Relevant for us? We-prioritization in cognitive processing

Constable, Merryn, Elekes, Fruzsina, Sebanz, Natalie and Knoblich, Günther (2019) Relevant for us? We-prioritization in cognitive processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45 (12). pp. 1549-1561. ISSN 0096-1523

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Abstract

Humans are social by nature. We ask whether this social nature operates as a lens through which individuals process the world even in the absence of immediate interactions or explicit goals to collaborate. Is information that is potentially relevant to a group one belongs to (“We”) processed with priority over information potentially relevant to a group one does not belong to (“They”)? We conducted three experiments using a modified version of Sui, He, and Humphreys’ (2012) shape–label matching task. Participants were assigned to groups either via a common preference between assigned team members (Experiment 1) or arbitrarily (Experiment 2). In a third experiment, only personal pronouns were used. Overall, a processing benefit for we-related information (we-prioritization) occurred regardless of the type of group induction. A final experiment demonstrated that we-prioritization did not extend to other individual members of a short-term transitory group. We suggest that the results reflect an intrinsic predisposition to process information “relevant for us” with priority, which might feed into optimizing collaborative processes.

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