Blocking Effects in Social Inference Generalize Across Targets: Learning to Interpret a Person's Behavioral Cues Interferes With Learning About Other People's Behavior

Abstract

Recent research has explored cue competition phenomena in social learning. In particular, blocking effects have been observed in the way people learn to infer someone's internal states from their behavioral cues: When people learn to associate a certain behavior with a certain internal state, this blocks their learning of subsequent behavioral cues that also predict the same state, when those cues are presented with the original behavior. In this research, we show that this blocking effect generalizes across targets, such that learning that a behavior predicts an internal state in a person hinders learning that other cues predict the same internal state in a different person, when both behaviors are presented simultaneously. This effect proved robust, and it was not moderated by the group membership of the targets.