Evidence for a two-step model of social group influence

Emiel Cracco; Ulysses Bernardet; Robbe Sevenhant; Nette Vandenhouwe; Fran Copman; Wouter Durnez; Klaas Bombeke; Marcel Brass

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.104891

Evidence for a two-step model of social group influence

iScience. 2022 Aug 6;25(9):104891. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104891. eCollection 2022 Sep 16.

Authors

Emiel Cracco^{1

2}, Ulysses Bernardet³, Robbe Sevenhant¹, Nette Vandenhouwe¹, Fran Copman¹, Wouter Durnez⁴, Klaas Bombeke⁴, Marcel Brass^{1

5}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium.
² Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium.
³ Aston Institute of Urban Technology and the Environment, Aston University, Birmingham, UK.
⁴ imec-mict-UGent, Department of Communication Sciences, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium.
⁵ Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany.

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Biological sciences.