Atwood S, Schachner Adena, Mehr Samuel A
Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540 USA.
Department of Psychology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0109 USA.
Open Mind (Camb). 2022 Dec 16;6:280-290. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00067. eCollection 2022.
Many studies argue that synchronized movement increases prosocial attitudes and behavior. We reviewed meta-analytic evidence that reported effects of synchrony may be driven by experimenter expectancy, leading to experimenter bias; and participant expectancy, otherwise known as placebo effects. We found that a majority of published studies do not adequately control for experimenter bias and that multiple independent replication attempts with added controls have failed to find the original effects. In a preregistered experiment, we measured participant expectancy directly, asking whether participants have expectations about synchrony and prosociality that match the findings in published literature. Expectations about the effects of synchrony on prosocial attitudes directly mirrored previous experimental findings (including both positive and null effects)-despite the participants not actually engaging in synchrony. On the basis of this evidence, we propose an alternative account of the reported bottom-up effects of synchrony on prosociality: the effects of synchrony on prosociality may be explicable as the result of top-down expectations invoked by placebo and experimenter effects.
许多研究认为，同步运动会增强亲社会态度和行为。我们回顾了元分析证据，即报告的同步效应可能是由实验者期望驱动的，从而导致实验者偏差；以及参与者期望，也就是所谓的安慰剂效应。我们发现，大多数已发表的研究没有充分控制实验者偏差，并且多次添加控制的独立重复尝试未能发现原始效应。在一项预先注册的实验中，我们直接测量了参与者的期望，询问参与者对同步性和亲社会性的期望是否与已发表文献中的发现相符。尽管参与者实际上并未参与同步，但他们对同步性对亲社会态度影响的期望直接反映了先前的实验结果（包括积极和无效效应）。基于这一证据，我们提出了一个关于所报告的同步性对亲社会性自下而上效应的替代解释：同步性对亲社会性的影响可能可以解释为安慰剂和实验者效应引发的自上而下期望的结果。
