Abstract
Despite the inherent sociality of human nature, other people pose some of the most difficult challenges to the mind. To successfully interact with other individuals, we need to predict their future responses, a computationally-vexing problem given the enormous range of behaviors in which other people can engage. Decades of research have demonstrated that to simplify this task, perceivers routinely draw on prior beliefs—that is, rather than wait to construct social predictions solely on relevant incoming information, people regularly use prior knowledge, stereotypes, and other sources of information to proactively predict the traits and behaviors of other people. Such research has also demonstrated that once formed, these predictions strongly influence social interactions even when people attempt to change or ignore them. Here, we test the hypothesis that our social predictions resist change because perceivers place high subjective value on having their expectations of others confirmed. Across four studies, we report data consistent with this hypothesis, both when perceivers’ expectations derive from gender stereotypes and when they derive from knowledge of familiar individuals. Specifically, in two neuroimaging experiments (n = 58), we observed increased activation in brain regions associated with reward processing— including the nucleus accumbens—when social expectations were confirmed. In two additional behavioral experiments (n = 704), we observed that perceivers were willing to forgo money to encounter an expectation-confirming target and avoid an expectation-violating target. Together, these findings suggest that perceivers value having their social expectations confirmed, much like other primary or secondary rewards.
Significance statement People want to interact successfully with other individuals, and they invest significant efforts in attempting to do so. To simplify the dauntingly complex task of interpersonal communication, perceivers use stereotypes and other sources of prior knowledge to predict the responses of individuals in their environment. Here, we show that these top-down expectations can also shape the subjective value of expectation-confirming and expectation-violating targets. To manipulate expectations, we used gender stereotypes and knowledge about US presidents. We observed that participants forgo money to see expectation-confirming targets and that brain regions associated with reward processing show increased activity for such targets. These findings suggest that confirmation of social expectations is intrinsically rewarding, similar to food or monetary rewards.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.