Department of Psychology.
Emotion. 2020 Mar;20(2):248-260. doi: 10.1037/emo0000545. Epub 2018 Dec 27.
Affective information about other people's social behavior may prejudice social interactions and bias person judgments. The trustworthiness of person-related information, however, can vary considerably, as in the case of gossip, rumors, lies, or "fake news." Here, we investigated how spontaneous person likability and explicit person judgments are influenced by trustworthiness, employing event-related potentials as indices of emotional brain responses. Social-emotional information about the (im)moral behavior of previously unknown persons was verbally presented as trustworthy fact (e.g., "He bullied his apprentice") or marked as untrustworthy gossip (by adding, e.g., using verbal qualifiers that are frequently used in conversations, news, and social media to indicate the questionable trustworthiness of the information and as a precaution against wrong accusations. In Experiment 1, spontaneous likability, deliberate person judgments, and electrophysiological measures of emotional person evaluation were strongly influenced by negative information yet remarkably unaffected by the trustworthiness of the information. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and extended them to positive information. Our findings demonstrate a tendency for strong emotional evaluations and person judgments even when they are knowingly based on unclear evidence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
关于他人社会行为的情感信息可能会影响社会互动并影响对人的判断。然而，与人相关的信息的可信度差异很大，例如八卦、谣言、谎言或“假新闻”。在这里，我们使用事件相关电位作为情绪脑反应的指标，研究了自发性的人的喜好和明确的人的判断如何受到可信度的影响。关于以前不认识的人的（不）道德行为的社会情感信息以可信的事实（例如，“他欺负他的学徒”）或标记为不可信的八卦（例如，添加经常在对话、新闻和社交媒体中使用的口头修饰语）进行口头陈述，以表明信息的可疑可信度，并作为对错误指控的预防措施。在实验 1 中，自发性的喜好、深思熟虑的人的判断以及情绪人物评估的电生理测量受到负面信息的强烈影响，但受信息可信度的影响却很小。实验 2 复制了这些发现，并将其扩展到正面信息。我们的研究结果表明，即使人们知道自己的判断是基于不明确的证据，他们也会对强烈的情感评估和人物判断产生倾向。（PsycINFO 数据库记录（c）2020 APA，保留所有权利）。
