Revealing dichotomous prior biases in social anxiety through a social prism model

Social situations can be overwhelming for some people, triggering avoidance and social anxiety (SA). However, it remains unknown why identical situations lead to different interpretations. Here, we developed a Social Prism Model to systematically address mechanisms underlying atypical social cognition in SA within a Bayesian cognitive framework. Through eight social valence judgment experiments (N = 541), we demonstrated that social anxiety may be shaped not by how sensory evidence is processed, but by robust dichotomous prior biases depending on social cues. The dichotomous prior biases indicated two parallel mental shortcuts that predispose individuals toward social fear, where negative prior biases were associated with an intolerance to uncertainty and a fear of social evaluations, and over-positive prior biases were associated with negative social learning. Our Bayesian simulations further demonstrated how variations in prior expectations parameters can give rise to biased social judgments, providing mechanistic support for the proposed framework. Collectively, these findings showed that the negative interpretations of the social situations can be understood within the Bayesian framework, highlighting a key role of prior expectation in shaping human social cognition.Author summary: Social situations can be overwhelming for some individuals, yet it remains unclear why the same scene triggers very different responses across people. Through a series of empirical human studies, we systematically decomposed social scenes into social cues of faces, bodies, animacy, emotion, interaction, and ambiguity. We showed that biased social cognition in social anxiety may arise from conflicting expectations about the social world, rather than from difficulty processing social cues. People with high social anxiety traits hold negative prior biases associated with intolerance to uncertainty and a fear of social evaluations, and at the same time, overly positive prior biases that reinforce maladaptive social learning. Together, our work offers a theory-driven framework for understanding heterogeneity in biased social cognition among social anxiety individuals, with implications for more targeted mental health interventions.