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Evidence for a two-step model of social group influence
Emiel Cracco1,2, Ulysses Bernardet3, Robbe Sevenhant1
1Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium.
Iscience
|September 2, 2022
Summary
Social influence impacts group behavior, like rioting. This study shows people reflexively follow group gaze, even when irrelevant, suggesting automatic imitation precedes strategic control.
Area of Science:
- Social Psychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Human Behavior
Background:
- Social groups significantly influence individual actions, impacting phenomena like mass panic and collective behavior.
- Gaze following, a key social influence mechanism, has been traditionally attributed to strategic decision-making processes.
- The role of automatic, reflexive processes in group gaze following remains less understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the influence of reflexive processes on social group gaze following.
- To determine if group size affects gaze following through automatic imitation rather than solely strategic considerations.
- To propose a dual-step model for social group influence on individual attention.
Main Methods:
- Utilized an ecologically valid virtual reality (VR) task to simulate group gaze dynamics.
- Assessed participants' gaze following behavior in response to varying group sizes.
- Recorded instances where participants altered their gaze direction mid-action, indicating potential strategic override.
Main Results:
- Participants demonstrated a higher propensity to follow the group's gaze as the number of individuals looking increased.
- This increased gaze following occurred even when participants were aware the group's gaze provided no pertinent information.
- A subset of participants exhibited a change of mind after initiating gaze following, suggesting a dynamic interplay of processes.
Conclusions:
- Social group influence on gaze is mediated by both reflexive imitation and strategic control.
- Bottom-up imitative processes may initially drive a tendency to follow the group's gaze.
- Top-down strategic processes can subsequently modulate or inhibit this reflexive tendency, leading to a two-step model of social influence.
Keywords:
Biological sciences
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