Sun Chu, Wang Nanbo, Geng Haiyan
School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, The People's Republic of China.
Department of Psychology, School of Health, Fujian Medical University, Fujian, China.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2024 Dec;31(6):2856-2865. doi: 10.3758/s13423-024-02531-2. Epub 2024 Jun 18.
As social entities, individuals' perception and behaviors are susceptible to the influence of their social groups. Previous research has consistently shown that the group context in which individuals are situated significantly influences their perceptual processing. We aim to investigate whether the group context in which another individual is situated alters our understanding of their visual perception, which holds profound implications for interpersonal interactions. To address this inquiry, we conducted three experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a visual scene depicting multiple avatars seated around a table, all facing an arrow positioned at the center of the table. They were instructed to adopt the visual perspective of a specific avatar within the group to perceive the arrow's orientation, and then reproduce its orientation from their own perspectives. We found that participants exhibited a bias towards the group's average perspective when reproducing the arrow's orientation. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that reinforced group processing could elicit an earlier appearance of this bias. In Experiment 3, we investigated an alternative explanation positing that the aforementioned bias originated from visual ensemble perception rather than group influence by instructing participants to reproduce the target avatar's position relative to the arrow's orientation. If the bias indeed originated from ensemble perception, it should also manifest in this task. However, the absence of any reproduction bias refuted this possibility. Through these experiments, we demonstrate that our understanding of an individual's perceptual experiences is influenced by the social context in which they are situated, which manifests as a convergence phenomenon.
作为社会实体，个体的认知和行为容易受到其社会群体的影响。先前的研究一直表明，个体所处的群体环境会显著影响其感知加工。我们旨在探究另一个体所处的群体环境是否会改变我们对其视觉感知的理解，这对人际互动具有深远影响。为了回答这个问题，我们进行了三项实验。在实验1中，向参与者呈现一个视觉场景，描绘了多个虚拟角色围坐在一张桌子旁，所有人都面对着位于桌子中心的一支箭。他们被要求采用群体中某个特定虚拟角色的视觉视角来感知箭的方向，然后从自己的视角重现其方向。我们发现，参与者在重现箭的方向时表现出朝着群体平均视角的偏差。实验2进一步表明，强化的群体加工能够引发这种偏差的更早出现。在实验3中，我们通过指示参与者重现目标虚拟角色相对于箭的方向的位置，研究了一种替代解释，即上述偏差源自视觉整体感知而非群体影响。如果偏差确实源自整体感知，那么在这项任务中也应该会表现出来。然而，没有任何重现偏差反驳了这种可能性。通过这些实验，我们证明了我们对个体感知体验的理解受到其所处社会环境的影响，这种影响表现为一种趋同现象。
