How can others influence our actions

We often think about conforming and imitation and then we think about differentiation and uniqueness, but these two things often work in concert. We want to be similar but different. We want to be, in some sense, optimally distinct. Ilaria Schlitz is an editorial assistant at Behavioral Scientist. She studied psychology at Wesleyan University. Popular on Behavioral Scientist. By Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. By Anupriya Kukreja. By Evan Nesterak. By Vanessa Bohns. View Most Popular.

The Economist. Could Facebook influence the outcome of the presidential election? Pronin, E. Alone in a crowd of sheep: asymmetric perceptions of conformity and their roots in an introspection illusion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 92 4 , Berger, J. From karen to katie using baby names to understand cultural evolution. Psychological Science , 23 10 , Cohen, G. Party over policy: The dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 85 5 , Recommended for You. I would see that the girl had much pain, something troubling her in life that she seemed drama and attention. She obviously felt she needed reaction, good or bad. Hence why we build up guards around ourselves, become closed off to other humans, afraid to show who we truly are. If we are open, we are vulnerable and risk being hurt by others who are unconscious. Yet if we are aware that their hurtful words or actions are exactly that — unconscious.

Then we have a chance of putting a stop to reaction and ego taking over. Everything we do and say to people has an effect on them, we never know to some extent. We can only apologise. The other side to being aware and conscious of your thoughts and actions is that when you are personally attacked by someone — you can choose to diminish their comment or action.

No happy person who is conscious goes around verbally abusing people. For example a woman once had a go at me, I was in the wrong slightly but she made it a big drama and was so angry, the tone of voice etc was not very nice. I apologised and instead talked with her as a friend would. This would only lead to hurtful comments and cause harm to each other..

No resolving. We are not robots, we are alive and we have feelings. The other day I made fun of someone being different and called her weird behind her back, who am I to do that? Judgment and criticism only separates us, prevents us from bonding and sharing.

Next time you find yourself judging someone or criticising them, have a think. Participants were seated in a dimly lit room facing a color monitor at a distance of 60 cm. The experiment was controlled by Presentation run on a 3.

The stimulus set was identical to Experiment 1 of Bach and Tipper It consisted of eight movies see Fig. Two of these movies showed John or George kicking a soccer ball, and two movies showed John or George pressing a key on a computer keyboard. In these four movies, the head of each actor appeared on the left side of the frame centre eccentricities: kicking: 1. After the computer-driven instructions and a short training phase of 16 trials the experiment began. It lasted for about 15 min and consisted of trials.

Each participant saw four of the eight movies, which were presented at equal rates in a randomized order. Movies were selected in the following way. For one participant, the two actors were presented on the right while kicking and on the left while typing. For another participant, the sides of presentation were reversed between typing and kicking actions. This ensured that for each participant, a right key-press to identify actor one was spatially compatible with only one of the two situations in which he appeared e.

Conversely, the left key-press to identify actor two was spatially compatible with the academic situation but not the sporty situation. Participants initiated each trial by pressing the space bar with their left hand. After ms the movie was presented.

Participants were instructed to identify the individual during the interval in which the movie played ms. If their identification was correct, the next trial was allowed to start. If participants were too slow or committed an error an error-message was displayed. After the experiment was finished, a short questionnaire consisting of four questions was presented on the computer screen.

They also rated the degree to which they thought him academic. They answered the same two questions with regard to the second actor. The order in which actors and traits were rated was counterbalanced across participants. Thus, the RTs to identify the two persons in the two situations depended on which person was identified with a spatially compatible response while typing, and which person was identified with a compatible response while kicking.

We further investigated whether this dependency on compatible responses was present for both the sporty and academic situations. See Table 1 for the RT data in all conditions, and Fig. The upper two panels show the spatial compatibility effects for RTs upper panel and Error rates middle panel in the identification task, collapsed across the two persons John and George.

The lower panel shows the results of the personal trait judgment task. Error bars show the standard error of the means.

Results of the experiment in RTs, Error rates, and personal trait ratings for the two persons George, John and both scenes academic, sporty , depending on whether George was always presented in a compatible manner while typing and John while kicking, or vice versa. The persons were more easily identified in the academic scenes than the sporty scenes, and this advantage was particularly found for the identification of George. Thus, in both scenes, the participants made fewer errors when identifying the person for which response side and head location were compatible see Fig.

Thus, the attribution of personal traits to the two persons depended on which person was identified with a spatially compatible response while typing, and which person was identified with a compatible response while kicking. Although George was generally seen to be more academic than John, this difference was reduced when John was identified with a compatible response while typing. Conversely, although John was generally perceived sportier than George, this difference was reduced when George was identified with a compatible response while kicking.

