A new study suggests that people are remarkably adept at avoiding exploitation at the hands of others — unless they suffer from anxiety.
A new study suggests that people are remarkably adept at avoiding exploitation at the hands of others — unless they suffer from anxiety.
A group of three researchers from Brown University recently conducted a study that found that healthy people easily recognize when those around them become increasingly untrustworthy — and they react, appropriately enough, by pulling away. But they found that the same wasn’t true for those who have significant levels of anxiety. People who are anxious, the study concluded, continue to trust and invest in people who display increasingly untrustworthy behavior.
The findings were published in Psychological Science on Tuesday, April 28.
“We know from previous research that learning and uncertainty are very closely linked,” said Amrita Lamba, the study’s first author and a Ph.D. student in Brown’s Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences. “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.”
Read more at Brown University
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
