Psychology & Neuroscience

Lamer and Team Read the Room for Angry Crowd Bias

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Lamer and Team Read the Room for Angry Crowd Bias

Lamer and Team Read the Room for Angry Crowd Bias

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Lamer and Team Read the Room for Angry Crowd Bias

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Sarah Lamer’s research into the psychology of social biases found favor with an international audience this year, earning her a spot on the Association for Psychological Science (APS) roster of Rising Stars for 2024.

The APS is the leading international organization dedicated to advancing scientific psychology across disciplinary and geographic borders. Lamer, assistant professor in the UT Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, is proud to be recognized among the top early-career colleagues in her field.

“This acknowledges the importance and rigor of my scientific work as well as the intensive mentorship model I take in my lab,” said Lamer. She works alongside her graduate students Darla Bonagura and Gillian Preston in her Social Perception and Cognition (SPĀC) lab.

“I work closely with my skilled team of graduate and undergraduate mentees to explore important and timely questions about why bias exists, where it originates, and why it is so fluently perpetuated,” she said. “This accolade recognizes the important work that we do as we discover answers to these critical questions.”

One of her research projects, “The Angry Crowd Bias: Social, Cognitive, and Perceptual Mechanisms,” is supported by a National Science Foundation grant that enables her to design, analyze, and conduct studies; mentor graduate students through the research process; share their work at professional conferences; and conduct workshops to share a love of science with students in the local Knoxville community.

The angry crowd bias is a psychological phenomenon people can experience when first exposed to faces that are hard to see or that have subtle expressions—notably among a “many faces in a crowd” situation. People can report that these faces look threatening, even when they are not.

“We know from a bulk of research that people are able to detect average information about a crowd with some accuracy,” said Lamer. “But perception is more complex than that. Accuracy and bias always work together in human perception.”

Lamer and her team hypothesized that this complex mix causes a tendency to perceive an unfamiliar crowd’s mood to be potentially dangerous.

“We focused on anger bias since crowds can pose a stronger threat to safety than an individual,” she said. “If a crowd is angry at you, you are at much higher risk than if an individual is angry at you. In other words, it is functional to be wary of a crowd.”

The team uses state-of-the-art methods and statistical tools to examine a viewer’s visual attention to faces—eye-tracking data, signal-detection methods, and drift-diffusion modeling—to track what people focus on while making emotional judgments. Then they assess what is accurate and what leads to bias.

“The approach makes it possible to track visual patterns—for example, which faces people look at first in a crowd, how long they look at each face, and whether they ignore anyone,” said Lamer. “All of which are likely to be affected by the race and gender of the faces themselves.”

This work is timely in relation to widespread protests in the US over the past several years and the divergent interpretations these crowds have received across public perception—potentially due in part to the racial and gender makeup of these assemblies.

“With this social backdrop in mind—and understanding that, according to event-forecasting models, social unrest is likely to increase in the future—this research was designed to identify the people whom negative crowd biases are most likely to affect, where these biased judgments come from, and how malleable they might be,” said Lamer. “We plan to complete data analysis on our current study by the end of the semester.”

Phillip McGarry Published in ‘The Conversation’

Phillip McGarry Published in ‘The Conversation’

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Phillip McGarry Published in ‘The Conversation’

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Republicans and Democrats consider each other immoral – even when treated fairly and kindly by the opposition

How a political opponent acted didn’t change participants’ harsh moral judgments. wildpixel/iStock via Getty Images
Phillip McGarry, University of Tennessee

Both Republicans and Democrats regarded people with opposing political views as less moral than people in their own party, even when their political opposites acted fairly or kindly toward them, according to experiments my colleagues and I recently conducted. Even participants who self-identified as only moderately conservative or liberal made the same harsh moral judgments about those on the other side of the political divide.

Psychology researcher Eli Finkel and his colleagues have suggested that moral judgment plays a major role in political polarization in the United States. My research team wondered if acts demonstrating good moral character could counteract partisan animosity. In other words, would you think more highly of someone who treated you well – regardless of their political leanings?

We decided to conduct an experiment based on game theory and turned to the Ultimatum Game, which researchers developed to study the role of fairness in cooperation. Psychology researcher Hanah Chapman and her colleagues have demonstrated that unfairness in the Ultimatum Game elicits moral disgust, making it a good tool for us to use to study moral judgment in real time.

The Ultimatum Game allowed us to experimentally manipulate whether partisans were treated unfairly, fairly or even kindly by political opponents. Participants had no knowledge about the person they were playing with beyond party affiliation and how they played the game.

In our experiments, even after fair or kind treatment, participants still rated political opponents as less moral. Moreover, this was true even for participants who didn’t consider themselves to have strong political bias.

Other psychology studies suggest that conservatives are more politically extreme, being more likely to adopt right-wing authoritarianism and more sensitive to moral disgust. However, in our experiments, we found no differences in party animosity and moral judgment between liberals and conservatives, suggesting political polarization is a bipartisan phenomenon.

Why it matters

Our experiments illustrate the magnitude of current political polarization in the United States, which has been increasing for at least the last four decades.

Americans with different political opinions could once cooperate and maintain friendships with one another. But as political attitudes begin to coincide with moral convictions, partisans increasingly view each other as immoral.

My colleagues and I are particularly interested in this topic, as we worry about the potential for political polarization based on moral convictions to descend into political violence.

What’s next

My colleagues and I believe that a controlled scientific approach, rather than speculation, could help find ways to mitigate political polarization. Currently, we are running experiments to explore how online interaction – for example, through social media – can foster psychological distance between partisans. We’re also investigating how emotions such as disgust can contribute to the moral component of partisan animosity, and how the evolutionary origins of morality may play a psychological role in political polarization.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.The Conversation

Phillip McGarry, Ph.D. Candidate in Experimental Psychology, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.