As a last step of our analysis, we performed a mediation analysis to investigate whether our spatial compatibility manipulation affected trait judgment directly or by inducing changes in response fluency during person identification. To this end, we derived single measures for a the spatial compatibility manipulation, b the resulting compatibility effects in the RTs and Error rates, and c the compatibility effects in the personal trait judgments.

The measure for the compatibility effects in RTs, Error rates and trait judgments were calculated by subtracting the mean of the sporty John and academic George responses from the mean of academic John and sporty George responses. The first group of participants should therefore show positive compatibility effects, whereas the second group should show negative effects. The critical test for mediation is whether controlling for the effects of the mediator variables i.

Thus, the mediational analysis confirms that our spatial compatibility manipulation affected trait judgments not directly, but at least partially by inducing fluency effects in the Error rates during person identification.

The present study replicated the vision-action personality effect demonstrated by Bach and Tipper As in the previous study, the actions of the observer influenced which personal traits she attributed to individuals she watched at the same time.

Our new results also provide insights into the level of action representation at which the effects occurred. These variations in response fluency were sufficient to influence personal trait judgments. Actors were judged sportier when they were identified more fluently while performing the sporty action. They were judged more academic when they were more fluently identified while performing the academic action. The critical role of fluency in affecting personal trait judgments was further confirmed by a mediational analysis.

It showed that our spatial compatibility manipulation did not influence subsequent personal trait judgments directly, but specifically because it evoked changes in the fluency of the responses. One person might, for instance, have appeared sportier because the representation of his kicking action was enhanced if the observer performed a similar foot action, and disrupted if he performed a dissimilar hand action. Although such a process could take place, it cannot explain the present results.

Similar effects of fluency on judgments have been observed before. However, our results go beyond these findings in several respects. First, whereas in previous studies fluency was a consequence of the perceptual properties of the viewed stimuli such as contrast or presentation time, it was now manipulated by affecting the overt motor behavior of the participants i.

Second, previously observed changes in attitude to objects were typically very general, affecting global attributes such as liking or beauty. In contrast, the present manipulation induced specific changes in attitude and enhanced certain traits of the observed persons but not others i. And third, to our knowledge, this is the first study that used a motor fluency manipulation to successfully induce changes in the attitude towards other people, as opposed to abstract stimuli or objects.

Our new findings may serve to link current ideas from social psychology to research on clinical populations. A failure to differentiate self from other is increasingly recognized as a hallmark of various clinical syndromes. Similarly, in schizophrenia the inner speech of the sufferers might become misattributed to other, often malevolent, individuals cf. Our study shows that such misattributions are not restricted to clinical populations but also take place in the general population, though of course to a less extreme extent.

The differences between our study and previous reports of fluency affecting stimulus judgments also raise the question about which mechanism drives the effect, and about exactly what becomes misattributed. Prior research on fluency suggests that the effects occur on the level of affective responses for a review, see Reber et al. For instance, Monahan, Murphy, and Zajonc showed that presenting stimuli repeatedly leads to a general enhancement of positive affect that, in turn, can affect the judgment of even unrelated stimuli.

Similarly, the fluent identification of one individual e. A second possibility is that the personal trait judgment effects reflect the misattribution of the fluency experiences themselves, regardless of affective consequences of the fluent responses. We propose that the fluency experiences evoked by spatially compatible responses might similarly be transferred to the observed individuals and let their actions appear more fluent. Recent findings from neuroimaging studies are consistent with such a view.

Areas in the anterior cingulate cortex ACC have been shown to evaluate the outcome of actions with regard to effort, pain, errors, or the presence of response conflict for a review, see Botvinick et al.

However, the critical overlap between self and other did not exist on the level of the specific motor acts that were performed. We thank Andy Eichhorn and Conrad Taylor for their help in preparing the stimulus material, and Erin Heerey and India Morrison for feedback on the paper.

Electronic mail may be sent to p. The work was supported by a Wellcome Trust Progamme grant awarded to S. However, to perform the identification task, participants had to orient their attention towards the faces of the actors. Since compatibility effects strongly depend on where attention is distributed on the display e. Action based compatibility should therefore, if anything, produce the opposite pattern of results in RTs, Error rates, and ratings as the spatial compatibility between head location and response keys.

National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Sponsored Document from. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. J Exp Soc Psychol. Steven P. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Patric Bach: ku.