Social overshadowing : revisiting cue-competition in social interactions
Date
05/01/2023Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
In a large variety of contexts, it is essential to use the available information to extract patterns and behave accordingly. When it comes to social interactions for instance, the information gathered about interaction partners across multiple encounters (e.g., trustworthiness) is crucial in guiding one's own behavior (e.g., approach the trustworthy and avoid the untrustworthy), a process akin to trial-by-trial learning. Building on associative learning and social cognition literatures, the present research adopts a domain-general approach to learning and explores whether the principles underlying associative learning also govern learning in social contexts. In particular, we examined whether overshadowing, a well-established cue-competition phenomenon, impacts learning of the cooperative behaviors of unfamiliar interaction partners. Across three experiments using an adaptation of the iterated Trust Game, we consistently observed a 'social overshadowing' effect, that is, a better learning about the cooperative tendencies of partners presented alone compared to those presented in a pair. This robust effect was not modulated by gender stereotypes or beliefs about the internal communication dynamics within a pair of partners. Drawing on these results, we argue that examining domain-general learning processes in social contexts is a useful approach to understanding human social cognition.
Citation
Telga , M , Alcalá , J A , Heyes , C & Urcelay , G P 2023 , ' Social overshadowing : revisiting cue-competition in social interactions ' , Psychonomic Bulletin & Review . https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02229-3
Publication
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1069-9384Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2023. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
Funding: This research was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council grant (ES/R011494/2) awarded to Gonzalo P. Urcelay and conducted while Maïka Telga was visiting the University of Leicester from the University of Granada as an Honorary Fellow.Collections
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