Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA), Trieste, Italy.
Nat Hum Behav. 2018 Oct;2(10):750-756. doi: 10.1038/s41562-018-0425-1. Epub 2018 Sep 17.
People form moral impressions rapidly, effortlessly and from a remarkably young age. Putatively 'bad' agents command more attention and are identified more quickly and accurately than benign or friendly agents. Such vigilance is adaptive, but can also be costly in environments where people sometimes make mistakes, because incorrectly attributing bad character to good people damages existing relationships and discourages forming new relationships. The ability to accurately infer the moral character of others is critical for healthy social functioning, but the computational processes that support this ability are not well understood. Here, we show that moral inference is explained by an asymmetric Bayesian updating mechanism in which beliefs about the morality of bad agents are more uncertain (and therefore more volatile) than beliefs about the morality of good agents. This asymmetry seems to be a property of learning about immoral agents in general, as we also find greater uncertainty for beliefs about the non-moral traits of bad agents. Our model and data reveal a cognitive mechanism that permits flexible updating of beliefs about potentially threatening others, a mechanism that could facilitate forgiveness when initial bad impressions turn out to be inaccurate. Our findings suggest that negative moral impressions destabilize beliefs about others, promoting cognitive flexibility in the service of cooperative but cautious behaviour.
人们可以快速、轻松地从非常年轻的时候就形成道德印象。被认为是“坏”的代理人比良性或友好的代理人更能引起注意，也能更快、更准确地被识别。这种警惕是适应性的，但在人们有时会犯错的环境中也可能是代价高昂的，因为将良好的人错误地归因于不良品格会破坏现有的关系，并阻碍新关系的建立。准确推断他人的道德品质对于健康的社交功能至关重要，但支持这种能力的计算过程尚不清楚。在这里，我们表明，道德推断可以用不对称的贝叶斯更新机制来解释，在这种机制中，对坏代理人的道德的信念比对好代理人的道德的信念更不确定（因此更不稳定）。这种不对称似乎是一般学习不道德代理人的一个特征，因为我们也发现对坏代理人的非道德特征的信念存在更大的不确定性。我们的模型和数据揭示了一种认知机制，该机制允许对潜在威胁他人的信念进行灵活更新，当最初的不良印象被证明不准确时，这种机制可以促进原谅。我们的发现表明，负面的道德印象会破坏对他人的信念，促进认知灵活性，以促进合作但谨慎的行为。
