Similarity Among Friends Serves as a Social Prior: The Assumption That “Birds of a Feather Flock Together” Shapes Social Decisions and Relationship Beliefs

Abstract

Social interactions unfold within networks of relationships. How do beliefs about others’ social ties shape—and how are they shaped by—expectations about how others will behave? Here, participants joined a fictive online game-playing community and interacted with its purported members, who varied in terms of their trustworthiness and apparent relationships with one another. Participants were less trusting of partners with untrustworthy friends, even after they consistently showed themselves to be trustworthy, and were less willing to engage with them in the future. To test whether people not only expect friends to behave similarly but also expect those who behave similarly to be friends, an incidental memory test was given. Participants were exceptionally likely to falsely remember similarly behaving partners as friends. Thus, people expect friendship to predict similar behavior and vice versa. These results suggest that knowledge of social networks and others’ behavioral tendencies reciprocally interact to shape social thought and behavior.

Trusting others who vary in consistency between their personal standards and behavior: Differences by age, gender, and honesty trust beliefs

“…They judged the inconsistent person as less trustworthy than a consistent person, including judging the former as untrustworthy and the latter as trustworthy. These findings complement research which shows that adults use the consistency principle to judge the trustworthiness of others as it pertains to consistencies between: (a) apologies and subsequent behavior (Hui et al, 2011) and (b) personal trustworthiness and trustworthiness of friends (Schwyck et al, 2023). The findings complement the findings that adults conceptualize hypocrisy as the inconsistency between personal standards and behavior when standards are presented first (Barden et al, 2005;Laurent & Clark, 2019).…”

“…( 2019) found that older, but not younger, children recognized hypocrisy as demonstrated in their judgments of the characteristics of others who showed inconsistency between their behavior and moral standards. The use of the consistency principle in trustworthiness judgments has been found in adults for various social behaviors (e.g., Hui et al., 2011; Schwyck et al., 2023) and in older children rather than young children when judging temporal consistency and verbal‐nonverbal consistency (Rotenberg et al., 1989; Rotenberg & Pilipenko, 1984). The current research provides unique findings, however.…”

“…Hui et al (2011) found that adults judge persons as less trustworthy when they demonstrate behavior which is inconsistent rather than consistent with their apologies to others. Schwyck et al (2023) found that adults judge persons who have untrustworthy friends as relatively untrustworthy even though they (the persons) had demonstrated trustworthiness.…”

“…Schwyck et al. (2023) found that adults judge persons who have untrustworthy friends as relatively untrustworthy even though they (the persons) had demonstrated trustworthiness.…”

People are represented and remembered through their relationships with others

“…The consistency of trait and behavioral information aids in social stereotyping which shapes person perception and determines what we specifically remember about others (Cantor & Mischel, 1977;Hastie et al, 2014;Hastie & Carlston, 1980;Quinn et al, 2007). People are also more likely to infer friendships between two individuals who share similar preferences and belong to similar social groups (Son et al, 2021) or demonstrate similar behavior in a game (Schwyck, Du, Li, et al, 2023). In other words, people, just like "items" in classic memory tasks may be distilled into a multidimensional feature vector of person-specific attributes that serve to organize social knowledge and predict behavior (Hamilton et al, 1980;Stolier et al, 2020;Uleman & Kressel, 2013).…”