“Be careful what you do”: How social threat influences social attention driven by reach-to-grasp movements

ABSTRACT

Social attention is the ability to share with social partners the attentional focus on an object and to orient attentional resources after observing others’ behaviors. In the present work, we analyzed whether social threat may influence social attention during the observation of social agents’ reach-to-grasp movements. In two experimental studies, we adopted a Posner-like paradigm: participants were required to classify neutral stimuli appearing in a congruent or incongruent position with the actor’s movement. Membership (ingroup vs. outgroup) and contextual cues (neutral vs. threatening objects) were manipulated. The results showed a robust action-cueing effect: responses to stimuli in a congruent position with the actor’s action were faster than responses to incongruent stimuli. Interestingly, we found a stronger effect for the threatening outgroup (i.e., Iraqi) than for the ingroup (i.e., Italian), especially in presence of menacing objects. No effects were found when observing the non-threatening outgroup (i.e., Japanese).

KEYWORDS:

• Social attention
• action observation
• group membership
• social threat
• stereotypes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/9x36f/.

Open scholarship

 

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/9x36f/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roberta Capellini

Roberta Capellini received the PhD degree in Psychology, Linguistics and Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Milano-Bicocca. She worked as a post-doc fellow at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Her research interests focus on social attention processes, motor resonance, and cognitive ergonomics.

Simona Sacchi

Roberta Capellini received the PhD degree in Psychology, Linguistics and Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Milano-Bicocca. She worked as a post-doc fellow at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Her research interests focus on social attention processes, motor resonance, and cognitive ergonomics.