Ritter Marie, Sauter Disa A
Department of Social Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2017 Nov 16;8:2006. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02006. eCollection 2017.
Group membership is important for how we perceive others, but although perceivers can accurately infer group membership from facial expressions and spoken language, it is not clear whether listeners can identify in- and out-group members from non-verbal vocalizations. In the current study, we examined perceivers' ability to identify group membership from non-verbal vocalizations of laughter, testing the following predictions: (1) listeners can distinguish between laughter from different nationalities and (2) between laughter from their in-group, a close out-group, and a distant out-group, and (3) greater exposure to laughter from members of other cultural groups is associated with better performance. Listeners ( = 814) took part in an online forced-choice classification task in which they were asked to judge the origin of 24 laughter segments. The responses were analyzed using frequentist and Bayesian statistical analyses. Both kinds of analyses showed that listeners were unable to accurately identify group identity from laughter. Furthermore, exposure did not affect performance. These results provide a strong and clear demonstration that group identity cannot be inferred from laughter.
群体成员身份对于我们如何看待他人很重要，虽然感知者可以从面部表情和语言中准确推断出群体成员身份，但尚不清楚听众是否能从非语言发声中识别出内群体和外群体成员。在当前的研究中，我们考察了感知者从笑声的非语言发声中识别群体成员身份的能力，检验了以下预测：（1）听众能够区分不同国籍的笑声；（2）能够区分来自其所属内群体、关系密切的外群体和关系疏远的外群体的笑声；（3）更多地接触其他文化群体成员的笑声与更好的表现相关。听众（N = 814）参与了一项在线强制选择分类任务，在该任务中，他们被要求判断24个笑声片段的来源。使用频率主义和贝叶斯统计分析对回答进行了分析。两种分析均表明，听众无法从笑声中准确识别群体身份。此外，接触并没有影响表现。这些结果有力且明确地证明，无法从笑声中推断出群体身份。
