Zhang Shijia, Diao Jiangdong, Huang Jiahui, Liu Yanchi, Mo Lei
Center for Studies of Psychological Application, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China.
Shenzhen Pingshan Foreign Languages Wenyuan School, Shenzhen 518000, China.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2024 Jul 22;14(7):625. doi: 10.3390/bs14070625.
Assertion is the use of declarative sentences to convey information, which necessitates meeting the "justified-belief norm" as a prerequisite. However, a significant amount of misinformation that did not meet these conditions was spread during COVID-19, leading to a reintroduction of the assertion norm. One possible hypothesis is that the threatening content of the misinformation influenced the perception of the norm. However, this remains unclear to researchers. Therefore, we conducted two experiments to investigate the effect of threatening content in information on individuals' perceptions of norms. In all the experiments, participants read backstories with and without threatening content, followed by answering assertion questions. It was observed that people do follow a looser assertion norm for information that contains threatening content. Additionally, further exploration revealed that threatening factors also lead individuals to more easily perceive the related content as truth and reduce the probability of being blamed. These two outcomes provide some explanation for the underlying mechanism of threatening factors' influence. The research results further refined the theory of assertion norms, offering a certain basis for information management.
断言是使用陈述句来传达信息，这需要满足“合理信念规范”作为前提条件。然而，在新冠疫情期间，大量不符合这些条件的错误信息得以传播，这导致了断言规范的重新引入。一种可能的假设是，错误信息的威胁性内容影响了对规范的认知。然而，研究人员对此仍不清楚。因此，我们进行了两项实验，以研究信息中的威胁性内容对个体规范认知的影响。在所有实验中，参与者阅读有无威胁性内容的背景故事，然后回答断言问题。结果发现，对于包含威胁性内容的信息，人们确实遵循更宽松的断言规范。此外，进一步的探索表明，威胁因素还会导致个体更容易将相关内容视为真实，并降低被指责的概率。这两个结果为威胁因素影响的潜在机制提供了一些解释。研究结果进一步完善了断言规范理论，为信息管理提供了一定的依据。
