Clear judgments based on unclear evidence: Person evaluation is strongly influenced by untrustworthy gossip.

Abstract

Affective information about other people's social behavior may prejudice social interactions and bias person judgments. The trustworthiness of person-related information, however, can vary considerably, as in the case of gossip, rumours, lies, or so-called "fake news". Here, we investigated how spontaneous person-likability and explicit person judgments are influenced by trustworthiness, employing event-related potentials as indexes of emotional brain responses. Social-emotional information about the (im)moral behaviour of previously unknown persons was verbally presented as trustworthy fact, (e.g. "He bullied his apprentice") or marked as untrustworthy gossip (by adding e.g. allegedly), using verbal qualifiers that are frequently used in conversations, news and social media to indicate the questionable trustworthiness of the information and as a precaution against wrong accusations. In Experiment 1, spontaneous likability, deliberate person judgments and electrophysiological measures of emotional person evaluation were strongly influenced by negative information, yet remarkably unaffected by the trustworthiness of the information. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and extended them to positive information. Our findings demonstrate a tendency for strong emotional evaluations and person judgments even when they are knowingly based on unclear evidence.

Emotional content reduces the cognitive effort invested in processing the credibility of social (mis)information

“…Scholz et al, 2017, Vosoughi et al, 2018. Recent studies investigating the impact of information of questionable veracity have provided first evidence that the emotional content strongly affects social judgements and neural correlates while the impact of trustworthiness is limited (Baum & Abdel Rahman, 2020;Baum, Rabovsky, Rose, & Abdel Rahman, 2018). Here, we investigate pupil dilation responses as indexes of the cognitive or emotional processes underpinning these judgments.…”

“…Effects of instructed reappraisal of emotional faces was an approximately 0.05 mm change (Yih et al, 2018). Additionally, ERP results (Baum et al, 2018;Baum & Abdel Rahman, 2019) have shown numerically slightly weaker emotion effects of positive than of negative information compared to neutral.…”

“…2) is mainly equivalent to Baum & Abdel Rahman (2020) that is based on a well-established design (e.g. Abdel Rahman, 2011;Baum et al, 2018;Suess et al, 2015). In Phase 1, participants were exposed to news with a manipulation check testing the likability of all faces before and 15-minutes after the news exposure (pre-exposure and post-exposure person likability ratings on 5-point scales from likable to unlikable).…”

Emotional news affects social judgments independent of perceived media credibility

“…Crucially, the LPP is sensitive to additional information such as context and relevance, putting emotional contents into perspective (Blechert et al, 2012;Herbert et al, 2011;Rellecke et al, 2012;Schacht & Sommer, 2009b;Schindler et al, 2019), whereas the EPN is relatively independent of task demands and the relevance of emotional contents in a given context (Herbert et al, 2011;Herbert et al, 2013;Schacht & Sommer, 2009b). It is noteworthy that this evidence of additional contextual influences on ERPs comes from studies testing effects of emotional information immediately, while there is scarce evidence of such contextual effects on later consequences (Baum et al, 2018). We expected that the EPN is mainly sensitive to the emotional content of the headlines irrespective of source credibility, whereas emotion effects in LPP amplitudes should be modulated by source credibility, with reduced amplitudes for distrusted sources.…”

“…This modulation may be primarily found for positive headlines if negative information is prioritized as protection against potential threat (cf. Baum et al, 2018). The present study was preregistered under the OSF (Baum & Abdel Rahman, 2018 2 ).…”