;D Just found this and thought it was interesting..but not as a stand alone thread...FWIW....
here's some light technical reading on the subject:
human-nature.com/ep/articles/ep02108120.htmlThese studies examined the salience of information in social contract situations. We tested three claims about the relative importance of cheaters and cooperators: (1) Cheaters are more important to remember than cooperators, (2) Cooperators are more important to remember than cheaters, and (3) Cheaters and cooperators are equally important to remember.
Our results are most consistent with the first. Experiment 1 found people rated cheaters more important to remember than cooperators, though both were rated higher than those categorized as neither. Experiment 2 found cheaters were looked at longer than cooperators, though both were looked at longer than those classified as neither. People also had better memory for faces of cheaters than cooperators, and were more likely to remember social contract information for cheaters.
Why should cheaters be particularly salient? One reason is because cheaters threaten the very viability of social exchange (e.g., Cosmides, 1989; Cosmides and Tooby, 1992; Gigerenzer and Hug, 1992). Unless steps are taken to identify and remember individuals that accept benefits and fail to pay costs, cheaters would out-reproduce cooperators. Furthermore, instances of cheating may carry greater information value. If evolution works to improve the efficiency of cognitive mechanisms, we would expect that it would produce a cognitive system that is particularly sensitive to information that has the greatest diagnostics value. In this case, it should be most sensitive to information providing cues about a person's character. Everything else being equal, knowing that a person cooperated may not tell us much about their character.
Knowing that they cheated would be more relevant. This is because cheaters have to give the appearance of being trustworthy and thus they may have to cooperate much of the time.
However, our results also provide some support for the view that it is important to remember cooperators. Cooperators were looked at longer and remembered better than those judged irrelevant to the social contract situation. This suggests that people also regard as important individuals displaying pro-social behavior (Brown and Moore, 2000). This is important because individuals need to know whom to approach in future instances of exchange, not just which individuals to avoid. Of course, it may also be important to rely on information from other people in the form of gossip, to avoid the problem that even cheaters often have to cooperate (Emler, 1990, 1992).
The present studies also found that people can make conscious judgments of the relative importance of remembering cheaters and cooperators. This was revealed in Experiment 1, where explicit judgments of importance were assessed. This suggests people can strategically implement encoding strategies that increase the likelihood of remembering different individuals. For instance, by knowing that they want to remember the cheaters, people can decide to spend more time looking at their faces relative to individuals with a different social contract status. This is what we found in Experiment 2.
Our studies also examined whether the amount of resources involved in the exchange has an effect on the relative importance of remembering cheaters and cooperators. One would expect that any differences in importance between the two should be particularly evident when there is more to lose or gain in an exchange. When trivial amounts are involved, the relative difference in importance between cheaters and cooperators may be negligible. The amount involved in the exchange could also affect the actions that a person takes in dealing with cheaters.
As Cosmides and Tooby (1989) put it, "When you believe that I have cheated you in a major way, there should be a flood of memories about your past history with me: You must decide whether it is worth your while to continue our relationship" (p. 63). Thus, do you give a person another chance, or do you exclude them outright from all future exchange? The extent of the infraction likely plays an important role in this regard.
The first study found that people gave higher important-to-remember ratings when a greater amount was involved. However, the results of the second experiment failed to find an effect of amount. Thus, people's conscious intentions did not turn into longer viewing times, and did not turn into a greater likelihood of remembering the individuals. Though the descriptive statistics were in that direction, the results were not significant. This could be due to the high amounts of variance observed in the viewing times. High variance can have the effect of eliminating any differences observed between experimental conditions.
By contrast, the data in the first experiment were obtained using a 7-point rating scale. By its very nature, this constrains much of the variance, making it more likely that an effect will be significant. At any rate, further research will be required to address this issue.
Another interesting discovery of the present study has to do with how quickly the effects on memory are evident. Previous studies have found differences in memory between cheaters and cooperators with a delay of a week between first exposure to the faces and subsequent attempts at recognition (Mealey, Daood, and Krage, 1996; Oda, 1997). These studies, however, did not examine whether those biases are evident after only a short delay. Indeed, one might expect that in the short run, no bias would be evident because the individuals would be relatively fresh in memory. Interestingly, however, a bias in remembering the cheaters was evident shortly after the individuals were first seen.
Thus, cheaters stand out right away, more so than do people exhibiting pro-social behavior. Future research will have to determine whether differences between cheaters and cooperators get larger with time or remain constant.
Importantly, the memory bias was evident not just in terms of face recognition, but also with respect to the social contract status. The studies by Mealey, Daood, and Krage (1996) and Oda (1997) found biased face recognition for cheaters, but did not examine whether there are differences in the likelihood of remembering that the cheaters were cheaters compared to remembering that the cooperators were cooperators. As noted above, however, one must not only be able to recognize many different individuals, one must also be able to recall how those individuals behaved in social contract situations. This is crucial for deciding whether or not to channel future resources to an individual. Our studies suggest that biases in memory also extend to the information regarding the individual's character.
To conclude, though much research has shown people are good at identifying potential violators of social contract rules, the present study shows that people are adept at remembering the information that carries the greatest diagnostic value in social exchange.
People are particularly good at remembering the faces of cheaters, and that these individuals violated social contract rules, compared to other social contract information. Moreover, our results suggest that this may be accomplished at least in part by spending a greater amount of time looking at the faces of these individuals.
Hey Guys, I'm sitting here bored out of my mind, so I though I would do some musing..not so much as to "tout" anything...we all have CMKX..but more to reflect upon what may transpire in the coming weeks.
