Vellani Valentina, Glickman Moshe, Sharot Tali
Affective Brain Lab, Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, WC1H 0AP, UK.
Max Planck University College London Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, London, WC1B 5EH, UK.
Commun Psychol. 2024 Nov 6;2(1):107. doi: 10.1038/s44271-024-00144-y.
Knowledge is distributed over many individuals. Thus, humans are tasked with informing one another for the betterment of all. But as information can alter people's action, affect and cognition in both positive and negative ways, deciding whether to share information can be a particularly difficult problem. Here, we examine how people integrate potentially conflicting consequences of knowledge, to decide whether to inform others. We show that participants (Exp1: N = 114, Pre-registered replication: N = 102) use their own information-seeking preferences to solve complex information-sharing decisions. In particular, when deciding whether to inform others, participants consider the usefulness of information in directing action, its valence and the receiver's uncertainty level, and integrate these assessments into a calculation of the value of information that explains information sharing decisions. A cluster analysis revealed that participants were clustered into groups based on the different weights they assign to these three factors. Within individuals, the relative influence of each of these factors was stable across information-seeking and information-sharing decisions. These results suggest that people put themselves in a receiver position to determine whether to inform others and can help predict when people will share information.
知识分布在许多个体之中。因此，人类肩负着相互告知以实现共同进步的任务。但由于信息能够以积极和消极两种方式改变人们的行为、情感及认知，决定是否分享信息可能是一个特别棘手的问题。在此，我们研究人们如何综合知识可能存在的相互冲突的后果，以决定是否告知他人。我们发现，参与者（实验1：N = 114，预注册复现实验：N = 102）会利用自身的信息寻求偏好来解决复杂的信息分享决策问题。具体而言，在决定是否告知他人时，参与者会考虑信息对指导行动的有用性、其效价以及接收者的不确定程度，并将这些评估整合到一个信息价值计算中，该计算能够解释信息分享决策。聚类分析显示，参与者根据他们赋予这三个因素的不同权重被聚类成不同的组。在个体内部，这些因素各自的相对影响在信息寻求和信息分享决策过程中是稳定的。这些结果表明，人们会设身处地站在接收者的立场来决定是否告知他人，并且有助于预测人们何时会分享信息。
