Spieß Lukas, Bekkering Harold
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2020 Mar 24;11:508. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00508. eCollection 2020.
Meaningful social interactions rest upon our ability to accurately infer and predict other people's preferences. Ireferen doing so, we can separate two sources of information: knowledge we have about the particular individual (individual knowledge) and knowledge we have about the social group to which that individual belongs (categorical knowledge). However, it is yet unclear how these two types of knowledge contribute to making predictions about other people's choice behavior. To fill this gap, we had participants learn probabilistic preferences by predicting object choices of agents with and without a common logo printed on their shirt. The logo thereby served as a visual cue to increase perceptions of groupness. We quantified how similar predictions for a specific agent are relative to the objective individual-level preferences of that agent and how close these predictions are relative to the objective group-level preferences to which that agent belongs. We found that the logo influenced how close participants' predictions were to the individual-level preferences of an agent relative to the preferences of the group the agent belongs to. We interpret this pattern of results as indicative of a differential weighting of individual and categorical group knowledge when making predictions about individuals that are perceived as forming a social group. The results are interpreted in an assimilation account of categorization and stress the importance of group knowledge during daily social interactions.
有意义的社会互动取决于我们准确推断和预测他人偏好的能力。在这样做的过程中，我们可以区分两种信息来源：我们对特定个体所拥有的知识（个体知识）以及我们对该个体所属社会群体所拥有的知识（分类知识）。然而，目前尚不清楚这两种类型的知识如何有助于对他人的选择行为进行预测。为了填补这一空白，我们让参与者通过预测衣服上印有或未印有共同标志的主体的物品选择来学习概率偏好。因此，该标志作为一种视觉线索，增强了群体感。我们量化了对特定主体的预测相对于该主体客观的个体层面偏好的相似程度，以及这些预测相对于该主体所属客观群体层面偏好的接近程度。我们发现，该标志影响了参与者的预测相对于主体所属群体的偏好与主体个体层面偏好的接近程度。我们将这种结果模式解释为，在对被视为形成一个社会群体的个体进行预测时，个体知识和分类群体知识的权重存在差异。这些结果在分类的同化理论中得到解释，并强调了群体知识在日常社会互动中的重要性。
