We Arrive at Negative Conclusions More Easily Under Threat
Post by D. Chloe Chung
What's the science?
We accumulate information over time to make important decisions, sometimes even in highly stressful situations. As there is often endless information available to us, we need to decide when to stop gathering information in order to make judgments. However, under stressful, threatening conditions, we are prone to make decisions even with a small amount of information (e.g. hearing a faint sound in a dark alleyway, perceiving it as a threat, and concluding that the environment is dangerous). This week in the Journal of Neuroscience, Globig and colleagues investigated how we process information in threatening situations.
How did they do it?
A total of 83 participants were divided into a threat manipulation group and a control group. The threat manipulation group was informed that they would later have to deliver a speech on an undisclosed topic in front of judges. Then, they were asked to solve difficult math problems in a limited time. These anticipated threats were designed to increase the anxiety and stress levels in participants. On the contrary, the control group was told that they would later have to write a short essay on a random topic that would not be judged and were given easier math problems to solve. After the manipulation, both groups played the “Factory Game”: Participants had to determine whether they were in a telephone or television factory based on the number of telephones or televisions shown on a moving conveyor belt that they were observing. During this test, for each participant, one type of factory was randomly assigned as the “desirable” factory and the other one as the “undesirable” factory. Participants were told that they would earn points when they visit the desirable factory but lose points when they visit the undesirable factory. They were also told that they would earn points when making a correct judgment about the factory type but would lose points upon a wrong judgement. The two payments were independent of each other.
What did they find?
After first checking that the level of anxiety was successfully increased in the “threat manipulation group” participants, the authors observed that the threat manipulation group tended to determine that they were in the undesirable factory (for example, the television factory) after observing a smaller proportion of undesirable items (televisions) compared to the control group. This means that with perceived threats, participants were more likely to draw conclusions based on less evidence, but only when drawing conclusions about the undesirable condition specifically. When it came to the desirable factory, the presence of perceived threats did not change the amount of evidence required to draw conclusions about the desirability of the situation. To understand how threat affects evidence accumulation specifically the authors used a computational modelling approach, finding a higher relative rate for negative evidence in the threat manipulation group. They found that threat biases the way in which participants weigh valenced (positive or negative) information.
What’s the impact?
This work confirms that the way we collect and process evidence can be greatly impacted by threats present in our situation, suggesting that we draw conclusions about our undesirable situation quickly, and with little evidence. Findings from this study suggest that, for those who are more sensitive to threats due to anxiety or other mood disorders, this process of accumulating negative information faster could be harmful as it may lead to an overly negative assessment of their situation.
Globig et al. Under threat weaker evidence is required to reach undesirable conclusions. Journal of Neuroscience (2021).Access the original scientific publication here.