The Effect Of Perceived Intergroup Threat On Gaze Cueing

Gaze cueing, a tendency to follow the gaze of others and orient one’s attention, is an important ability for non-language communication, and this ability is critical for social learning and discovering potentially relevant information. This ability, which is found in several animal species, appears at 3-6 months in human infancy. When we use this ability to observe others, the response time of congruent gazes is shorter than the response time of incongruent gazes, which is known as the gaze-cueing effect.Previous studies provide evidence that gaze cueing is sensitive to social modulators. An animal study found high-status and low-status monkeys reflexively followed the gaze of high-status monkeys, but high-status monkeys did not follow the gaze of low-status monkeys. Similarly, there is evidence that people only followed the gaze of high-status individuals. Tellingly, greater gaze-cueing effects were found when humans observed masculine faces than feminine faces.Previous research suggests that intergroup threat may affect gaze cueing because males and social status are related to intergroup threat. Intergroup threat refers to the perception of group members that another group may cause them harm. The evidence from intergroup-threat research indicates that high-status groups pose more threat than low-status groups, and that masculine faces are more threatening than feminine faces.We conducted four studies to examine whether the effect of intergroup threat between nations influenced social attention in humans, independently of the sense of intergroup threat that was perceived implicitly from observed faces. Specifically, Chinese face stimuli were classified into two groups with a single random allocation:threatening out-group and non-threatening in-group in study 1,2 and 4; non-threatening out-group and non-threatening in-group in study 3. Participants were asked to learn to which group each face belonged. The intergroup relations between the two groups were manipulated as threatening in study 1,2 and 4, and as non-threatening in study 3. Then a standard gaze-cueing paradigm was employed. Our expectation was that participants would follow the gaze of threatening out-group faces in study 1,2 and 4, while participants would not follow the gaze of non-threatening out-group faces in study 3. Larger gaze-cueing effects were also predicted for threatening out-group faces than for non-threatening in-group faces in study 1,2 and 4. Specifically, the technology of fMRI was used in study 4.The present study focused on whether intergroup threat would modulate gaze cueing. Participants felt an intergroup threat from the threatening out-group but not from the non-threatening out-group, so that they followed the gaze of threatening out-group faces in study 1, 2 and 4, but they did not follow the gaze of non-threatening out-group faces in study 3. The results from study 4 showed greater activity in the occipital gyrus, fusiform gyrus, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), caudate, insula, thalamus when participants viewed threatening out-group faces than they viewed non-threatening in-group faces. Taken together, these results suggest that intergroup threat modulates gaze cueing and plays an important role in shaping social attention.