Department of Communication, University of California, Los Angeles, 2225 Rolfe Hall, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA.
Julius Clinical, Zeist, The Netherlands.
Sci Rep. 2024 Jun 25;14(1):14575. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-65535-x.
People often interact with groups (i.e., ensembles) during social interactions. Given that group-level information is important in navigating social environments, we expect perceptual sensitivity to aspects of groups that are relevant for personal threat as well as social belonging. Most ensemble perception research has focused on visual ensembles, with little research looking at auditory or vocal ensembles. Across four studies, we present evidence that (i) perceivers accurately extract the sex composition of a group from voices alone, (ii) judgments of threat increase concomitantly with the number of men, and (iii) listeners' sense of belonging depends on the number of same-sex others in the group. This work advances our understanding of social cognition, interpersonal communication, and ensemble coding to include auditory information, and reveals people's ability to extract relevant social information from brief exposures to vocalizing groups.
人们在社交互动中经常与群体（即集合）互动。鉴于群体层面的信息在导航社交环境中很重要，我们期望对与个人威胁以及社会归属感相关的群体方面具有感知敏感性。大多数集合感知研究都集中在视觉集合上，很少有研究关注听觉或声音集合。在四项研究中，我们提供了证据表明：（i）感知者仅通过声音就能准确地提取群体的性别构成；（ii）随着男性人数的增加，对威胁的判断也会增加；（iii）听众的归属感取决于群体中相同性别的其他人的数量。这项工作推进了我们对社会认知、人际沟通和集合编码的理解，包括听觉信息，并揭示了人们从短暂的发声群体接触中提取相关社会信息的能力。
