Jacquet Pierre O, Safra Lou, Wyart Valentin, Baumard Nicolas, Chevallier Coralie
Laboratoire de neurosciences cognitives, Département d'études cognitives, École normale supérieure, INSERM, PSL Research University, 75005 Paris, France.
Institut Jean Nicod, Département d'études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL Research University, 75005 Paris, France.
R Soc Open Sci. 2019 Jan 9;6(1):180454. doi: 10.1098/rsos.180454. eCollection 2019 Jan.
There is considerable variability in the degree to which individuals rely on their peers to make decisions. Although theoretical models predict that environmental risks shift the cost-benefit trade-off associated with social information use, this idea has received little empirical support. Here we aim to test the effect of childhood environmental adversity on humans' susceptibility to follow others' opinion in the context of a standard face evaluation task. Results collected in a pilot study involving 121 adult participants tested online showed that susceptibility to social influence and childhood environmental adversity are positively associated. Computational analyses further confirmed that this effect is not explained by the fact that participants exposed to early adversity produce noisier decisions overall but that they are indeed more likely to follow the group's opinion. To test the robustness of these findings, a pre-registered direct replication using an optimal sample size was run. The results obtained from 262 participants in the pre-registered study did not reveal a significant association between childhood adversity and task performance but the meta-analysis ran on both the pilot and the pre-registered study replicated the initial finding. This work provides experimental evidence for an association between individuals' past ecology and their susceptibility to social influence.
个体在多大程度上依赖同伴做决定存在相当大的差异。尽管理论模型预测环境风险会改变与社会信息使用相关的成本效益权衡，但这一观点几乎没有得到实证支持。在此，我们旨在测试童年环境逆境对人类在标准面部评估任务中听从他人意见的易感性的影响。在一项涉及121名成年参与者的在线试点研究中收集的结果表明，对社会影响的易感性与童年环境逆境呈正相关。计算分析进一步证实，这种效应并非由早期经历逆境的参与者总体上做出更嘈杂的决定这一事实所解释，而是他们确实更有可能听从群体意见。为了检验这些发现的稳健性，我们进行了一项预先注册的直接复制研究，采用了最佳样本量。在预先注册的研究中，262名参与者得到的结果并未揭示童年逆境与任务表现之间存在显著关联，但对试点研究和预先注册研究进行的荟萃分析重现了最初的发现。这项工作为个体过去的生活环境与其对社会影响的易感性之间的关联提供了实验证据。
