FlashReportThe influence of mere social presence on Stroop interference: New evidence from the semantically-based Stroop task
Highlights
► We examined the influence of mere social presence on Stroop interference. ► We used both the standard and the semantically-based Stroop task. ► Mere social presence influences response competition but not the computation of semantics. ► Our results corroborate the automatic character of semantic activation in reading. ► We provide a new explanatory account of the influence of mere social presence in the Stroop task.
Section snippets
Participants and design
One hundred thirty-three female psychology undergraduates at Blaise Pascal University, Clermont-Ferrand, France took part in these experiments (41 in Experiment 1 and 92 in Experiment 2) in exchange for a course credit. All were native French speakers, had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, and were not color-blind.
Design
Both experiments involved a 2 (social presence: present vs. absent) × 3 (type of stimulus: standard incongruent vs. color-associated incongruent vs. neutral) mixed design with
Discussion and conclusion
The present experiments closely replicated the work of Huguet and colleagues (Huguet et al., 1999, Sharma et al., 2010) showing that social presence reduces standard Stroop interference. This replication is important since it generalizes past findings to a vocal task in which (in Experiment 2) the more conventional color-neutral words were used as control stimuli.
More critically and against the initial claim made by Huguet et al. (1999) that social presence can prevent the computation of
Acknowledgments
Both authors thank Jan De Houwer, Pascal Huguet, Karl Christoph Klauer, and Jim Sherman for their helpful advice, comments, and suggestions on previous drafts of the manuscript.
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2018, Acta PsychologicaCitation Excerpt :Therefore, they argued, that even when these studies showed an elimination of Stroop interference, they were unlikely to have demonstrated a reduction in semantic processing and instead were affecting response conflict processes only. Instead in a series of studies Augustinova and Ferrand have shown that semantic interference appears to be unaffected by these experimental manipulations (Augustinova & Ferrand, 2012a, 2012b, 2014b; Ferrand & Augustinova, 2014). To show this they employed semantic-associative Stroop trials to index semantic conflict.
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