23 September 2025
How does social judgement modulate behavioural and neural mechanisms underlying value-based decision-making? Social judgement is likely to play a particularly important role when the potential for embarrassing errors is substantial.
In this work, EMERGE partners from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich investigated social judgement using an orthogonalized reward/punishment-based Go/NoGo task in which untoward Pavlovian influences favouring Go in a reward scenario and NoGo in a punishment scenario are known to disturb required instrumental actions. The authors found that the experience of being socially evaluated selectively impaired learning of Go responses, while NoGo learning was unimpaired. Social evaluation also shifted Positivity bias from near-neutral levels to a significantly negative bias, pointing to more conservative decision-making strategies when under social judgement. These findings indicate that social evaluative stress specifically disrupts action generation, aligning with theories positing that stress promotes passive or habitual responses.
Read the paper in the link below.
More Information
