Investigating Behaviour and Face Encoding in a Hypothetical Real-World Social Contract: Handwashing in Hazardous Health Settings

Investigations into the evolutionary origins of human cognition has shown that individuals’ memory for others is influenced by the latter’s behaviour in social contracts. Such research is primarily based on hypothetical or more abstract forms of social contracts, whereas an application of this knowledge to everyday health behaviours can be of great value. To address this, the current study investigated whether participants who were asked to imagine themselves in a hypothetical hazardous health scenario showed differential response sensitivity (d′) and latency (RT) to faces of hospital staff tagged with contrasting hand hygiene before touching patients: clean hands, dirty hands, or unknown hand-washing behaviour (control). The test used a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC: “old/new”) face recognition paradigm. The findings showed that d′ to dirty and clean hands were similar, but higher than for controls. Moreover, d′ was not affected by the occupation of hospital staff (nurses vs. porters). The absence of memory gains towards clean or dirty hands points to the need for new strategies to remind patients to observe (and remember) the hand hygiene of others when exposed to hazardous health environments.