Talk by Julia Baum (Berlin): "The impact of untrustworthy person-related information on person perception, evaluation, and judgment"
Affective Neuroscience and Psychophysiology
Colloquium
Julia Baum (Humboldt University of Berlin)
30.01.2019 18:00 - 20:00 — GEMI, Raum 1.134
The impact of untrustworthy person-related information on person perception, evaluation, and judgment
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”. Does the trustworthiness have an influence on people’s person judgments derived from person-related information? In my dissertation, I’m investigating how person perception, evaluation, person-likability and deliberate person judgments are influenced by trustworthiness, employing event-related potentials as indexes of emotional brain responses.
In a first study, we marked information untrustworthy 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. 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). Over two experiments we show that person-likability, deliberate person judgments and electrophysiological measures of emotional person evaluation (late positive potential, LPP) were strongly influenced by negative and positive information, yet remarkably unaffected by the trustworthiness of the information. In a second study, we investigated influences of source credibility by presenting information in media sources that differ in their attributed levels of credibility. Participants read headlines about negative, positive, or relatively neutral social behavior that were presented simultaneously with unfamiliar faces in visual contexts relating to existing, well-known German online media sources associated with low or high levels of credibility. After learning, judgments of persons paired with negative information were more negative than those related to neutral information, independent of source credibility. Similarly, event-related potentials (ERPs) indexing perception-related motivated attention (early posterior negativity, EPN) were affected by emotional contents. ERPs related to higher-order person evaluation (LPP) showed a modulation due to the implicit appraisal of source credibility. However, this modulation was relatively small compared to the strong impact of the affective information that was present for both, credible and less credible sources. Our findings across those studies demonstrate a tendency for strong emotional evaluations and person judgments even when they are knowingly based on unreliable evidence.