L-eye to me: the combined role of Need for Cognition and facial trustworthiness in mimetic desires

EXPRESS: Observational evaluative conditioning is sensitive to relational information

Social learning represents an important avenue via which evaluations can be formed or changed. Rather than learn slowly through trial and error, we can instead observe how another person (a "model") interacts with stimuli and quickly adjust our own behaviour. We report five studies (n = 912) that focused on one subtype of social learning, observational evaluative conditioning (OEC), and how it is moderated by relational information (i.e., information indicating how a stimulus and a model's reactions are related). Participants observed a model reacting positively to one stimulus and negatively to another, and were either told that these reactions were genuine, faked, or opposite to the model's actual feelings. Stimulus evaluations were then indexed using ratings and a personalised Implicit Association Test (pIAT). When the model's reactions were said to be genuine, OEC effects emerged in the expected direction. When the model's reactions were said to be faked, the magnitude of self-reported, but not pIAT, effects was reduced. Finally, stating that the model's reactions were opposite to his actual feelings eliminated or reversed self-reported effects and eliminated pIAT effects. We consider how these findings relate to previous work as well as mental-process theories.

Affective evaluation of images influences personality judgments through gaze perception

Faces that consistently shifted the gaze to subsequent target locations in a gaze cueing task were chosen as being more trustworthy than faces that always looked away from the target, suggesting that the validity of a gaze cue influenced the viewers' judgments regarding the trustworthiness of human faces. We investigated whether the gaze cueing effect and judgments regarding the personality conveyed by a face would be affected by the valence of a target. A face image moved its eyes to the left or the right, and an emotional target image (positive, negative, or neutral) appeared to left or right of the face. Participants had to indicate the location of this target by pressing a key. The target image was preceded by a face that shifted its gaze to the target image (valid cue), a face that directed its gaze to the opposite side (invalid cue), or a face that did not move its eyes (no cue). The perceived trustworthiness of the face was evaluated after the gaze-cueing task. Results showed that faces that looked at positive targets were evaluated as more trustworthy than faces that looked at negative targets. However, the valence of the targets did not affect trustworthiness ratings in invalid and no-cue conditions. We suggest that integrated information about the predictability of the gaze cue and the valence of the gaze target modulates impressions about the personality of the face.

Verbal Descriptions of Cue Direction Affect Object Desirability

Approach-avoidance behaviors are observed across a broad range of species. For humans, we tend move toward things we like, and away from things we dislike. Previous research tested whether repeatedly shifting visuo-spatial attention toward an object in response to eye gaze cues can increase liking for that object. Here, we tested whether a gaze-liking effect can occur for verbal descriptions of looking behavior without shifts of attention. Also, we tested the gaze specificity hypothesis – that the liking effect is specific to gaze cues – by comparing the effect of different types of cue (pointing gestures and arrow cues). In Experiment 1, participants (N = 205) were split into 5 groups according to the type of cue that was described as directed either toward or away from an object. The results show that (1) attention is not necessary; the liking effect was recorded for verbal descriptions of looking, (2) the effect also occurs for descriptions of pointing and arrows, and (3) the liking effect is enhanced for gaze cues compared to arrows, consistent with the gaze specificity hypothesis. Results from a further experiment suggest that the effect is not due to demand compliance. We conclude that the gaze-liking effect occurs for verbal descriptions of eye gaze. Indeed, because our method bypasses altogether the use of visual cues, objects, and shifts in visual selective attention, our paradigm appears to be more sensitive at tapping into the fundamental approach-avoidance response that mediate the implicit liking effect. As such, it offers new opportunities for research investigations in the future.

How attention gates social interactions

Social interactions are at the core of social life. However, humans selectively choose their exchange partners and do not engage in all available opportunities for social encounters. In this review, we argue that attentional systems play an important role in guiding the selection of social interactions. Supported by both classic and emerging literature, we identify and characterize the three core processes-perception, interpretation, and evaluation-that interact with attentional systems to modulate selective responses to social environments. Perceptual processes facilitate attentional prioritization of social cues. Interpretative processes link attention with understanding of cues' social meanings and agents' mental states. Evaluative processes determine the perceived value of the source of social information. The interplay between attention and these three routes of processing places attention in a powerful role to manage the selection of the vast amount of social information that individuals encounter on a daily basis and, in turn, gate the selection of social interactions.

A closer look at the size of the gaze-liking effect: a preregistered replication

This study is a direct replication of gaze-liking effect using the same design, stimuli and procedure. The gaze-liking effect describes the tendency for people to rate objects as more likeable when they have recently seen a person repeatedly gaze toward rather than away from the object. However, as subsequent studies show considerable variability in the size of this effect, we sampled a larger number of participants (N = 98) than the original study (N = 24) to gain a more precise estimate of the gaze-liking effect size. Our results indicate a much smaller standardised effect size (d_z= 0.02) than that of the original study (d_z = 0.94). Our smaller effect size was not due to general insensitivity to eye-gaze effects because the same sample showed a clear (d_z = 1.09) gaze-cuing effect - faster reaction times when eyes looked toward vs away from target objects. We discuss the implications of our findings for future studies wishing to study the gaze-liking effect.

