Abstract
This paper argues that being in the Asch situation, where there is a felt need to conform to others’ faulty behaviors, poses a social threat to people. Furthermore, participating in a psychology experiment in which you will have to interact with other participants might trigger sense-making processes. The paper proposes that these assumed threats or sense-making processes are likely to activate the behavioral inhibition system, making people respond in more inhibited ways than they normally would be inclined to do. As a result, people’s tendency to affiliate behaviorally with persons who are similar to them can be inhibited. The implication is that lowering behavioral inhibition (by experimentally reminding people about having acted without behavioral inhibitions) should lead to more public conformity in the Asch situation and stronger behavioral affiliation with ingroup members than not being reminded about behavioral disinhibition. Findings of four experiments support this line of reasoning. These findings are discussed in terms of behavioral inhibition and behavioral affiliation. Alternative accounts of the data that focus on social belongingness threats and optimal distinctiveness are also considered.
Highlights
In the present paper we examine the dynamics of how people respond to potentially threatening social interactions
Studies 1 and 2 focused on the dynamics of how people respond to threats in social interactions, in particular Asch experiments in which there is pressure to publicly conform with faulty answers of fellow participants
If our hypothesis was true that behavioral disinhibition would lead to behavioral affiliation especially with similar people, we should find that reminders of behavioral disinhibition will lead our participants to sit closer to the student from their own university, but not closer to the student from the rival university
Summary
In the present paper we examine the dynamics of how people respond to potentially threatening social interactions. We focus on reactions in the Asch (1951, 1955, 1956) situation, in which there is pressure to conform to the faulty answers given by other research participants. We examine responses in psychology experiments in which people expect to interact with other participants. We argue that these kinds of social interaction situations may contain threatening or sense-making aspects for research participants and that the social interaction threats or sensemaking processes may activate the behavioral inhibition system (BIS: Carver and White, 1994). We test behavioral implications of this line of reasoning by assessing how lowering behavioral inhibition by means of experimental manipulation may affect public conformity and behavioral affiliation with the other participants in the experiments. We ground our predictions by building on work on behavioral affiliation and associated literatures and aim to integrate these insights with our recently developed perspective on behavioral inhibition and disinhibition (Van den Bos and Lind, 2013)
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