Do We Feel the Same Way If We Think the Same Way? Shared Attitudes and the Social Induction of Affect

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the literature on emotional mimicry, we argue that attitude similarity between a sender and a receiver influences the social induction of affect. Studies 1, 2, and 3 supported this reasoning by showing that similarity fostered, whereas dissimilarity blocked concordant reactions to a happy sender (but not to a sad sender). We also examined the mechanism behind these effects and found that similarity influenced liking of the happy sender but did not affect liking of the sad sender. Study 4 provided causal evidence for this idea by showing that similarity influenced the induction of positive affect through liking.

Acknowledgments

We thank Magdalena Gawarzyńska, Sylwia Jarosz, Aleksandra Karolak, Magda Kowalska, Justyna Michalak, Bartosz Neska, Paulina Rudzińska, and Alicja Sabat for their help in conducting experimental sessions. We intend to comply with the data-sharing standard of the American Psychological Association (Ethical Standard 8.14).

Notes

Although the meanings of these terms overlap, there are some slight differences between them. The most general one, affective linkage, can be applied to all processes by which the affective states of two or more people can be connected. It may manifest itself as a concordant affective reaction (e.g., happiness in response to happiness), a discordant affective reaction (e.g., happiness in response to sadness), or a complimentary affective reaction (e.g., fear in response to anger). Of importance, unlike emotional contagion and the social induction of affect, affective linkage does not require direct exposure to a sender. For instance, affect can be linked across individuals not only when they are exposed to each other but also when they react to the same stimulus (Elfenbein, 2014). Emotional contagion is the most specialized term, which implies that a receiver reacts to a sender’s affect with concordant affective reaction (discordant and complimentary affective reactions have been referred to as countercontagion; Hatfield et al., 1994). Moreover, this term is usually used to label the process that cannot take place without emotional mimicry being involved (and thus is often called primitive emotional contagion). The last term, social induction of affect, falls in between the previous two. It implies that the process (a) involves direct exposure to a sender’s emotional expression, (b) may take two forms: concordant induction (a receiver shows an affective shift in the same direction as a sender’s displayed affect) or discordant induction (a receiver shows an affective shift in the opposite direction), and (c) may be triggered not only by emotional mimicry but also by other mechanisms (e.g., social comparison processes). Thus, in accordance with Epstude and Mussweiler (2009) and McIntosh et al. (1994), we use the term “social induction of affect.”

We chose the items from an initial pool of 80 debatable statements generated by eight psychology students. Two independent judges selected 15 statements that referred to the most controversial issues. Next, we asked 54 students (35 female, 19 male) to rate the selected statements on a scale from 1 (definitely nondebatable) to 7 (definitely debatable). A one-sample t test against a reference mean (M_reference = 5.00) confirmed that all 15 statements were highly debatable (Ms > 5.50, SDs < 1.31, Cohen’s ds > .54; medium-to-large effects).

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