How do we take the temperature of a crowd? Perceivers preferentially attend to faces exhibiting strong emotions, seeing the crowd’s average emotional state more extreme than actually is (crowd-emotion-amplification effect)

The Crowd-Emotion-Amplification Effect. Amit Goldenberg et al. Psychological Science, February 24, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620970561

Abstract: How do people go about reading a room or taking the temperature of a crowd? When people catch a brief glimpse of an array of faces, they can focus their attention on only some of the faces. We propose that perceivers preferentially attend to faces exhibiting strong emotions and that this generates a crowd-emotion-amplification effect—estimating a crowd’s average emotional response as more extreme than it actually is. Study 1 (N = 50) documented the crowd-emotion-amplification effect. Study 2 (N = 50) replicated the effect even when we increased exposure time. Study 3 (N = 50) used eye tracking to show that attentional bias to emotional faces drives amplification. These findings have important implications for many domains in which individuals must make snap judgments regarding a crowd’s emotionality, from public speaking to controlling crowds.

Keywords: emotions, social cognition, perception, intergroup dynamics, open data, open materials, preregistered