Research Foundation-Flanders, Department of Psychology, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
PLoS One. 2013;8(1):e53827. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0053827. Epub 2013 Jan 16.
Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that our brain is composed of evolved mechanisms. One extensively studied mechanism is the cheater detection module. This module would make people very good at detecting cheaters in a social exchange. A vast amount of research has illustrated performance facilitation on social contract selection tasks. This facilitation is attributed to the alleged automatic and isolated operation of the module (i.e., independent of general cognitive capacity). This study, using the selection task, tested the critical automaticity assumption in three experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 established that performance on social contract versions did not depend on cognitive capacity or age. Experiment 3 showed that experimentally burdening cognitive resources with a secondary task had no impact on performance on the social contract version. However, in all experiments, performance on a non-social contract version did depend on available cognitive capacity. Overall, findings validate the automatic and effortless nature of social exchange reasoning.
进化心理学家认为，我们的大脑是由进化而来的机制组成的。一个被广泛研究的机制是骗子检测模块。这个模块会让人们非常善于在社会交换中发现骗子。大量研究表明，在社会契约选择任务中表现出促进作用。这种促进作用归因于模块的所谓自动和孤立操作（即，独立于一般认知能力）。本研究使用选择任务，在三个实验中测试了关键的自动性假设。实验 1 和 2 表明，社会契约版本的表现不依赖于认知能力或年龄。实验 3 表明，通过次要任务实验性地给认知资源增加负担，对社会契约版本的表现没有影响。然而，在所有实验中，非社会契约版本的表现确实取决于可用的认知能力。总的来说，这些发现验证了社会交换推理的自动和不费力的性质。
