By Kate Shaw
Everyone loves a bit of juicy gossip, but have you ever stopped to think about how hearing who is having an affair or who made a drunken fool out of themselves at least year's Christmas party affects you? A new study in Science finds that gossip actually influences our vision, making us highly attuned to people we’ve heard negative information about.
The research is based on a visual process called "binocular rivalry." Scientists show subjects two images at once, one presented to the right eye, and the other to the left eye. The images battle for our attention—one comes into our field of vision while the other is suppressed, then the images switch. The image that our eyes focus on for longer is considered dominant. An image may be dominant because of its inherent properties (it’s brighter or bigger), or because of a subconscious bias in our brains.
In this study, subjects were shown pictures of neutral-emotion faces and were given some type of social information about an interaction the person in the image had. Sometimes the information was negative (they threw a chair at someone), sometimes it was positive (they helped an old person in the grocery store), and sometimes it was neutral (they passed someone on the street).
Next, they were shown these faces again during a binocular rivalry test. In each test, the subjects were presented with one of these faces along with an unrelated stimulus (a picture of a house). They were asked to press one keyboard key while their eyes focused on the face, and another key while their eyes focused on the house. By measuring the length of time participants “saw” each image, the scientists determined how salient each face was. The faces, types of information, and presentation were counterbalanced across all trials to control for any experimental biases.
The participants focused significantly longer on the faces they had heard negative social information about compared to the faces they had heard positive or neutral social information about. Furthermore, the same faces were also more salient than faces that had been paired with negative non-social information (they had a root canal). These results show that it wasn’t the just negative nature of the information that grabbed the subjects' attention; it was the fact that the information was negative and social. This type of information, also known as gossip, seems to strike a certain chord and makes us particularly attentive.
Clearly, our visual systems aren’t completely independent and impartial; instead, what we know and how we feel greatly influences what we see.
Scientists believe that one of the functions of gossip in our society is to help us gather information about people we haven’t interacted with. Even if we haven’t met someone yet, hearing that they had lied, stolen, or slept around may make us more cautious when dealing with them. If our vision is drawn to people we hear negative gossip about, we may be able to gather more information about them, or simply be able to better watch our backs.
Science, 2011. DOI: 10.1126/science.1201574 (About DOIs).
Everyone loves a bit of juicy gossip, but have you ever stopped to think about how hearing who is having an affair or who made a drunken fool out of themselves at least year's Christmas party affects you? A new study in Science finds that gossip actually influences our vision, making us highly attuned to people we’ve heard negative information about.
The research is based on a visual process called "binocular rivalry." Scientists show subjects two images at once, one presented to the right eye, and the other to the left eye. The images battle for our attention—one comes into our field of vision while the other is suppressed, then the images switch. The image that our eyes focus on for longer is considered dominant. An image may be dominant because of its inherent properties (it’s brighter or bigger), or because of a subconscious bias in our brains.
In this study, subjects were shown pictures of neutral-emotion faces and were given some type of social information about an interaction the person in the image had. Sometimes the information was negative (they threw a chair at someone), sometimes it was positive (they helped an old person in the grocery store), and sometimes it was neutral (they passed someone on the street).
Next, they were shown these faces again during a binocular rivalry test. In each test, the subjects were presented with one of these faces along with an unrelated stimulus (a picture of a house). They were asked to press one keyboard key while their eyes focused on the face, and another key while their eyes focused on the house. By measuring the length of time participants “saw” each image, the scientists determined how salient each face was. The faces, types of information, and presentation were counterbalanced across all trials to control for any experimental biases.
The participants focused significantly longer on the faces they had heard negative social information about compared to the faces they had heard positive or neutral social information about. Furthermore, the same faces were also more salient than faces that had been paired with negative non-social information (they had a root canal). These results show that it wasn’t the just negative nature of the information that grabbed the subjects' attention; it was the fact that the information was negative and social. This type of information, also known as gossip, seems to strike a certain chord and makes us particularly attentive.
Clearly, our visual systems aren’t completely independent and impartial; instead, what we know and how we feel greatly influences what we see.
Scientists believe that one of the functions of gossip in our society is to help us gather information about people we haven’t interacted with. Even if we haven’t met someone yet, hearing that they had lied, stolen, or slept around may make us more cautious when dealing with them. If our vision is drawn to people we hear negative gossip about, we may be able to gather more information about them, or simply be able to better watch our backs.
Science, 2011. DOI: 10.1126/science.1201574 (About DOIs).
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