Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： How do humans learn to trust unfamiliar others? Decisions in the absence of direct knowledge rely on our ability to generalize from past experiences and are often shaped by the degree of similarity between prior experience and novel situations. Previous study has suggested that people prefer to trust toward strangers who resemble the original player they previously learned was trustworthy and avoid trusting toward strangers resembling the untrustworthy player. However, it is still unclear whether this stimulus generalization effect exist across different situations, and the role of intention perception in this effect. Here, we leverage a stimulus generalization framework to examine how perceptual similarity between known individuals and unfamiliar strangers across different interactive situations shapes people’s trust toward strangers. Given that the strong adaptability of stimulus generalization mechanism, we speculated that the faces associated with different degrees of unfairness will affect the individual's trust towards similar unfamiliar faces, and intention perception modulate this process. Three experiments were conducted to examine the above hypothesis. In Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, participants play or observe an iterative ultimatum game with three partners who exhibit highly unfair, medium unfair, or highly fair behavior. After learning who was fair/unfair allocator, participants select new partners for a trust game. Unbeknownst to participants, each potential new partner was parametrically morphed with one of the three original players. In Experiment 3, participants play a similar iterative ultimatum game with three partners, nevertheless the allocations were generated by a computer algorithm which excludes the intention of the allocator. Under this unintentional situation, the above-mentioned cross-situational generalization effect disappeared. A mixed logistic regression was performed, where both trustworthiness type (whether faces were morphed with the original fair, medium unfair, unfair) and perceptual similarity (increasing similarity to the original players, 23%, 34%, 45%, 56%, 67%, 78%) were entered as predictors of choosing to play with the morph. The result of Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 show that compared with the medium unfair condition, as the perceptual similarity between the morphed trustee’s face and the face of the fair (unfair) allocator in the previous interaction increases, the degree of trust (distrust) towards the trustee gradually increases. In addition, this effect is asymmetry, participants preferentially avoided the unfair morphs more so than engaging with the fair morphs suggests an asymmetric overgeneralization toward individuals perceived to be morally aversive. In Experiment 3, under unintentional situation, the above-mentioned cross-situational generalization effect disappeared. The results of Experiment 3 show that the perception of behavioral intention play an important role in the generation of the stimulus generalization effect. Together, our results demonstrate that the individual uses the associative learning mechanism to capture the moral information of the interactive objects from the past experience, and then guides subsequent trust decision-making. This mechanism draws on prior learning to reduce the uncertainty associated with strangers, ultimately facilitating potentially adaptive decisions to trust, or withhold trust from, unfamiliar others.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2022-11-22
Abstract：
How do humans learn to trust unfamiliar others? Decisions in the absence of direct knowledge rely on our ability to generalize from past experiences and are often shaped by the degree of similarity between prior experience and novel situations. A previous study suggested that people prefer to trust toward strangers who resemble the original player they previously learned was trustworthy and avoid trusting toward strangers resembling the untrustworthy player. However, it is still unclear whether this stimulus generalization effect exists across different situations, and the role of intention perception in this effect. Here, we leverage a stimulus generalization framework to examine how perceptual similarity between known individuals and unfamiliar strangers across different interactive situations shapes people’s trust toward strangers. Given that the strong adaptability of the stimulus generalization mechanism, we assume that the faces associated with different degrees of unfairness will affect the individual's trust towards similar unfamiliar faces, and intention perception modulates this process.
Three experiments were conducted to examine the above hypothesis. In Experiment 1a and Experiment 1b, participants play or observe an iterative ultimatum game with three partners who exhibit highly unfair, medium unfair, or highly fair behavior. After learning who was the fair/unfair allocator, participants select new partners for a trust game. Unbeknownst to participants, each potential new partner was parametrically morphed with one of the three original players. In Experiment 2, participants play a similar iterative ultimatum game with three partners, nevertheless the allocations were generated by a computer algorithm which excludes the intention of the allocator.
A mixed linear regression was conducted, with both (un)fairness type (whether faces were morphed with the original fair, medium unfair, unfair allocator’ face) and perceptual similarity (increasing similarity to the original face, 23%, 34%, 45%, 56%, 67%, 78%) were entered as predictors of choosing to play with the morphed face. The result of Experiment 1a and Experiment 1b show that compared with the medium unfair condition, as the perceptual similarity between the morphed trustee’s face and the face of the fair (unfair) allocator in the previous interaction increases, the degree of trust (distrust) towards the trustee gradually increases. In addition, this effect is asymmetrical, participants preferentially avoided more the unfair morphs in comparison with the fair morphs. This suggests an asymmetric overgeneralization toward individuals perceived to be morally aversive. Using Drift-Diffusion Modeling (DDM), we found that the drift rate ν under unfair condition is significantly smaller than that under medium unfair or fair conditions, and most of them are in the range of less than 0. This suggests that individuals are more likely to accumulate evidence of distrust when making trust decisions about unfamiliar faces that are similar to the allocator who was unfair in previous interactions. In Experiment 2, under an unintentional situation, the above-mentioned cross-situational generalization effect disappeared.
Together, our results demonstrate that the individuals use the associative learning mechanism to capture the moral information of the interactive objects from the past experience, and then guides subsequent trust decision-making. This mechanism draws on prior learning to reduce the uncertainty associated with strangers, ultimately facilitating potentially adaptive decisions to trust, or withhold trust from unfamiliar others.
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2018-11-15
Abstract： A large body of research has examined the relationship between guilt and prosocial behavior – yet the findings are inconclusive. A meta-analysis was conducted to explore the effect of trait and state guilt on prosocial behavior, as well as potential moderators of this effect. A literature search yielded 46 qualified papers with 92 effect sizes and 17248 participants. Results showed that trait guilt was significantly associated with prosocial behavior (r = 0.36, p < 0.001), and this relationship was moderated by the type of prosocial behavior. The induction of state guilt also significantly impacted prosocial behavior, with a small effect size (d = 0.24, p < 0.001) – and this relationship was moderated by whether the recipient of the prosocial behavior was also the victim of the guilt-evoking act. No other moderators were found. The p-curve analysis showed that the p-curves of the two meta-analyzes were right skewed, indicating that the relationship between the guilt proneness and prosocial behavior and the effect of state guilt on the prosocial behavior had a real effect, not caused by publication bias or p hacking. "
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