Zeng Lilith, Park Haeme R P, McNally Gavan P, Jean-Richard-Dit-Bressel Philip
School of Psychology, UNSW, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Neuroscience Research Australia, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Commun Psychol. 2025 Jul 9;3(1):103. doi: 10.1038/s44271-025-00284-9.
Some individuals persist in behaviors that incur harm to themselves or others. While adaptive decision-making requires integrating such punishment feedback to update action selection, the mechanisms driving individual differences in this capacity remain unclear. Here, in a sample spanning 24 countries (N = 267), we used a conditioned punishment task to identify how individuals learn from and adapt to punishment. We identified three, behaviorally robust phenotypes: (1) Sensitive, who correctly inferred punishment causality and adaptively updated decisions through direct experience of punishment; (2) Unaware, who failed to correctly infer punishment causality from direct experience but corrected their decisions following an informational intervention clarifying consequences; and (3) Compulsive, who persisted in harmful decisions despite both punishment and informational intervention. These phenotypes were driven by distinct cognitive mechanisms: (1) causal inference deficits, where individuals misinterpreted punishment causality, impairing correct knowledge acquisition (remediable via targeted informational intervention); and (2) integration failure, a deficit in synthesizing causal knowledge, action valuation, and action selection that rendered decision-making inert to punishment feedback, even after targeted informational intervention. Remarkably, these phenotypes predicted longitudinal outcomes (learning trajectories, choice behavior) six months later. By identifying the cognitive mechanisms driving variation in human punishment learning, this work provides a framework to understand why individuals persist in harmful behavior and highlights the need for approaches to address these distinct cognitive barriers to adaptive decision-making.
一些人持续做出对自己或他人造成伤害的行为。虽然适应性决策需要整合这种惩罚反馈来更新行动选择，但驱动这种能力个体差异的机制仍不清楚。在这里，在一个涵盖24个国家（N = 267）的样本中，我们使用了一种条件惩罚任务来确定个体如何从惩罚中学习并适应惩罚。我们确定了三种行为上稳定的表型：（1）敏感型，他们能正确推断惩罚因果关系，并通过直接的惩罚体验适应性地更新决策；（2）无察觉型，他们无法从直接经验中正确推断惩罚因果关系，但在接受了明确后果的信息干预后纠正了自己的决策；（3）强迫型，他们尽管受到了惩罚和信息干预，仍坚持做出有害决策。这些表型由不同的认知机制驱动：（1）因果推理缺陷，即个体错误解读惩罚因果关系，损害正确知识的获取（可通过有针对性的信息干预补救）；（2）整合失败，即在综合因果知识、行动评估和行动选择方面存在缺陷，导致决策对惩罚反馈无动于衷，即使在有针对性的信息干预之后也是如此。值得注意的是，这些表型预测了六个月后的纵向结果（学习轨迹、选择行为）。通过确定驱动人类惩罚学习差异的认知机制，这项工作提供了一个框架，以理解为什么个体持续做出有害行为，并强调需要采取方法来解决这些影响适应性决策的不同认知障碍。
