Department of Social and Human Environment.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2013 Nov;39(6):1901-13. doi: 10.1037/a0033335. Epub 2013 Jun 17.
Our ability to learn about the reputations of others-that is, who is likely to cooperate versus cheat-contributes greatly to cooperativeness in society. There has been recent debate whether humans employ memory bias favoring cheaters (i.e., there is an evolved module for the detection of cheaters) or whether no such bias exists (i.e., reputation learning is flexibly modulated by contextual factors). We report 3 experiments that address this issue by comparing persistence against extinction-which is a reliable measure of prepared fear learning (Öhman & Mineka, 2001)-between memories regarding cheaters and cooperators. In all experiments, participants learned to classify unfamiliar persons as either cooperators or cheaters, and, then, they were instructed to disregard those learned associations and told that they had been determined arbitrarily, which simulated a verbal extinction procedure in the fear conditioning paradigm (Hugdahl & Öhman, 1977). The results indicated that while postlearning changes in perceived trustworthiness were modulated by a contextual factor (appearance of the facial stimulus), the persistence of learning exhibited a cheater advantage: Cheaters remained perceived as untrustworthy to a greater extent than cooperators as trustworthy at the extinction period. Thus, there exists a cheater bias in human reputation learning, the proximate and ultimate mechanisms of which warrant further study.
我们了解他人声誉的能力——即谁更有可能合作而不是欺骗——极大地促进了社会的合作性。最近有一场争论，即人类是否利用了有利于欺骗者的记忆偏差（即存在用于检测欺骗者的进化模块），或者这种偏差是否不存在（即声誉学习可以通过情境因素灵活调节）。我们通过比较针对欺骗者和合作者的记忆的持久性与消退（即 Öhman 和 Mineka，2001 年的可靠恐惧学习测量），报告了 3 项实验，解决了这个问题。在所有实验中，参与者学习将不熟悉的人分类为合作者或欺骗者，然后，他们被指示忽略那些习得的关联，并被告知这些关联是任意确定的，这模拟了恐惧条件反射范式中的口头消退程序（Hugdahl 和 Öhman，1977）。结果表明，虽然学习后对可信赖性的感知变化受到情境因素（面部刺激物的出现）的调节，但学习的持久性表现出欺骗者的优势：欺骗者被认为比合作者更不值得信任的程度在消退期更大。因此，人类声誉学习中存在欺骗者偏见，其近似和最终机制值得进一步研究。
