Adaptive social decisions are disrupted in highly antagonistic individuals

BackgroundHealthy social functioning relies on an ability to form accurate representations of others’ character and to utilize the representations to guide decisions. Here, we take a transdiagnostic longitudinal approach to investigate disrupted social decision-making in psychopathology. MethodsWe obtained transdiagnostic antagonism symptom scores from a battery of standardized questionnaires in an online US sample nationally representative for age, sex, and ethnicity. Participants completed a Moral Inference Task where they made a series of predictions about the moral decisions of both a selfish and a generous agent, and periodically reported their beliefs about the agents’ moral character. Participants were incentivized to form accurate representations of the agents’ tendencies as they later played an economic game where they could entrust money to the agents. We characterized the behavioral phenotypes of antagonism in forming social representations and using the representations to make adaptive social decisions.ResultsParticipants with high antagonism (1) held strong, pessimistic prior expectations, (2) were less accurate in predicting others’ moral decisions, (3) were more confident about their subjective impressions, and (4) made maladaptive trust decisions.ConclusionsWe found that disrupted social representations are specific to the latent dimension of antagonism and stable over time. The findings emphasize the role of social representations in adaptive social decisions in antagonism, providing a potential target for interventions.