的同化影响。通过复制先前的研究，我们发现，在冬季外出的参与者高估了其他人对寒冷的不适程度（研究 1），而吃咸点心不喝水的参与者认为其他人对口渴过度不适（研究 2）。然而，在这两项研究中，当参与者认为被考虑的其他人持有与自己相反的政治观点时，这种影响就消失了。判断这些不同观点的参与者不受自己强烈的内脏驱动状态的影响，这一发现凸显了社会判断中差异的力量。因此，差异可能代表了具身认知的一个边界条件，并抑制了对共同的外部群体痛苦的共情理解。我们的发现揭示了人们需要更好地理解内部体验如何影响他们对那些可能持有与自己不同价值观的人的感受和体验的看法。
