Bound to the group and blinded by the leader: ideological leader-follower dynamics in a trust economic game

Competence-based social status and implicit preference modulate the ability to coordinate during a joint grasping task

Studies indicate that social status influences people's social perceptions. Less information is available about whether induced social status influences dyadic coordination during motor interactions. To explore this issue, we designed a study in which two confederates obtained high or low competence-based status by playing a game together with the participant, while the participant always occupied the middle position of the hierarchy. Following this status-inducing phase, participants were engaged in a joint grasping task with the high- and low-status confederates in different sessions while behavioural (i.e., interpersonal asynchrony and movement start time) indexes were measured. Participants' performance in the task (i.e., level of interpersonal asynchrony) when interacting with the low-status partner was modulated by their preference for him. The lower participants' preference for a low- relative to a high-status confederate, the worse participants' performance when interacting with the low-status confederate. Our results show that participants' performance during motor interactions changes according to the social status of the interaction partner.

Oculomotor behavior tracks the effect of ideological priming on deception

The decision to lie to another person involves a conflict between one's own and others' interest. Political ideology may foster self-promoting or self-transcending values and thus may balance or fuel self vs. other related conflicts. Here, we explored in politically non-aligned participants whether oculomotor behavior may index the influence on moral decision-making of prime stimuli related to left and right-wing ideologies. We presented pictures of Italian politicians and ideological words in a paradigm where participants could lie to opponents with high vs. low socio-economic status to obtain a monetary reward. Results show that left-wing words decreased self-gain lies and increased other-gain ones. Oculomotor behavior revealed that gazing longer at politicians' pictures led participants to look longer at opponent's status-related information than at game's outcome-related information before the decision. This, in turn, caused participants to lie less to low status opponents. Moreover, after lying, participants averted their gaze from high status opponents and maintained it towards low status ones. Our results offer novel evidence that ideological priming influences moral decision-making and suggest that oculomotor behavior may provide crucial insights on how this process takes place.

Modulation of preference for abstract stimuli following competence-based social status primes

In the present study, we measured whether competence-related high and low social status attributed to two unknown individuals affects participants' implicit reactivity to abstract stimuli associated to the identity of the same individuals. During a status-inducing procedure, participants were asked to play an interactive game with two (fake) players coded as high vs low status based on their game competence. Before and after the game, a modified version of the Affective Misattribution Procedure (AMP) was administered in which the players' faces were used as primes. The evaluation target, as is typical to AMP, was a Chinese ideogram. There were two different presentation timings for the prime image: 75 ms and 17 ms. After the status-inducing procedure, the evaluation targets preceded by the high-status prime (i.e. best player's face) were rated as more pleasant than those preceded by the low-status prime (i.e. worst player's face). This effect was only found, however, for the 75 ms lasting prime. Moreover, explicit ratings of the primes showed that the high-status player was rated as more intelligent, competent and dominant than the low status one. These results indicate that implicit preference and explicit evaluation of unacquainted individuals are rapidly modulated by competence-based social status attribution, thus hinting at the plastic nature of social categorization and, relatedly, the malleability of visual preference.