The More I Get to Know You, the More I Distrust You? Non-linear Relationship between Social Skills and Social Behavior

A commentary on Judging strangers' trustworthiness is associated with theory of mind skills In recent years, there has been growing interest in the study of social skills in neuropsychiatric diseases (1, 2). This interest arises from the evidence, which indicates that social skill impairments generate deep impact on the functioning and, ultimately, the quality of life of neuropsychiatric patients. The better understating of the mechanisms involved in these processes is useful for elaborating therapeutic interventions to integrate these patients into society. However, the way in which the alteration of social skills specifically biases social behavior is not clear yet (3). In this context, the study carried out by Prevost et al. (4) may shed light in this important, yet unexplored, area. Here, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test stimuli are used to measure both theory of mind (ToM) skills and the judgment of trustworthiness in strangers. The authors show that ToM affects the way in which healthy subjects trust strangers. Although prior evidence indicates that perspective-taking and empathy skills are positively related to trustworthy judgments, the authors find a negative relationship between these judgments and ToM. In other words, people who read the intentions of others better tend to distrust strangers. These results can be useful to understand the relationship between classical social skills, for example, those tested in clinical settings and real social behavior. Now on the one hand, during ontogenic development, trust behaviors increase in relation to both ToM skills and the maturation of ToM-related brain networks (5, 6). On the other hand, studies using interactive social tasks apparently show opposite results. For example, people with high ToM scoring tend to make more unfair decisions and have more strategic (Machiavellian) behaviors (7). A possible scope for interpreting these results is to distinguish the capacity of reading social information from the way of using this information to adapt social behaviors. For example, adolescents with better perspective-taking ability not only trust in others but also have the will to punish others' distrusting behaviors (8). Likewise, during the development of social skills, adolescents no longer have trust behaviors when they face unfair partners (5). Hence, the social information that subjects extract from other people can be used to carry out different social behaviors (e.g., cooperative or non-cooperative behaviors) depending on other factors, as for example, the context, prior history of interaction with the same person, etc. In order to …