Shared attention is extremely common. In stadiums, public squares, and private living rooms, people attend to the world with others. Humans do so across all sensory modalities—sharing the sights, ...sounds, tastes, smells, and textures of everyday life with one another. The potential for attending with others has grown considerably with the emergence of mass media technologies, which allow for the sharing of attention in the absence of physical co-presence. In the last several years, studies have begun to outline the conditions under which attending together is consequential for human memory, motivation, judgment, emotion, and behavior. Here, I advance a psychological theory of shared attention, defining its properties as a mental state and outlining its cognitive, affective, and behavioral consequences. I review empirical findings that are uniquely predicted by shared-attention theory and discuss the possibility of integrating shared-attention, social-facilitation, and social-loafing perspectives. Finally, I reflect on what shared-attention theory implies for living in the digital world.
How does the cultural construct of collectivism impact social interactions? Two accounts of collectivism offer diverging predictions. The collectivism-as-values account proposes that people in ...collectivistic cultures prioritize their ingroup relationships; accordingly, this account predicts that collectivistic cultures will have more harmonious ingroup interactions than individualistic cultures. The socioecological account holds that individualistic cultures have high relational mobility, which requires people to invest in their ingroup relationships, whereas collectivistic cultures feature more fixed relationships that do not require positive engagement. To test these competing hypotheses about ingroup relationships across cultures, we sampled the daily interactions of college students in China and the United States. Results revealed that the individualistic culture (United States) had more positive ingroup interactions, more gratitude, and more emotional support than the collectivistic culture (China). The current findings are consistent with the socioecological account of collectivism and the effects of relational mobility on social relationships.
Agency and Identity in the Collective Self Shteynberg, Garriy; Hirsh, Jacob B.; Garthoff, Jon ...
Personality and social psychology review,
02/2022, Letnik:
26, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Contemporary research on human sociality is heavily influenced by the social identity approach, positioning social categorization as the primary mechanism governing social life. Building on the ...distinction between agency and identity in the individual self (“I” vs. “Me”), we emphasize the analogous importance of distinguishing collective agency from collective identity (“We” vs. “Us”). While collective identity is anchored in the unique characteristics of group members, collective agency involves the adoption of a shared subjectivity that is directed toward some object of our attention, desire, emotion, belief, or action. These distinct components of the collective self are differentiated in terms of their mental representations, neurocognitive underpinnings, conditions of emergence, mechanisms of social convergence, and functional consequences. Overall, we show that collective agency provides a useful complement to the social categorization approach, with unique implications for multiple domains of human social life, including collective action, responsibility, dignity, violence, dominance, ritual, and morality.
The target article posits that caregiver cooperation rendered heightened expression of childhood fear an adaptive response to threat. I argue that caregiver cooperation rendered childhood fear ...expression less accurate as a signal of actual threat, and hence less effective for harm avoidance. Further, other emotional expressions that avoid unwarranted caregiver stress may be more likely to evoke needed care.
Abstract Collective consciousness is “baked into” the architecture of the human mind—it is at the foundation of a uniquely human psychology, wherein homo sapiens have the intent and the capacity to ...cooperate with beings that are living and dead, human and otherwise. I discuss the psychological contours of collective consciousness and its effects on human cognition, affect, motivation, and behavior. Integrating across three major theoretical papers and dozens of empirical papers, I argue that the psychological structure and function of collective consciousness are intertwined; the former giving rise to the latter. I also discuss two varieties of collective consciousness—collective reality and collective psychology—that enable individual and group success in human society. I will end by describing how the psychology of collective consciousness can enhance our understanding of mutual trust and cooperation.
People increasingly view those with opposing political beliefs as less moral than those with shared political beliefs. Across two experiments, using a U.S. undergraduate sample (n = 1,070) and a U.S. ...resident online sample through Prolific (n = 402), we employed the Ultimatum Game (UG) to investigate whether acts of fairness, or even kindness, by persons with out-party political beliefs would mitigate moral derogation toward them. In neither experiment, did fairness or kindness by persons with opposite political beliefs moderate moral derogation. More extreme partisans engaged in even greater moral derogation of out-party (versus in-party) individuals, regardless of their acts of fairness or kindness. However, even self-identified moderate partisans engage in out-party moral derogation. The implications of these findings for political discourse and resolution for political conflict are discussed.
Scholars have long been concerned with understanding the psychological mechanisms by which cultural (i.e., shared) knowledge emerges. This article proposes a novel psychological mechanism that allows ...for the formation of cultural memories, even when intragroup communication is absent. Specifically, the research examines whether a stimulus is more psychologically and behaviorally prominent when it is assumed to be experienced by more similar versus less similar others. Findings across 3 studies suggest that stimuli such as time pressure (Study 1), words (Study 2), and paintings (Study 3) are more psychologically and behaviorally prominent when they are thought to be experienced by more (vs. less) similar others. Critically, the effect is absent when similar others are thought to be experiencing distinct stimuli from the participant (Study 3). Taken as a whole, these results are consistent with the hypothesis that stimuli which are assumed to be experienced by one's social group are more prominent in both cognition and behavior. Theoretical implications for the emergence of culture are discussed.
•A review of the latest scholarship on shared attention and its consequences.•A discussion of how shared attention leads to the emergence of a shared reality.•A summary of conceptual explanations for ...shared attention effects.
I review the recent literature on shared attention, instances in which one's personal perspective is also another's. As described by Shteynberg 6••, shared attention involves the activation of a psychological perspective that is personal and plural and irreducibly collective—a perspective in which the world is experienced from ‘our attention’. When shared attention is perceived, information under shared attention receives deeper cognitive processing. By updating mutual knowledge, shared attention facilitates communication and, quite possibly, the creation of shared attitudes and beliefs. In this review, I focus on the last 5 years of empirical work detailing the cognitive and affective consequences of shared attention. I also highlight empirical work on the relevance of shared attention to pragmatically important challenges, such as the polarizing effects of social and mass media consumption, as well as the cognitive mechanisms behind autism-like traits. In all, the findings underscore the possibility that shared attention is a basic psychological building block of human sociality—a capacity to act collectively with others who share one's reality.
Shared Attention at the Origin Shteynberg, Garriy
Journal of cross-cultural psychology,
11/2015, Letnik:
46, Številka:
10
Journal Article
Recenzirano
What is at the origin of a descriptive norm’s power to influence people? The standard explanation posits that a perceived widespread frequency of a given behavior signals a groupwide attitudinal ...agreement with that behavior, which in turn further encourages that behavior. Alternatively, I argue that the psychological power behind descriptive norms lies in the social nature of the attentional mode in which typical behavior is encountered. I introduce the reader to recent research on shared attention and its cognitive, attitudinal, affective, and behavioral consequences. Then, I use the shared attention perspective to further understand the psychological power of descriptive norms.
The study of observational learning, or learning from others, is a cornerstone of the behavioral sciences, because it grounds the continuity, diversity, and innovation inherent to humanity's cultural ...repertoire within the social learning capacities of individual humans. In contrast, collective learning, or learning with others, has been underappreciated in terms of its importance to human cognition, cohesion, and culture. We offer a theory of collective learning, wherein the cognitive capacity of collective attention indicates and represents common knowledge across group members, yielding mutually known representations, emotions, evaluations, and beliefs. By enhancing the comprehension of and cohesion with fellow group members, collective attention facilitates communication, remembering, and problem-solving in human groups. We also discuss the implications of collective learning theory for the development of collective identities, social norms, and strategic cooperation.
PDF
