When you speak in front of an audience, how do you know what the emotional state of the majority of attendees is?
This issue has been studied in psychology and a curious phenomenon has been discovered that we will explain in detail in this article. We will know the effect of amplifying the emotion of the crowd and what are its repercussions.
When a person addresses a crowd and tries to discern which emotion is predominant among them, a psychological phenomenon known as the crowd emotion amplification effect can occur. It basically consists of take as reference the most visibly extreme emotions since they are the ones that attract the recipient’s attention more quickly, and extrapolate that information to all members of the audience.
It must be taken into account that these mental processes are automatic and take place in fractions of a second. Therefore, the observer has not had time to look at each and every one of the faces and therefore to interpret the emotional states of all of them, but rather has done a quick sweep through some of them, and their attention has been captured by the most prominent ones, that is, those that showed a more intense emotional expression, whether in one direction or another.
Therefore, the crowd’s emotion amplification effect would act as a shortcut, a mechanism that would economize the mental flow in order to obtain a conclusion directly about the general emotionality of a group without having to carry out an in-depth analysis which would require specific attention to each person and a comparison between all of them, which would mean an enormously slower and more expensive process at the processing level.
How does this mechanism work?
It is one thing to know what the crowd emotion amplification effect consists of and quite another to understand how it works. Researchers have considered different alternatives, and one of them has to do with a mental process called set coding. The underlying process consists of subjects making an immediate summary of all the visual information they perceive, including information related to the emotionality of others.
Another possibility is what we already anticipated in the previous point, and would consist of the extrapolation of the general situation through the most salient information (the most marked emotions, in this case, since we are talking about this type of stimuli). According to this theory, if we were faced with an audience in which several of the people were visibly angry while the rest maintained a neutral emotional state, we could infer that, in general, the group would be angry.
Obviously, This mechanism represents a bias, and in that simple example it is clearly seen. The key is the following: that a stimulus is the most striking does not mean that it is the predominant one in a set, but that does not seem to matter to our attention, since our perceptual processes will automatically focus on those elements that stand out above the rest only due to their apparent magnitude, not because they are the predominant trend in the total set.
The importance of expressiveness
As social beings that we are, we constantly carry out interactions between people, and in all of them the information we receive through facial expressions and non-verbal language is essential to attribute an emotional state to our interlocutor, which will modulate continuously and without us realizing it. It takes into account the type of interaction that is taking place. It is a process so automatic that we do not realize its existence but it is vital to carry out socially accepted interactions.
Possibly, the effect of amplification of the crowd’s emotion is a consequence derived from the importance of the expressions, since it is assumed that We will pay more attention to those faces that are expressing a more intense emotion so that it automatically sets off our alarms and we can adapt our method of interaction accordingly, whether to calm the interlocutor or to share their joy, to give some examples of situations that could commonly occur.
In that sense, it is also interesting to see that humans tend to focus more on negative emotional states, so within the range of intense expressions, those that denote a negative or hostile emotionality will be the ones that capture our attention with a greater probability than the rest. , although these are also intense but with a more positive orientation. In that case, between people showing joy and others showing anger, we will most likely direct our gaze towards the latter.
Recently, an interesting investigation has been carried out on the effect of amplification of crowd emotion by Goldenberg and Co., which involves observe this phenomenon in laboratory conditions and thus be able to study its true scope. Below we will see each part of this study in detail.
Hypothesis
In the previous phase of the experiment, three hypotheses were established that would then have to be tested in the following phases. The first of them is that the estimate of the average observed emotion would be greater than what it really is. The second hypothesis would state that the crowd emotion amplification effect would become increasingly intense as more people were added to the observed audience.
Finally, the third hypothesis would refer to the fact that the effect studied would be significantly more powerful in cases in which the most prominent emotions were negative rather than positive. Once the three hypotheses were expressed, we proceeded to the experimental phase.
Experimental phase
Three consecutive studies were carried out to verify the stated hypotheses In the first, 50 volunteers participated, each of whom observed a group of between 1 and 12 faces on a screen, some neutral and others with angry or happy expressions, for just one second, after which they had to indicate which emotion they generally perceived. It was repeated over 150 trials, in which the number and expression of the faces varied randomly to present the most diverse situations.
The second experiment was the same as the first, with the difference that Another variable was manipulated: exposure time In this way, the participants saw the groups of faces for 1 second, 1.4 seconds or 1.8 seconds, each condition being repeated for 50 trials, so they would make up (in a random order) a total of 150, the same as in the first experiment.
We come to the third and final experiment. The conditions were again similar to those of the first, but this time the number of 12 faces was maintained in all trials, and another variable was studied: the eye movement of each individual, to check where the gaze was fixed on each one. the essays.
Results
Once the three experiments were completed, all the data obtained were analyzed in order to reach conclusions that would allow the hypotheses to be verified or falsified. The first study allowed us to observe that, indeed, the participants observed a more intense emotionality in the faces than was generally the case. Furthermore, they also demonstrated that, The greater the number of faces on the screen, the stronger this effect was, which corroborated the thesis of the second hypothesis
The second test only reinforced these statements, since its results were also in line with what was proposed by the second hypothesis and also with the third, since it was proven that negative emotions did, in fact, capture more attention from the participants than positive ones. . However, the exposure time variable demonstrated that this phenomenon was diluted with longer times and therefore produced a weaker crowd emotion amplification effect in negative emotions and long time.
The amplification effect observed in the third study was somewhat smaller than in the other two. It’s possible that adding eye-tracking devices could have altered the way participants naturally made their observations. It was observed that The difference between the average emotion perceived in the faces and the real one was greater the longer they looked at the faces with more intense emotions and even less in those that presented a neutral emotion.
The conclusion of this study, therefore, is that its three hypotheses were correct, and opens the way to an interesting methodology with which to continue studying the effect of amplification of crowd emotion.
