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In this experiment, we manipulated what men believed about their own penis size, relative to others. We gave them false information, stating that the average penis size was larger than it in fact is, reasoning that, on average, these males will feel that relatively and subjectively their own penis was smaller; compared to those told that the average penis size was smaller than true average. We then asked them to rate how much they would like to own a sports car. These facts and questions were buried amongst other items giving information and asking for product ratings, so that our hypothesis was masked from participants. We found that males, and males over 30 in particular, rated sports cars as more desirable when they were made to feel that they had a small penis.

People are accurate at classifying emotions from facial expressions but much poorer at determining if such expressions are spontaneously felt or deliberately posed. We explored if the method used by senders to produce an expression influences the decoder’s ability to discriminate authenticity, drawing inspiration from two well-known acting techniques: the Stanislavski (internal) and Mimic method (external). We compared spontaneous surprise expressions in response to a jack-in-the-box (genuine condition), to posed displays of senders who either focused on their past affective state (internal condition) or the outward expression (external condition). Although decoders performed better than chance at discriminating the authenticity of all expressions, their accuracy was lower in classifying external surprise compared to internal surprise. Decoders also found it harder to discriminate external surprise from spontaneous surprise and were less confident in their decisions, perceiving these to be similarly intense but less genuine-looking. The findings suggest that senders are capable of voluntarily producing genuine-looking expressions of emotions with minimal effort, especially by mimicking a genuine expression. Implications for research on emotion recognition are discussed.

People hold strong beliefs about the role of emotional cues in detecting deception. While research on the diagnostic value of such cues has been mixed, their influence on human veracity judgements is yet to be fully explored. Here, we address the relationship between emotional information and veracity judgements. In Study 1, the role of emotion recognition in the process of detecting naturalistic lies was investigated. Decoders’ veracity judgements were compared based on differences in trait empathy and their ability to recognise microexpressions and subtle expressions. Accuracy was found to be unrelated to facial cue recognition and negatively related to empathy. In Study 2, we manipulated decoders’ emotion recognition ability and the type of lies they saw: experiential or affective (emotional and unemotional). Decoders received either emotion recognition training, bogus training, or no training. In all scenarios, training did not affect veracity judgements. Experiential lies were easier to detect than affective lies; however, affective unemotional lies were overall the hardest to judge. The findings illustrate the complex relationship between emotion recognition and veracity judgements, with abilities for facial cue detection being high yet unrelated to deception accuracy.

We apply the author's computational approach to groups to our empirical work studying and modelling riots. We suggest that assigning roles in particular gives insight, and measuring the frequency of bystander behaviour provides a method to understand the dynamic nature of intergroup conflict, allowing social identity to be incorporated into models of riots.

Riots are unpredictable and dangerous. Our understanding of the factors that cause riots is based on correlational observations of population data, or post hoc introspection of individuals. To complement these accounts, we developed innovative experimental techniques, investigated the psychological factors of rioting and explored their consequences with agent-based simulations. We created a game, ‘Parklife’, that physically co-present participants played using smartphones. In two teams, participants tapped on their screen to grow trees and flowerbeds on separate but adjacent virtual parks. Participants could also tap to vandalize the other team's park. In some conditions, we surreptitiously introduced inequity between the teams so that one (the disadvantaged team) had to tap more for each reward. The experience of inequity caused the disadvantaged team to engage in more destruction, and to report higher relative deprivation and frustration. Agent-based models suggested that acts of destruction were driven by the interaction between individual level of frustration and the team's behaviour. Our results provide insights into the psychological mechanisms underlying collective action.

Riots are unpredictable and dangerous. Our understanding of the factors that cause riots are based on correlational observations of population data, or post hoc introspection of individuals. To complement these accounts, we developed innovative experimental techniques, investigated the psychological factors of rioting, and explored their consequences with agent-based simulations. We created a game, ‘Parklife’, that physically co-present participants played using smartphones. In two teams, participants tapped on their screen to grow trees and flowerbeds on separate but adjacent virtual parks. Participants could also tap to vandalise the other team’s park. In some conditions, we surreptitiously introduced inequity between the teams so that one (the disadvantaged team) had to tap more for each reward. The experience of inequity caused the disadvantaged team to engage in more destruction, and to report higher relative deprivation and frustration. Agent-based models suggested that acts of destruction were driven by the interaction between individual level of frustration and the team’s behaviour. Our results provide insights into the psychological mechanisms underlying collective action.

The COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing restrictions have been associated with changes in use of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (HIV-PrEP), use of doxycycline as STI-PrEP and sexual behaviour including chemsex behaviour among men who have sex with men (MSM).1 2 As part of a local service needs assessment for the provision of services for MSM using PrEP and MSM engaging in chemsex, we asked MSM to complete a short anonymous online electronic survey after their PrEP monitoring appointment. Of the 269 MSM who attended for HIV-PrEP monitoring …

The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect unreliability in their conspecifics. Yet, how such epistemic vigilance is achieved from naturalistic sensory inputs remains unclear. Here we show that listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of other speakers from their speech are based on a common prosodic signature. Using a data-driven method, we separately decode the prosodic features driving listeners’ perceptions of a speaker’s certainty and honesty across pitch, duration and loudness. We find that these two kinds of judgments rely on a common prosodic signature that is perceived independently from individuals’ conceptual knowledge and native language. Finally, we show that listeners extract this prosodic signature automatically, and that this impacts the way they memorize spoken words. These findings shed light on a unique auditory adaptation that enables human listeners to quickly detect and react to unreliability during linguistic interactions., It remains unclear whether and how listeners can infer speakers’ reliability from the sound of their voice. Here, the authors show that listeners from several languages rely on a common prosodic signature to infer whether speakers are lying or doubting.

JD, SR and CS received grant ES/N01068X/1 from the Economic and Social Research Council (https://esrc.ukri.org/). Introduction Do we always do what others do, and, if not, when and under what conditions do we do so? In this paper we test the hypothesis that mimicry is moderated by the mere knowledge of whether the source is a member of the same social category as ourselves. Methods We investigated group influence on mimicry using three tasks on a software platform which interfaces with mobile computing devices to allow the controlled study of collective behaviour in an everyday environment. Results Overall, participants (N = 965) were influenced by the movements of confederates (represented as dots on a screen) who belonged to their own category in both purposive and incidental tasks. Conclusion Our results are compatible with collective level explanations of social influence premised on shared social identification. This includes both a heuristic of unintended mimicry (the acts of group members are diagnostic of how one should act), and communication of affiliation (based on a desire to make one’s group cohesive). The results are incompatible with traditional ‘contagion’ accounts which suggest mimicry is automatic and inevitable. The results have practical implications for designing behavioural interventions which can harness the power of copying behaviour, for example in emergency evacuations. Publisher PDF

Correction to: Nature Communications https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20649-4, published online 8 February 2021. The original version of the Supplementary Information associated with this Article contained errors in Supplementary Figures 1, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8 and an error in the figure legend of Supplementary Figure 8. The HTML has been updated to include a corrected version of the Supplementary Information; the original incorrect version of the Supplementary Information file can be found as Supplementary Information associated with this Correction.

Copyright © 2017 The Authors. 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. Wellcome Trust. Grant Number: WT105128AIA

The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect unreliability in their conspecifics. Yet, how epistemic vigilance is achieved from naturalistic sensory inputs such as speech remains largely unknown. Here we show that a common prosodic code signals both confidence and honesty to listeners. Using a novel data-driven method, we decode the prosodic contours driving social attributions of confidence and honesty from speech across pitch, duration and loudness. We find that these two kinds of judgements about the reliability of a speaker rely on a common prosodic code that is independent from individuals’ conceptual knowledge and native language. We also demonstrate that listeners extract these prosodic signatures of reliability automatically, and that this impacts the way they memorize new spoken words. These findings shed light on a unique communicative adaptation that enables human listeners to quickly detect and react to unreliability during linguistic interactions.

