| Popis: |
The ability to adapt behavior in the face of social feedback is an important component of social competency. In many social contexts, the most appropriate behavior depends on who we are interacting with, and the current value we place in their response. In this paper, we used a devaluation method to examine the extent to which participants use and update flexible representations of social outcome identity and value. In a series of experiments, participants learned actions that were associated with positive social feedback as outcomes from two different identities. In study 1a, we found that devaluing one of the identities, by learning negative information about them, reduced preferences for the action associated with the positive social outcome from that identity. This preference change occurred without participants requiring additional action-social outcome learning. Neutral (Study 1b) and positive (Study2) information did not alter preferences. Learning negative information before learning the action-social outcome (Study 3) slowed reaction time during learning, but did not impair learning the association for the devalued identity. However, it did reduce the preference for actions associated with that identity. Study 4 replicated Study 1a with a different source of negative information. These results are consistent with individuals using a model-based representation of the identity and current value of social outcomes to guide the choice of actions. |
