believe that historically, paying attention to such gossip played an important role in our survival chances, such that today negative hearsay continues to bias our visual system.
Eric Andersonat Northeastern University in Boston and his colleagues have shown this in a new study that paired photos of neutral faces with lines of positive, negative or neutral gossip, and presented these to 61 participants on-screen. Typical lines of gossip were ‘threw a chair at his classmate’, ‘helped an elderly woman with her groceries’ and ‘passed a man on the street’. Each face was paired four times with its designated nugget of social information.
These faces were then presented in a binocular rivalry paradigm with pictures of houses. This means that using a piece of a equipment called a stereoscope, a face was presented exclusively to one eye and a house exclusively to the other, which would have led the two images to compete for access to the participant’s conscious awareness. For the participants, a fluctuating perceptual experience would then have ensued, first one image seen, then the other, and back again until the trial finished after ten seconds.
Participants were asked to press a keyboard key to indicate which image they could see at any given time and Anderson’s finding is that faces previously paired with negative gossip tended to dominate and be seen for longer, by more than half a second, than faces paired previously with positive or neutral gossip, or entirely new faces.