Self- and Other-Orientation in High Rank: A Cultural Psychological Approach to Social Hierarchy.

PUBLIC ABSTRACT: Social hierarchy is one fundamental aspect of human life, structuring interactions in families, teams, and entire societies. In this review, we put forward a new theory about how social hierarchy is shaped by the wider societal contexts (i.e., cultures). Comparing East Asian and Western cultural contexts, we show how culture comprises societal beliefs about who can raise to high rank (e.g., become a leader), shapes interactions between high- and low-ranking individuals (e.g., in a team), and influences human thought and behavior in social hierarchies. Overall, we find cultural similarities, in that high-ranking individuals are agentic and self-oriented in both cultural contexts. But we also find important cross-cultural differences. In East Asian cultural contexts, high-ranking individuals are also other oriented; they are also concerned about the people around them and their relationships. We close with a call to action, suggesting studying social hierarchies in more diverse cultural contexts.

Harm to self outweighs benefit to others in moral decision making.

How we make decisions that have direct consequences for ourselves and others forms the moral foundation of our society. Whereas economic theory contends that humans aim at maximizing their own gains, recent seminal psychological work suggests that our behavior is instead hyperaltruistic: We are more willing to sacrifice gains to spare others from harm than to spare ourselves from harm. To investigate how such egoistic and hyperaltruistic tendencies influence moral decision making, we investigated trade-off decisions combining monetary rewards and painful electric shocks, administered to the participants themselves or an anonymous other. Whereas we replicated the notion of hyperaltruism (i.e., the willingness to forego reward to spare others from harm), we observed strongly egoistic tendencies in participants' unwillingness to harm themselves for others' benefit. The moral principle guiding intersubject trade-off decision making observed in our study is best described as egoistically biased altruism, with important implications for our understanding of economic and social interactions in our society.

Europe's Culture(s): Negotiating Cultural Meanings, Values, and Identities in the European Context.

The intent of this Special Issue is to be a starting point for a broadly-defined European cultural psychology. Across seven research articles, the authors of this Special Issue explore what European culture(s) and European identity entail, how acculturation within the European cultural contexts takes place and under what conditions a multicultural Europe might be possible. The Special Issue also discusses what is currently missing from the research agenda. Therein, the findings of this Special Issue constitute an important starting point for future psychological research that accompanies Europe along its journey into the 21st century.

Video meeting signals: Experimental evidence for a technique to improve the experience of video conferencing.

We found evidence from two experiments that a simple set of gestural techniques can improve the experience of online meetings. Video conferencing technology has practical benefits, but psychological costs. It has allowed industry, education and social interactions to continue in some form during the covid-19 lockdowns. But it has left many users feeling fatigued and socially isolated, perhaps because the limitations of video conferencing disrupt users' ability to coordinate interactions and foster social affiliation. Video Meeting Signals (VMS™) is a simple technique that uses gestures to overcome some of these limitations. First, we carried out a randomised controlled trial with over 100 students, in which half underwent a short training session in VMS. All participants rated their subjective experience of two weekly seminars, and transcripts were objectively coded for the valence of language used. Compared to controls, students with VMS training rated their personal experience, their feelings toward their seminar group, and their perceived learning outcomes as significantly higher. Also, they were more likely to use positive language and less likely to use negative language. A second, larger experiment replicated the first, and added a condition where groups were given a version of the VMS training but taught to use emoji response buttons rather than gestures to signal the same information. The emoji-trained groups did not experience the same improvement as the VMS groups. By exploiting the specific benefits of gestural communication, VMS has great potential to overcome the psychological problems of group video meetings.

Social information rapidly prioritizes overt but not covert attention in a joint spatial cueing task.

Coordinating actions with others is crucial for our survival. Our ability to see what others are seeing and to align our visual attention with them facilitates these joint actions. In the present research, we set out to increase our understanding of such joint attention by investigating the extent to which social information would be able to prioritize overt (when moving the eyes to attend) and covert (when shifting attention without eye movements) attention in a joint spatial cueing task. Participants saw a cue and detected a target at the same or a different location alongside an unseen partner of either higher or lower social rank. In a novel twist, participants were led to believe that the cue was connected to the gaze location of their partner. In Experiment 1, where participants were told to not move their eyes (covert attention), the partner's social rank did not change how quickly participants detected targets. But in Experiment 2, where participants were free to move their eyes naturally (overt attention), inhibition of return effects (slower responses to cued than uncued targets) were modulated by their partner's social rank. These social top-down effects occurred already at a short SOA of 150 ms. Our findings suggest that overt attention might provide a key tool for joint action, as it is penetrable for social information at the early stages of information processing.

Leaders in Interdependent Contexts Suppress Nonverbal Assertiveness: A Multilevel Analysis of Japanese University Club Leaders' and Members' Rank Signaling.

