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The influence of mere social presence on Stroop interference: New evidence from the semantically-based Stroop task

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2012.04.014Get rights and content

Abstract

Several studies have shown that mere social presence reduces Stroop interference but processes underlying such effect are still poorly understood. Given that the standard Stroop task used in those studies confounds semantic and response competition, it remains unclear whether Stroop words are processed normally (Sharma, Booth, Brown, & Huguet, 2010) or whether the processing of their semantic representations is altered (Huguet, Galvaing, Monteil, & Dumas, 1999, Exp. 1). The direct evidence from the semantically-based Stroop task (i.e., a task that is free of response competition and thus isolates the semantic component of the Stroop interference, Neely & Kahan, 2001) provided in this paper attests normal semantic processing. Such result refutes the idea that semantic activation can be prevented or controlled by social presence and thus adds to the growing body of evidence showing that semantic activation is indeed automatic. Also importantly, this paper offers an alternative explanation of past findings, which holds that social presence simply reduces the response competition that occurs in the standard Stroop task and sheds some light on the processes that underlie social-facilitating effects of mere presence in the 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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