284 GRISKEVICIUS ET AL mm1920- Design and Procedure The study design was a be pants 2 (parti cipant sex) de and beli des part of the study,Pa c used to est day with the r with 3 sa ces.In the cha ing on a moonl beach re to be with cac heybelievedit to be.Hafof time f the pl that tive.The cha so that th off to th scenario terward.the eed to justir results were influenced by the ratings of their 3 g mates Half the me the ratings of the roup were high (7). Hal rmer a the latt gs.Forthe statistical analyses.all ratings were standardized.whereby a higher rief rotheir class requirement. All participants came to the lab in same-sex groups of 3– 6 and were seated at private computers that were visually shielded from others by partitions. The mean age for women was 19.2 (SD
1.6), and the mean age for men was 19.8 (SD
1.9). Design and Procedure The study design was a between-participants 2 (participant sex) 4 (motive prime: mate attraction, self-protection, “scenario” control, or “no￾prime” control) 2 (group judgment: positive vs. negative) design. In the first part of the study, participants rated the attractiveness of multiple images that they believed were used to establish their aesthetic preferences. After the ratings, they underwent one of the four priming manipulations. After the prime, participants entered a computer chat room with 3 same-sex individuals with whom they believed they would later have a face-to-face discussion on aesthetic preferences. In the chat room, they publicly rated one of the images that they had previously rated on how interesting or uninteresting they believed it to be. Half of the time the ratings of the other 3 group members were programmed to be positive, and half of the time the group judgment was negative. The chat room was arranged so that the participant was always the last person in the group to provide a public rating. Conformity measure. The purpose of the first part of the study was to ascertain the participants’ actual private preferences for a specific artistic image that would later serve as the key image of interest in the chat room (with the initial private rating of the image serving as a covariate for the chat-room rating of the image). To reduce pressures to be consistent between the private and the public ratings, and to decrease possible suspiciousness, participants also rated 39 distracter images on the extent to which they thought each image was interesting. The images were collected from the Internet and consisted of various complex and simple graphic artistic designs and abstract paintings. Ratings were provided on a 9-point scale ranging from 1 (not at all interesting) to 9 (very interesting). Partic￾ipants were led to believe that the 40 images were part of a much larger set and that other participants were likely rating a different set of images. Their ratings for the 40 images indicated a wide range of preferences. However, the mean rating for the key image was 5.00 (SD
1.71), which was at the midpoint of the scale. After the private ratings, participants were informed that there was another group of participants in a different room that was also currently working on the same study. They were then told that they had been randomly assigned to a group of four same-sex participants from the two rooms, and the group was linked together by computer in a virtual chat room. Participants were told that in the second half of the study, all 4 members of their group would meet face to face to discuss their individual aesthetic preferences. The chat room was ostensibly the first step in the group discussion and served to publicly ascertain everyone’s aesthetic preferences, which would be the focus of the later discussion. This part of the procedure was designed to ensure that participants were accountable for their responses in the chat room because they might later need to justify their responses in the face-to-face discussion. In the chat room, participants again rated their preferences for the key image. They were led to believe that the image was randomly chosen by the computer and that it might not have been previously seen by them or their 3 group mates. However, it was arranged so that, as participants rated the image, they could see on the screen the ratings of their group members, who were programmed to provide their ratings before the participants. Half of the time, the group judgment was positive (8, 8, 7), indicating that they thought the image was highly interesting; the other half of the time, group judgment was negative (2, 2, 3), indicating that they thought the image was very uninteresting. The rating of the image constituted the dependent measure of the study. Given that participants had no prior interaction with their group mates, their public rating of the image in the chat room was the first piece of information they conveyed about themselves to the group. Priming procedure. Just before participants entered the chat room, they underwent a focusing task that served as the motive prime manipu￾lation. In the task, they read one of three short scenarios that were designed to activate a self-protection, a mate-attraction, or a neutral motive. Each of the three scenarios was of similar length (about 850 words) and contained the same instructions: “Please carefully read the following scenario. As you read, try to imagine yourself in the scenario and create a vivid mental picture.” In the self-protective scenario, participants imagined being in a house alone late at night. As the scenario progressed, they overheard scary noises outside and believed that someone had entered the house. After calling out and receiving no reply, the story ended as someone was about to enter the bedroom. In the mate-attraction scenario, participants imagined being on vacation with their friends. While on vacation, the reader met a highly desirable person of the opposite sex and spent a romantic day with the new romantic interest. The scenario ended as the two people were passionately kissing on a moonlit beach and feeling a strong desire to be with each other.1 The study had two separate control conditions: a scenario control and a no-prime control. In the scenario control, participants read a scenario similar in length to the other two scenarios, except that it was devoid of threat- or romance-inducing content. In the control scenario, participants imagined getting ready to go to a much-anticipated concert with a same-sex friend. They imagined that, during the night of the show, they could not find the concert tickets. Later, the friend arrived with the tickets, and they both headed off to the show anticipating a delightful musical experience. In the no-prime control, participants went to the chat room without reading any scenario. The no-prime control was not expected to produce different levels of conformity, compared with the scenario control. However, having both control conditions ensured that any potential differences in conformity between the control and the substantive motive conditions were not pro￾duced by the specific contents of the control scenario. To assess whether the three different scenarios were effective at induc￾ing the desired motives and their associated affective states, a separate group of 46 male and female participants underwent one of the three scenario prime manipulations. Immediately afterward, they indicated the extent to which they were experiencing threat, a desire to protect them￾selves, romantic arousal, and a desire to attract a romantic partner. Re￾sponses to these items were measured using 7-point Likert scales ranging from 1 (not at all) and 7 (very much). There were no interactions or main effects involving participant sex, indicating that the scenarios had a similar effect on men and women. As seen in Table 1, the self-protection scenario elicited significantly more feelings of threat and a stronger desire to protect oneself, compared with either the control condition or the mate-attraction condition ( ps .001). Conversely, the mate-attraction scenario elicited significantly more romantic arousal and a stronger desire to attract a romantic partner, compared with either the control condition or the self￾protection condition ( ps .001). Thus, both the self-protection and the mate-attraction scenarios were effective at inducing the intended motives and associated affective states. Results We measured the extent of participants’ conformity by exam￾ining the degree to which their public ratings of the target image were influenced by the ratings of their 3 group mates. Half the time, the ratings of the group were high (8, 8, 7), indicating a positive group judgment; half the time, the ratings were low (2, 2, 3), indicating a negative group judgment. Conformity by the participants in the former case was signified by higher ratings; conformity in the latter case was signified by lower ratings. For the statistical analyses, all ratings were standardized, whereby a higher 1 The mate-attraction prime did not suggest that this encounter was a brief romantic fling, nor did the prime suggest that the encounter was the beginning of a meaningful relationship. 284 GRISKEVICIUS ET AL. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.