Previous research has shown that leadership is signaled through nonverbal assertiveness. However, those studies have been mostly conducted in individualistic cultural contexts, such as in the U.S. Here, we suggest that one important strategy for goal attainment in collectivistic cultures is for leaders to self-regulate their behaviors. Thus, contrary to the previous evidence from individualistic cultural contexts, in collectivistic cultural contexts, leaders might suppress nonverbal assertiveness. To test this possibility, we assessed nonverbal behaviors (NVB) of Japanese leaders and members, and how they were evaluated by observers. We recruited Japanese leaders and members of university clubs and video-recorded them while introducing their club. Then, we coded their nonverbal rank signaling behavior. Finally, we asked a new set of naïve observers to watch these video-clips and to judge targets' suitability for being possible club leaders. Results of a multilevel analysis (level 1: individual participants, level 2: clubs) suggested that the more the club culture focused on tasks (rather than relationships), the more likely were leaders (but not members) of those clubs to suppress their nonverbal assertiveness. Naïve observers judged individuals who restrained from emitting nonverbal assertiveness as being more suitable and worthy club leaders. Thus, our findings demonstrate the cultural fit between contextual effects at the collective level (i.e., cultural orientation of a group) and the signaling and perceiving of social ranks at the individual level (i.e., suppression of nonverbal assertiveness). We discuss the importance of studying the cultural fit between the collective reality that people inhabit and people's psychology for future research in cultural psychology.

Social Beliefs and Visual Attention: How the Social Relevance of a Cue Influences Spatial Orienting.

We are highly tuned to each other's visual attention. Perceiving the eye or hand movements of another person can influence the timing of a saccade or the reach of our own. However, the explanation for such spatial orienting in interpersonal contexts remains disputed. Is it due to the social appearance of the cue-a hand or an eye-or due to its social relevance-a cue that is connected to another person with attentional and intentional states? We developed an interpersonal version of the Posner spatial cueing paradigm. Participants saw a cue and detected a target at the same or a different location, while interacting with an unseen partner. Participants were led to believe that the cue was either connected to the gaze location of their partner or was generated randomly by a computer (Experiment 1), and that their partner had higher or lower social rank while engaged in the same or a different task (Experiment 2). We found that spatial cue-target compatibility effects were greater when the cue related to a partner's gaze. This effect was amplified by the partner's social rank, but only when participants believed their partner was engaged in the same task. Taken together, this is strong evidence in support of the idea that spatial orienting is interpersonally attuned to the social relevance of the cue-whether the cue is connected to another person, who this person is, and what this person is doing-and does not exclusively rely on the social appearance of the cue. Visual attention is not only guided by the physical salience of one's environment but also by the mental representation of its social relevance.

How different cultures look at faces depends on the interpersonal context.

Culture can influence how we see and experience the world, and recent research shows that it even determines how we look at each other. Yet, most of these laboratory studies use images of faces that are deprived of any social context. In the real world, we not only look at people's faces to perceive who they are, but also to signal information back to them. It is unknown, therefore, within which interpersonal contexts cultural differences in looking at faces emerge. In the current study, we manipulated one aspect of the interpersonal context of faces: whether the target face either established mutual gaze looking directly into the camera as if talking to the viewer or averted gaze slightly to the side as if talking to another person. East Asian and Western participants viewed target face videos while their eye movements were recorded. If cultural differences are exclusively related to encoding information from others, interpersonal context should not matter. However, if cultural differences are also the result of culturally specific expectations about how to appropriately interact with another person, then cultural differences should be modulated by whether the speaker seemingly addresses the viewer or another person. In support of the second hypothesis, we only find cultural differences in looking at faces in the mutual gaze condition. We speculate that cultural norms surrounding the use of gaze as a social signal may underlie previous findings of cultural differences in face perception. (PsycINFO Database Record

The dual function of social gaze.

Ears cannot speak, lips cannot hear, but eyes can both signal and perceive. For human beings, this dual function makes the eyes a remarkable tool for social interaction. For psychologists trying to understand eye movements, however, their dual function causes a fundamental ambiguity. In order to contrast signaling and perceiving functions of social gaze, we manipulated participants' beliefs about social context as they looked at the same stimuli. Participants watched videos of faces of higher and lower ranked people, while they themselves were filmed. They believed either that the recordings of them would later be seen by the people in the videos or that no-one would see them. This manipulation significantly changed how participants responded to the social rank of the target faces. Specifically, when they believed that the targets would later be looking at them, and so could use gaze to signal information, participants looked proportionally less at the eyes of the higher ranked targets. We conclude that previous claims about eye movements and face perception that are based on a single social context can only be generalized with caution. A complete understanding of face perception needs to address both functions of social gaze.