In contrast with R. B. Zajonc's (1965) classic view about social facilitation-inhibition (SFI) effects, it was found that the presence of relatively unpredictable audiences and forced social comparison with a slightly superior coactor both facilitated performance in the Stroop task while inhibiting automatic verbal processing. Not only do these findings reveal that social presence can help inhibit the emission of dominant responses, providing further support for an attentional view of SFI effects, but they also demonstrate the power of social situations over what has been thought to be invariant automatic processing. As such, they are inconsistent with the view reiterated in more than 500 articles on Stroop interference over the past 60 years and suggest that more attention should be paid to the situations in which cognition takes place.The situations in which human beings perceive, manipulate, and interpret information have traditionally been neglected by cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists in general. According to Levine, Resnick, and Higgins (1993), the recognition of the importance of domain-specific knowledge led cognitive psychologists to take a first step toward a possible inclusion of social factors as part of cognition. This first step, however, did not specifically involve social factors but "did highlight how particular, how situated or contextualized, cognition always is" (Levine et al., 1993, p. 586). As Levine et al. noted, it is in fact necessary to attend not only to knowledge elements but also to the conditions of their use, that is, the situations in which cognition takes place.In this article our purpose is to show that even relatively simple social situations can have dramatic effects on some basic cognitive responses that have been well established in psychology. Specifically, we argue that the presence of other people can help dominate processes that are viewed as uncontrollable in the Stroop task, suggesting that more can be learned about cognition when studying it in its social context. Interest in the way social presence affects cognition has a long history in social psychology. Under the . Electronic mail may be sent to huguet@cicsun.univ-bpclermont.fr. label social facilitation (Zajonc, 1965), it has been found that audiences and coactors affect individual performance, sometimes facilitating it and sometimes impeding it (see Bond & Titus, 1983;Geen, 1989Geen, , 1991Guerin, 1993, for reviews). In this area, however, it is generally assumed that automatic or dominant response tendencies are facilitated by the presence of others. In contrast with this, our findings in the context of the Stroop task reveal that social facilitation can sometimes result from an inhibition of such tendencies, providing further support for a neglected, attentional view of social facilitation-inhibition (SFI) effects. SFI EffectsAccording to Bond and Titus's (1983) meta-analysis of 241 studies, social presence (a) increases the speed of well-learned, simple task performance but decreases the speed ...
A lockdown of people has been used as an efficient public health measure to fight against the exponential spread of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) and allows the health system to manage the number of patients. The aim of this study (clinicaltrials.gov NCT 0430818) was to evaluate the impact of both perceived stress aroused by Covid-19 and of emotions triggered by the lockdown situation on the individual experience of time. A large sample of the French population responded to a survey on their experience of the passage of time during the lockdown compared to before the lockdown. The perceived stress resulting from Covid-19 and stress at work and home were also assessed, as were the emotions felt. The results showed that people have experienced a slowing down of time during the lockdown. This time experience was not explained by the levels of perceived stress or anxiety, although these were considerable, but rather by the increase in boredom and sadness felt in the lockdown situation. The increased anger and fear of death only explained a small part of variance in the time judgment. The conscious experience of time therefore reflected the psychological difficulties experienced during lockdown and was not related to their perceived level of stress or anxiety.
Blanton and colleagues (1999) found that children who nominated a comparison-target in several courses chose same-sex students who slightly outperformed them in class. This had a bene®cial effect on children's course grades, which were also independently predicted by comparative evaluation (i.e. how the children evaluated their relative standing in class). These phenomena were examined at two time periods with a more detailed record of comparison choices while including several psychological moderators (i.e. closeness to and identi®cation with the comparison targets, perceived academic control, importance of academic domains). The present ®ndings (1) replicate those found earlier by Blanton and colleagues, (2) offer evidence that children compare upward with close friends with whom they identify as a means of self-improvement, (3) show that this identi®cation is more likely to occur when children perceive control over their standing relative to the comparison target, and (4) suggest that the effects of comparison-level choice (i.e. the level typical of the persons with whom one chooses to compare) diminish over time.
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