Cracco Emiel, Bernardet Ulysses, Sevenhant Robbe, Vandenhouwe Nette, Copman Fran, Durnez Wouter, Bombeke Klaas, Brass Marcel
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium.
Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium.
iScience. 2022 Aug 6;25(9):104891. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104891. eCollection 2022 Sep 16.
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.
社会群体影响在诸如暴乱和大规模恐慌等与社会相关的现象中起着重要作用。群体影响个体的一种方式是引导他们的目光。注视跟随随着群体规模的增加而增加，这一证据通常是从战略过程的角度来解释的。在这里，我们测试了反射过程的作用。在一个生态有效的虚拟现实任务中，我们发现当更多的人看向某个方向时，参与者更有可能跟随群体的目光，即使他们知道该群体没有提供相关信息。有趣的是，参与者有时在开始跟随群体的目光后也会改变主意，这表明自动模仿可能会被战略过程推翻。这表明社会群体影响最好用一个两步模型来解释，在这个模型中，自下而上的模仿过程首先引发一种反射性的模仿倾向，然后自上而下的战略过程决定是否执行或抑制这种反射。
