School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia.
School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne.
Cogn Sci. 2021 Sep;45(9):e13033. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13033.
Cultural evolutionary theory has identified a range of cognitive biases that guide human social learning. Naturalistic and experimental studies indicate transmission biases favoring negative and positive information. To address these conflicting findings, the present study takes a socially situated view of information transmission, which predicts that bias expression will depend on the social context. We report a large-scale experiment (N = 425) that manipulated the social context and examined its effect on the transmission of the positive and negative information contained in a narrative text. In each social context, information was progressively lost as it was transmitted from person to person, but negative information survived better than positive information, supporting a negative transmission bias. Importantly, the negative transmission bias was moderated by the social context: Higher social connectivity weakened the bias to transmit negative information, supporting a socially situated account of information transmission. Our findings indicate that our evolved cognitive preferences can be moderated by our social goals.
文化进化理论已经确定了一系列指导人类社会学习的认知偏见。自然主义和实验研究表明，传播偏好有利于负面和正面信息。为了解决这些相互矛盾的发现，本研究从社会情境的角度来看待信息传播，预测偏见的表达将取决于社会背景。我们报告了一项大规模实验（N = 425），该实验操纵了社会背景，并研究了它对包含在叙事文本中的正面和负面信息传播的影响。在每个社会背景中，信息在人与人之间传递时逐渐丢失，但负面信息比正面信息更能存活，支持负面传播偏见。重要的是，负面传播偏见受到社会背景的调节：更高的社会联系削弱了传播负面信息的偏见，支持了信息传播的社会情境观点。我们的研究结果表明，我们进化而来的认知偏好可以被我们的社会目标所调节。
