Involvement of the Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex in Learning Others' Bad Reputations and Indelible Distrust

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Social Psychology

Background:

• Negative reputations can lead to persistent distrust, impacting judgments even when the information is inaccurate.
• This distrust may stem from a transfer of negative evaluation to the individual, independent of factual accuracy.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the neural basis of how bad reputations influence person perception.
• To test if evaluation-related brain regions activate when encountering individuals with negative reputations, irrespective of the reputation's validity.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to monitor brain activity.
• Participants memorized faces paired with either good or bad reputations.
• Participants inferred cooperation likelihood while viewing faces, first recalling reputations, then attempting to disregard them.

Main Results:

• A region in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC), associated with negative evaluation, showed activation for faces with bad reputations.
• This activation persisted whether participants retrieved or disregarded the reputations.
• Greater left vlPFC activity correlated with inferences of non-cooperation.

Conclusions:

• Individuals associated with bad reputations can independently elicit negative evaluation-related brain responses.
• This neural response contributes to distrust, regardless of the reputation's accuracy.
• The left vlPFC plays a role in maintaining negative evaluations linked to reputational information.