Stress Reactivity and Sociocultural Learning: More Stress-Reactive Individuals Are Quicker at Learning Sociocultural Norms From Experiential Feedback

When interacting with others in unfamiliar sociocultural settings, people need to learn the norms guiding appropriate behavior. The present research investigates an individual difference that helps this kind of learning: stress reactivity. Interactions in an unfamiliar sociocultural setting are stressful, particularly when the actor fails to follow its rules. Although stress is typically considered a liability, more stress-reactive individuals may be more motivated to improve and, thus, quicker to learn these rules. Consistent with this idea, a pilot study found that people genetically inclined to stress reactivity, as computed by a genetic profile score across 59 single-nucleotide polymorphisms on 10 different genes, learned unfamiliar sociocultural norms from experiential feedback at a faster rate (i.e., exhibited a greater increase in accuracy across trials). Study 1 found that participants with higher acute cortisol reactivity in response to a physical stressor were faster at learning unfamiliar sociocultural norms. Study 2 conceptually replicated these results using a self-report measure of dispositional stress reactivity. Study 3 found that self-reported dispositional stress reactivity similarly predicted the rate of learning in a sociocultural task and a nonsocial task. Study 4 provided evidence for the underlying mechanism—participants higher on dispositional stress reactivity experienced more stress early in the sociocultural norm learning task, which predicted faster learning overall and lower stress later on in the task. These findings indicate that more stress-reactive individuals get more stressed out from the negative feedback that they receive in social interactions in unfamiliar settings, which motivates them to learn the relevant norms.