www.psychspace.com心理学空间网How our visual system is guided by gossip radar
The kind of negative tittle-tattle that appears daily in the tabloids seems to bear little merit. But experts 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.