Even a Nonexistent Medical Label Significantly Affects the Assessment of Human Behavior

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Researchers from the HSE Laboratory for the Neurobiological Foundations of Cognitive Development, Alexey Kotov, Ivan Aslanov and Yulia Sudorgina, have experimentally proved that categorical labels, including nonexistent medical terms, significantly affect people's judgments, activating semantic knowledge in memory. The study has been published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal.

The researchers studied the effect of the influence of labels on judgments. A verbal label is a word referring to a group of objects or situations that have common content.

During the online experiment, 314 participants randomly received one of four stories where fictional characters did strange things due to psychological disorders. In some cases, a special name for the disorder—‘depathapy’, an artificial word invented for the experiment, was used to describe it. Then the participants evaluated 13 statements on a seven-point scale: for example, how culpable the character is in what is happening, whether their behavior is stable, whether they can be helped with medication, etc.

It turned out that participants from the category where the condition was labelled were less likely to blame the characters in the story, considered their behavior more stable over time, and that the behaviour had a biological nature. As scientists have suggested, the influence of categorical labels on judgments occurs due to the fact that they activate semantic knowledge in our memory, turning to knowledge networks—a repository of information about common things that are not related to specific events in a person’s life.

In a 2017 study, American psychologists (Giffin et al.) proposed a hypothesis that labels indicate the existence of a reason for non-standard behavior, so participants are able to justify the characters’ actions.

However, HSE University researchers offer a different explanation: when recalling strange behavior, the participants of the experiment tend to call it a disease or use the names of other diseases known to them instead of the artificial label. This suggests that they get information from their semantic memory—a large block of knowledge about medicine, not just seeing a reason for what is happening.

In the experiment, the researchers analysed the reading of stories and the answers to questions over time. It turned out that even a week after reading, the effect of the label's influence on judgments remained, although the participants no longer remembered this nonexistent term.

Alexey Kotov

‘We found another important result: participants from the category label condition remembered much more information. This confirms that language can activate a large amount of semantic knowledge in memory used for understanding,’ says Alexey Kotov.

The researchers from the HSE Laboratory for the Neurobiological Foundations of Cognitive Development plan to study at what age language starts to influence judgment, memory, and learning. Scientists hypothesize that this influence will manifest itself only after 8-9 years, since children of this age begin to actively use verbal means to realize and control their cognitive functions. Researchers will also study how verbal forms (metaphors and analogies) are related to the way children and adults understand explanations during learning.