The Western Sydney Sexual Health Centre is a publicly funded sexual health service which provides sexual healthcare for a large population of non-Australian-born, non-English-speaking and culturally diverse men who have sex with men (MSM). As some of these MSM do not have access to universal healthcare coverage (Medicare) and many find the cost of the daily HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) too expensive, they would benefit from more affordable (PrEP) access. The Centre’s multidisciplinary team are experienced at delivering daily PrEP, and approximately 500 MSM access PrEP per year. However, given that the proportion of incident HIV infection among non-Australian-born MSM is increasing locally, it is important to engage such individuals and offer cheaper …

The average judgment of large numbers of people has been found to be consistently better than the best individual response. But what motivates individuals when they make collective decisions? While it is a popular belief that individual incentives promote out-of-the-box thinking and diverse solutions, the exact role of motivation and reward in collective intelligence remains unclear. Here we examined collective intelligence in an interactive group estimation task where participants were rewarded for their individual or group’s performance. In addition to examining individual versus collective incentive structures, we controlled whether participants could see social information about the others’ responses. We found that knowledge about others’ responses reduced the wisdom of the crowd and, crucially, this effect depended on how people were rewarded. When rewarded for the accuracy of their individual responses, participants converged to the group mean, increasing social conformity, reducing diversity and thereby diminishing their group wisdom. When rewarded for their collective performance, diversity of opinions and the group wisdom increased. We conclude that the intuitive association between individual incentives and individualist opinion needs revising.

Detecting deception is an important task in legal and investigative contexts, where the outcome of a charging decision or criminal trial can hang on the credibility of victim, witness or suspect testimony. However, people are poor judges of deception, often relying on incorrect nonverbal cues for their decision, when such behaviors may reflect the situation more than the sender’s internal state. Over two studies, we investigated one such situational factor relevant to forensic contexts: handcuffing suspects. Suspects provided truthful and deceptive responses in an interrogation setting, where half were in handcuffs. We investigated how suspects were judged by (a) an interrogator who was in the room, and (b) observers watching video recordings, either laypeople or police officers. Handcuffing was predicted to undermine efforts to detect deception, either by constraining suspects' gesticulation or by activating stereotypes associated with criminality. Indeed, handcuffing affected both suspect behavior (Study 1) and observers’ veracity judgments (Study 2). The findings highlight the need for research on situational factors, to inform deception detection and forensic practice.

Research in cognitive science typically places a boundary between participants and the stimuli they are asked to process. While this separation affords experimental control, it can also severely limit the generalizability of the conclusions that are drawn. Here, we review new evidence that some conclusions that have been drawn about social attention do not extend beyond the laboratory. They fundamentally misrepresent how social attention operates in natural social contexts. Critically, these difficulties have led to renewed interest in the dual function of gaze—when in authentic social situations, the eyes both collect information from the environment (an encoding function) and communicate one’s mental states to others (a signaling function)—which traditional social-attention paradigms arguably have failed to capture. We review this recent work and discuss the utility of adopting more naturalistic methods in cognitive science.

We introduce a method of using wrist-worn accelerometers to measure non-verbal social coordination within a group that includes autistic children. Our goal was to record and chart the children’s social engagement – measured using interpersonal movement synchrony – as they took part in a theatrical work- shop that was specifically designed to enhance their social skills. Interpersonal synchrony, an important factor of social engagement that is known to be impaired in autism, is cal- culated using a cross-wavelet similarity comparison between participants’ movement data. We evaluate the feasibility of the approach over 3 live performances, each lasting 2 hours, using 6 actors and a total of 10 autistic children. We show that by visualising each child’s engagement over the course of a performance, it is possible to highlight subtle moments of social coordination that might otherwise be lost when review- ing video footage alone. This is important because it points the way to a new method for people who work with autistic children to be able to monitor the development of those in their care, and to adapt their therapeutic activities accordingly.

Stories play a fundamental role in human culture. They provide a mechanism for sharing cultural identity, imparting knowledge, revealing beliefs, reinforcing social bonds and providing entertainment that is central to all human societies. Here we investigated the extent to which the delivery medium of a story (audio or visual) affected conscious and subconscious engagement with the narrative. Although participants self-reported greater involvement for watching video relative to listening to auditory scenes, stronger physiological responses were recorded for auditory stories. Sensors placed at their wrists showed higher and more variable heart rates, greater electrodermal activity, and even higher body temperatures. We interpret these findings as physiological evidence that the stories were more cognitively and emotionally engaging when presented in an auditory format. This may be because listening to a story, rather than watching a video, is a more active process of co-creation, and that this imaginative process in the listener’s mind is detectable on the skin at their wrist.