Pietraszewski David, Curry Oliver Scott, Petersen Michael Bang, Cosmides Leda, Tooby John
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, United States; Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, United States.
Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London School of Economics, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2015 Jul;140:24-39. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.03.007. Epub 2015 Apr 8.
Research suggests that the mind contains a set of adaptations for detecting alliances: an alliance detection system, which monitors for, encodes, and stores alliance information and then modifies the activation of stored alliance categories according to how likely they will predict behavior within a particular social interaction. Previous studies have established the activation of this system when exposed to explicit competition or cooperation between individuals. In the current studies we examine if shared political opinions produce these same effects. In particular, (1) if participants will spontaneously categorize individuals according to the parties they support, even when explicit cooperation and antagonism are absent, and (2) if party support is sufficiently powerful to decrease participants' categorization by an orthogonal but typically-diagnostic alliance cue (in this case the target's race). Evidence was found for both: Participants spontaneously and implicitly kept track of who supported which party, and when party cross-cut race-such that the race of targets was not predictive of party support-categorization by race was dramatically reduced. To verify that these results reflected the operation of a cognitive system for modifying the activation of alliance categories, and not just socially-relevant categories in general, an identical set of studies was also conducted with in which party was either crossed with sex or age (neither of which is predicted to be primarily an alliance category). As predicted, categorization by party occurred to the same degree, and there was no reduction in either categorization by sex or by age. All effects were replicated across two sets of between-subjects conditions. These studies provide the first direct empirical evidence that party politics engages the mind's systems for detecting alliances and establish two important social categorization phenomena: (1) that categorization by age is, like sex, not affected by alliance information and (2) that political contexts can reduce the degree to which individuals are represented in terms of their race.
研究表明，大脑中存在一套用于检测联盟的适应性机制：一个联盟检测系统，该系统会监测、编码并存储联盟信息，然后根据这些信息在特定社会互动中预测行为的可能性来修改所存储联盟类别的激活情况。先前的研究已经证实，当个体面临明确的竞争或合作时，该系统会被激活。在当前的研究中，我们探究共同的政治观点是否会产生同样的效果。具体而言，（1）即使没有明确的合作与对抗，参与者是否会根据他们支持的政党自发地对个体进行分类；（2）政党支持是否强大到足以减少参与者根据一个正交但通常具有诊断性的联盟线索（在本研究中为目标对象的种族）进行的分类。我们发现两者的证据都存在：参与者会自发且隐性地追踪谁支持哪个政党，并且当政党与种族交叉——即目标对象的种族无法预测政党支持时——根据种族进行的分类会大幅减少。为了验证这些结果反映的是一个用于修改联盟类别激活的认知系统的运作，而不仅仅是一般的社会相关类别，我们还进行了一组相同的研究，其中政党与性别或年龄交叉（预计这两者都不是主要的联盟类别）。正如预期的那样，按政党进行的分类程度相同，并且按性别或年龄进行的分类都没有减少。所有效应在两组被试条件下都得到了重复验证。这些研究提供了首个直接的实证证据，表明政党政治会激活大脑中用于检测联盟的系统，并确立了两种重要的社会分类现象：（1）与性别一样，按年龄进行的分类不受联盟信息的影响；（2）政治背景可以降低个体根据种族被分类的程度。
