Cracco, Emiel, Bernardet, Ulysses, Sevenhant, Robbe, Vandenhouwe, Nette, Copman, Fran, Durnez, Wouter, Bombeke, Klaas and Brass, Marcel (2022). Evidence for a two-step model of social group influence. iScience, 25 (9),
Abstract
Social group influence plays an important role in societally relevant phenomena such as rioting and mass panic. One way through which groups influence individuals is by directing their gaze. Evidence that gaze following increases with group size has typically been explained in terms of strategic processes. Here, we tested the role of reflexive processes. In an ecologically valid virtual reality task, we found that participants were more likely to follow the group’s gaze when more people looked, even though they knew the group provided no relevant information. Interestingly, participants also sometimes changed their mind after starting to follow the gaze of the group, indicating that automatic imitation can be overruled by strategic processes. This suggests that social group influence is best explained by a two-step model in which bottom-up imitative processes first elicit a reflexive tendency to imitate, before top-down strategic processes determine whether to execute or inhibit this reflex.
Publication DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.104891 |
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Divisions: | Aston University (General) |
Additional Information: | © 2022. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | Biological sciences,General |
Publication ISSN: | 2589-0042 |
Last Modified: | 02 Dec 2024 08:43 |
Date Deposited: | 26 Aug 2022 07:27 |
Full Text Link: | |
Related URLs: |
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PURE Output Type: | Article |
Published Date: | 2022-09-16 |
Published Online Date: | 2022-08-06 |
Accepted Date: | 2022-08-03 |
Authors: |
Cracco, Emiel
Bernardet, Ulysses ( 0000-0003-4659-3035) Sevenhant, Robbe Vandenhouwe, Nette Copman, Fran Durnez, Wouter Bombeke, Klaas Brass, Marcel |