Relevant for us? We-prioritization in cognitive processing.

Abstract

Humans are social by nature. We ask whether this social nature operates as a lens through which individuals process the world even in the absence of immediate interactions or explicit goals to collaborate. Is information that is potentially relevant to a group one belongs to ('We') processed with priority over information potentially relevant to a group one does not belong to ('They')? We conducted three experiments using a modified version of Sui and colleagues' (2012) shapelabel matching task. Participants were assigned to groups either via a common preference between assigned team-members (Experiment 1) or arbitrarily (Experiment 2). In a third experiment, only personal pronouns were used. Overall, a processing benefit for we-related information (we-prioritization) occurred regardless of the type of group induction. A final experiment demonstrated that we-prioritization did not extend to other individual members of a short-term transitory group. We suggest that the results reflect an intrinsic predisposition to process information 'relevant for us' with priority, which might feed into optimizing collaborative processes.

Overlap in processing advantages for minimal ingroups and the self

“…Similarly, the results contrast to prior work in which a significant ingroup-advantage (with a similar sample size) in the context of well-established teams was found even when the self and ingroup pairings were presented within the same task blocks 28 . The results are, however, consistent with a recent study showing minimal ingroup prioritisation was lower in magnitude than self-prioritisation when the two kinds of social stimuli were salient at the same time, and barely present when other ingroup members were not known at all 27 , as was the case in the present study. These findings suggest that novel ingroup-biases do not follow exactly the same patterns as those for established groups, particularly when competing with the saliency of the self.…”

“…Novel groups, however, may not hold enough weight to retain attention when task demands increase and the self competes for attention. This is supported in a recent study 27 , which found significantly reduced ingroup-prioritisation compared to self-prioritisation when groups were randomly and arbitrarily assigned with no information given about the other group members. This point highlights an important methodological consideration: if novel group-biases do not always follow the same patterns as established group-biases, then studies utilising minimal group paradigms hold the potential of showing a different pattern of responses.…”

“…Further, self-prioritisation exists even when familiarity is removed from all stimuli, such as when social labels were replaced with unfamiliar abstract symbols associated to the words (you, friend, stranger) before the experiment 26 . Initial studies have also demonstrated that ingroup associations can modulate processing for neutral stimuli in the same way 27 – 30 .…”

Affective compatibility with the self modulates the self-prioritisation effect

“…This effect is extremely pervasive and consistent. For example, it has been found when stimuli represent a self-collective (Constable, Elekes, et al, 2019;Enock et al, 2018;Moradi, Sui, et al, 2015;Moradi, Yankouskaya, et al, 2015), when stimuli are avatars (Payne et al, 2017;Woźniak et al, 2018), and for space (Strachan et al, 2020). The effect has also been demonstrated in multiple languages and cultures (e.g.…”

When self‐prioritization crosses the senses: Crossmodal self‐prioritization demonstrated between vision and touch

“…Hence, even without highly overlearned familiar stimuli in the self‐relevant condition, a difference in the processing of self‐relevant content and non‐self‐relevant content can still be reliably obtained (e.g. see Constable, Elekes, Sebanz, & Knoblich, 2019; Humphreys & Sui, 2016; Schäfer, Wesslein, Spence, Wentura, & Frings, 2016).…”