The role of experimenter belief in social priming

Research suggests that stimuli that prime social concepts can fundamentally alter people’s behavior. However, most researchers who conduct priming studies fail to explicitly report double-blind procedures. Because experimenter expectations may influence participant behavior, we asked whether a short pre-experiment interaction between participants and experimenters would contribute to priming effects when experimenters were not blind to participant condition. An initial double-blind experiment failed to demonstrate the expected effects of a social prime on executive cognition. To determine whether double-blind procedures caused this result, we independently manipulated participants’ exposure to a prime and experimenters’ belief about which prime participants received. Across four experiments, we found that experimenter belief, rather than prime condition, altered participant behavior. Experimenter belief also altered participants’ perceptions of their experimenter, suggesting that differences in experimenter behavior across conditions caused the effect. Findings reinforce double-blind designs as experimental best practice and suggest that people’s prior beliefs have important consequences for shaping behavior with an interaction partner.</jats:p

The subjective value of a smile alters social behaviour

Face-to-face social behaviour is difficult to explain, leading some researchers to call it the "dark matter" of psychology/neuroscience [1]. We apply an idea from neuroeconomics to this problem, suggesting that how people subjectively value facial expressions should predict usage differences during unconstrained interaction. Specifically, we ask whether the subjective value of smiles is malleable as a consequence of immediate social experience and how this relates to smiling during face-to-face interactions. We measured the value of a smile in monetary terms and found that increases in people's social neediness caused devaluation of polite smiles but no changes in how they valued genuine smiles. This result predicts that participants induced to feel high levels of social need should be less responsive to their social partners' polite smiles in a subsequent unconstrained social interaction. As expected, high social-need participants returned fewer polite smiles when interacting with a partner, leading to poor interaction outcomes. Genuine smile reciprocity remained unchanged. Findings show that social states influence real-world interactions by changing social-cue valuation, highlighting a potential mechanism for understanding the moment-to-moment control of social behaviour and how behaviour changes based on people's subjective evaluations of the social environment

The Impact of Experience on Affective Responses during Action Observation

Perceiving others in action elicits affective and aesthetic responses in observers. The present study investigates the extent to which these responses relate to an observer's general experience with observed movements. Facial electromyographic (EMG) responses were recorded in experienced dancers and non-dancers as they watched short videos of movements performed by professional ballet dancers. Responses were recorded from the corrugator supercilii (CS) and zygomaticus major (ZM) muscles, both of which show engagement during the observation of affect-evoking stimuli. In the first part of the experiment, participants passively watched the videos while EMG data were recorded. In the second part, they explicitly rated how much they liked each movement. Results revealed a relationship between explicit affective judgments of the movements and facial muscle activation only among those participants who were experienced with the movements. Specifically, CS activity was higher for disliked movements and ZM activity was higher for liked movements among dancers but not among non-dancers. The relationship between explicit liking ratings and EMG data in experienced observers suggests that facial muscles subtly echo affective judgments even when viewing actions that are not intentionally emotional in nature, thus underscoring the potential of EMG as a method to examine subtle shifts in implicit affective responses during action observation

Data

Data from Experiments 1 (not pre-registered), 2a (not pre-registered), 3, and

RRR - Dijksterhuis - Secondary Replication - Heerey

Our laboratory's Implementation of the Dijksterhuis RRR protoco