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Socially Situated Transmission: The Bias to Transmit Negative Information is Moderated by the Social Context
Author(s) -
Fay Nicolas,
Walker Bradley,
Kashima Yoshihisa,
Perfors Andrew
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/cogs.13033
Subject(s) - situated , context (archaeology) , psychology , transmission (telecommunications) , social psychology , information transmission , social environment , cognitive psychology , negative information , cognition , social learning , computer science , sociology , geography , neuroscience , telecommunications , computer network , social science , artificial intelligence , pedagogy , archaeology
Cultural evolutionary theory has identified a range of cognitive biases that guide human social learning. Naturalistic and experimental studies indicate transmission biases favoring negative and positive information. To address these conflicting findings, the present study takes a socially situated view of information transmission, which predicts that bias expression will depend on the social context. We report a large‐scale experiment ( N = 425) that manipulated the social context and examined its effect on the transmission of the positive and negative information contained in a narrative text. In each social context, information was progressively lost as it was transmitted from person to person, but negative information survived better than positive information, supporting a negative transmission bias. Importantly, the negative transmission bias was moderated by the social context: Higher social connectivity weakened the bias to transmit negative information, supporting a socially situated account of information transmission. Our findings indicate that our evolved cognitive preferences can be moderated by our social goals.