Department of Developmental, Personality and Social Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2021 Apr;74(4):746-759. doi: 10.1177/1747021820986528. Epub 2021 Feb 7.
A key prediction of motivational theories of automatic imitation is that people imitate in-group over out-group members. However, research on this topic has provided mixed results. Here, we investigate the possibility that social group modulations emerge only when people can directly compare in- and out-group. To this end, we conducted three experiments in which we measured automatic imitation of two simultaneously shown hands: one in-group and one out-group hand. Our general hypothesis was that the in-group hand would be imitated more than the out-group hand. However, even though both explicit and implicit manipulation checks showed that we succeeded in manipulating participants' feelings of group membership, we did not find support for the predicted influence of group membership on automatic imitation. In contrast to motivational theories, this suggests that group membership does not influence who we do or do not imitate, not even in a contrastive multi-agent paradigm.
动机理论对自动模仿的一个重要预测是，人们会模仿内群体成员而不是外群体成员。然而，关于这个主题的研究结果喜忧参半。在这里，我们研究了只有当人们可以直接比较内群体和外群体时，社会群体调节才会出现的可能性。为此，我们进行了三项实验，在实验中测量了同时呈现的两只手的自动模仿：一只内群体手和一只外群体手。我们的一般假设是，内群体手会比外群体手被模仿得更多。然而，尽管明确和隐含的操控检验都表明我们成功地操纵了参与者的群体归属感，但我们并没有发现群体归属对外群体自动模仿的预测影响。与动机理论相反，这表明群体归属不会影响我们模仿或不模仿的对象，即使在对比多主体范式中也是如此。
