Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 08005, Barcelona, Spain.
Université Paris Cité, CNRS, Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center, 75006, Paris, France.
Sci Rep. 2023 Nov 16;13(1):20034. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-46031-0.
Actions that are blatantly inefficient to achieve non-social goals are often used to convey information about agents' social affiliation, as in the case of rituals. We argue that when reproduced, actions that are individually inefficient acquire a social signaling value owing to the mechanisms that support humans' intuitive analysis of actions. We tested our hypothesis on 15-month-old infants who were familiarized with an agent that reproduced or merely observed the actions of efficient and inefficient individuals. Subsequently, we measured the infants' expectations of the agent's preferences for efficient and inefficient individuals. Our results confirmed that when agents act alone, infants expect a third-party to prefer efficient over inefficient agents. However, this pattern is entirely flipped if the third-party reproduces the agents' actions. In that case, infants expect inefficient agents to be preferred over efficient ones. Thus, reproducing actions whose rational basis is elusive can serve a critical social signaling function, accounting for why such behaviors are pervasive in human groups.
为了实现非社交目标而采取的明显低效的行动通常被用来传达有关主体社会归属的信息，例如在仪式的情况下。我们认为，当被复制时，由于支持人类对行动进行直观分析的机制，个体效率低下的行动获得了社会信号价值。我们在 15 个月大的婴儿身上测试了我们的假设，这些婴儿熟悉了一个会复制或仅仅观察高效和低效个体行动的主体。随后，我们测量了婴儿对主体对高效和低效个体的偏好的预期。我们的结果证实，当主体单独行动时，婴儿期望第三方更喜欢高效的主体而非低效的主体。然而，如果第三方复制了主体的行动，这种模式就完全颠倒了。在这种情况下，婴儿期望低效的主体比高效的主体更受青睐。因此，复制那些理性基础难以捉摸的行动可以起到关键的社会信号作用，这解释了为什么这种行为在人类群体中如此普遍。
