People are remarkably adept at avoiding exploitation at the hands of others, unless they suffer from anxiety, researchers report.
The new study shows that healthy people easily recognize when those around them become increasingly untrustworthy—and they react, appropriately enough, by pulling away. But researchers found that the same wasn’t true for those who have significant levels of anxiety.
People who are anxious, the study concludes, continue to trust and invest in people who display increasingly untrustworthy behavior.
“We know from previous research that learning and uncertainty are very closely linked,” says first author Amrita Lamba, a PhD student in the cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences department at Brown University.
“This study demonstrates that, if we do not have anxiety, we’re actually able to learn more once we detect uncertainty in social interactions, which helps us to avoid being exploited and to learn who can be trusted. With every uncertain social situation we navigate, with every change in trustworthiness we observe in people, we are fine-tuning our opinions of them and adjusting our relationships with them accordingly.”
For the study, researchers recruited 350 clinically diverse participants—about a quarter of whom showed symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder—and to design two activities that would measure the participants’ abilities to learn and adapt in uncertain situations.
First, the researchers asked participants to gamble on three different online slot machines. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the machines were rigged: One was designed to return consistently good winnings at the beginning, but it became unprofitable after the first few spins; the second consistently lost participants’ money at first, but then it began to become more profitable; the third was inconsistent and ultimately resulted in a zero-sum, zero-loss game for participants.
The researchers ..
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