Can attitude similarity shape social inhibition of return?

ABSTRACT

We examined whether the perceived similarity between two individuals can shape social attention shifts during a joint-action task. Initially, a confederate was described to a naïve participant through a personality profile in order to manipulate the degree of attitude similarity between them, and they later performed a joint-action task involving alternated aiming movements towards peripheral targets. This task is known to elicit two forms of Inhibition of Return (IOR), namely longer latencies when responding to a target previously reached by either oneself (individual IOR) or by the partner (social IOR) as compared to a previously-unreached target. Here, both IOR effects emerged but – unlike previous studies – social IOR was greater than individual IOR. Interestingly, such magnified social IOR occurred regardless of the degree of attitude similarity between participants. This seems to suggest that social knowledge about others can lead to a generalized impact on social attention during real interactions with them.

KEYWORDS:

• Joint-action
• attitude similarity
• social attention
• social inhibition of return
• social cognition

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This article is related to:

Interactive Cognition: An introduction

Acknowledgements

We thank Elena Fanin and Andrea Paolo Meloni for their assistance in data collection. We also thank Francesca Capozzi, Jelena Ristic, Tim Welsh, and one anonymous reviewer for useful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data are available on OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/WQNT9.

Notes

1 Although data collected from the confederates may be biased by the fact that they were fully aware of the experimental logic and they were overexposed to the task, exploratory descriptive statistics have been nonetheless carried out for completeness. These suggested the lack of a consistent pattern of results across the two confederates.

2 Even if we did not have any specific hypotheses concerning the gender of the couple (i.e., same vs. different), an identical number of same- and different-gender couples was associated with the two conditions of attitude similarity (i.e., same vs. dissimilar), in order to avoid possible imbalances. Hence, we felt it was important to also explore the potential role of this additional social factor (i.e., gender of the couple) in shaping our data. Therefore, we initially performed two explorative repeated-measures ANOVAs – for both RTs and MTs – with target location (repeated vs. different) and person who provided the response on the previous trial (same vs. other) as within-participant factors, and with the degree of similarity (similar vs. dissimilar) and gender of the couple (same vs. different) as between-participant factors. As for RTs, both the target location × person × gender and the target location × person × degree of similarity × gender interactions were not significant (Fs < 1, ps > .465). The same pattern also emerged in MTs analyses (Fs < 1.057, ps > .311). Bayesian ANOVAs, including the same factors used in the frequentist analyses, confirmed that the models including either the target location × person × gender or the target location × person × degree of similarity × gender interactions (or both) were not supported by the available data (BF₁₀s < 1 for both RTs and MTs).

3 To provide further evidence that the degree of similarity led to comparable results on both individual and social IOR, two additional ANOVAs, separated as a function of the person who provided the response on the previous trial (same vs. other), were executed with target location (repeated vs. different) as within-participant factor and the degree of similarity (similar vs. dissimilar) as between-participant factor. In both ANOVAs, the main effect of target location was significant (Fs > 23.673, ps < .001), while neither the main effect of the degree of similarity (Fs < 1, ps > .341) nor the interaction term (Fs < 1.208, ps > .279) were significant. The two Bayesian ANOVAs, identical as that used for the frequentist approach, confirmed that the best model fitting the data only included target location as main effect. This model was also preferable over the model also including the target location × degree of similarity interaction, BF₁₀s > 3.18.

In addition, given that the experimental task was relatively long, we also explored whether our manipulation impacted social IOR in the initial part of the experiment, based on the possibility that an effect of similarity, if any, might wash out over time. Therefore, we re-analysed RTs by binning trials in both two (i.e., first half, second half) and four (i.e., first-to-fourth quartiles) clusters. However, in both cases, the critical interaction involving target location × person × degree of similarity × cluster led to non-significant results (Fs < 1, ps > .772), thus making it unlikely that the modulatory role of the degree of similarity was indeed present at the beginning of the experiment and then vanished with time. Moreover, Bayesian analyses confirmed that, irrespectively of the number of clusters (i.e., two or four), the best model fitting the data included target location, person, and cluster as main effects, and the target location × person interaction, and this model was preferable over the model including the target location × person × degree of similarity × cluster interaction, BF₁₀s > 150.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by a DPSS-SID2019 grant (University of Padova) to MD; [Università degli Studi di Padova].