Experimental Psychology Seminar - Beyond contagion? Shared identity as boundary condition and mechanism in behavioural transmission
Speaker: Dr John Drury, School of Psychology, University of Sussex
‘Contagion’ is the dominant explanatory concept for
behavioural transmission and spread. It has been applied to a range of
phenomena, ranging from emotions, simple responses such as yawning, to complex
social processes, such as financial market behaviour. In the social sciences,
one of the first usages was in the explanation of rioting, and this is where it
if often found today. Its distinctive prediction is that exposure alone is
sufficient for uncritical and indiscriminate influence to occur. By contrast,
recent research on both crowd behaviour and on emotional transmission suggests
group boundaries to influence, since social identity is the mechanism of
influence. In this talk, I describe some preliminary evidence testing these
competing hypotheses. In one experiment, participants (n = 75) were exposed to
an aggressive crowd noise in three conditions: ingroup in relation to the
crowd, outgroup in relation to the crowd, or no groups. On both explicit and
reaction-time (IAT) measures, those in the outgroup condition were most likely
to reject aggression. Further in line with the social identity hypothesis, and
against the contagion hypothesis, self-relevance of source was found to mediate
this effect, and identity strength was found to moderate it. The presentation
concludes with a discussion of how far these social identity principles might
apply to other transmission phenomena.
Time: 4pm, 29 November 2016
Venue: Room 305, 26 Bedford Way, WC1H 0AP