Social Influence on Metacognitive Evaluations: The Power of Nonverbal Cues

Metacognitive evaluations refer to the processes by which people assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goal. Little is known about whether this process is susceptible to social influence. Here we investigate whether nonverbal social signals spontaneously influence metacognitive evaluations. Participants performed a two-alternative forced-choice task, which was followed by a face randomly gazing towards or away from the response chosen by the participant. Participants then provided a metacognitive evaluation of their response by rating their confidence in their answer. In Experiment 1, the participants were told that the gaze direction was irrelevant to the task purpose and were advised to ignore it. The results revealed an effect of implicit social information on confidence ratings even though the gaze direction was random and therefore unreliable for task purposes. In addition, nonsocial cues (car) did not elicit this effect. In Experiment 2, the participants were led to believe that cue direction (face or car) reflected a previous participant's response to the same question—that is, the social information provided by the cue was made explicit, yet still objectively unreliable for the task. The results showed a similar social influence on confidence ratings, observed with both cues (car and face) but with an increased magnitude relative to Experiment 1. We additionally showed in Experiment 2 that social information impaired metacognitive accuracy. Together our results strongly suggest an involuntary susceptibility of metacognitive evaluations to nonverbal social information, even when it is implicit (Experiment 1) and unreliable (Experiments 1 and 2).

Investigating the Effect of Gaze Cues and Emotional Expressions on the Affective Evaluations of Unfamiliar Faces

People look at what they are interested in, and their emotional expressions tend to indicate how they feel about the objects at which they look. The combination of gaze direction and emotional expression can therefore convey important information about people’s evaluations of the objects in their environment, and can even influence the subsequent evaluations of those objects by a third party, a phenomenon known as the emotional gaze effect. The present study extended research into the effect of emotional gaze cues by investigating whether they affect evaluations of the most important aspect of our social environment–other people–and whether the presence of multiple gaze cues enhances this effect. Over four experiments, a factorial within-subjects design employing both null hypothesis significance testing and a Bayesian statistical analysis replicated previous work showing an emotional gaze effect for objects, but found strong evidence that emotional gaze cues do not affect evaluations of other people, and that multiple, simultaneously presented gaze cues do not enhance the emotional gaze effect for either the evaluations of objects or of people. Overall, our results suggest that emotional gaze cues have a relatively weak influence on affective evaluations, especially of those aspects of our environment that automatically elicit affectively valenced reactions, including other humans.

Roles of NMDA and dopamine in food-foraging decision-making strategies of rats in the social setting

Background

In highly complex social settings, an animal’s motivational drive to pursue an object depends not only on the intrinsic properties of the object, but also on whether the decision-making animal perceives an object as being the most desirable among others. Mimetic desire refers to a subject’s preference for objects already possessed by another subject. To date, there are no appropriate animal models for studying whether mimetic desire is at play in guiding the decision-making process. Furthermore, the neuropharmacological bases of decision-making processes are not well understood. In this study, we used an animal model (rat) to investigate a novel food-foraging paradigm for decision-making, with or without a mimetic desire paradigm.

Results

Faced with the choice of foraging in a competitive environment, rats preferred foraging for the desirable object, indicating the rats’ ability for decision-making. Notably, treatment with the non-competitive N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor antagonist MK-801, but not with the dopamine D1 or D2 receptor antagonists, SCH23390 and haloperidol, respectively, suppressed the food foraging preference when there was a competing resident rat in the cage. None of these three antagonists affected the food-foraging preference for palatable food. Moreover, MK-801 and SCH23390, but not haloperidol, were able to abolish the desirable environment effect on standard food-foraging activities in complex social settings.

Conclusions

These results highlight the concept that mimetic desire exerts a powerful influence on food-foraging decision-making in rats and, further, illustrate the various roles of the glutamatergic and dopaminergic systems in mediating these processes.

Failed Replication of Oxytocin Effects on Trust: The Envelope Task Case

The neurohormone Oxytocin (OT) has been one of the most studied peptides in behavioral sciences over the past two decades. Many studies have suggested that OT could increase trusting behaviors. A previous study, based on the "Envelope Task" paradigm, where trust is assessed by the degree of openness of an envelope containing participant's confidential information, showed that OT increases trusting behavior and reported one of the most powerful effects of OT on a behavioral variable. In this paper we present two failed replications of this effect, despite sufficient power to replicate the original large effect. The non-significant results of these two failed replications clearly exclude a large effect of OT on trust in this paradigm but are compatible with either a null effect of OT on trust, or a small effect, undetectable with small sample size (N = 95 and 61 in Study 1 and 2, respectively). Taken together, our results question the purported size of OT's effect on trust and emphasize the need for replications.