ON THE SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF EMOTIONS IN GROUPS 271 ween participants would hinder the effectiveness of the emot task to a partic a die roll de Discussion The results of this study replicate our finding that majority's the end of the(scale ranging from Never nd nfirmed that otivational nersnective on conformity we showed that in situa that are per nity pre Groups were nd le our all thre ship,which is congruent with the idea that ormity is not a tion to this random ment was that the ever aligned with salient Although the and a of our ses based on p and procedure. nent cons mes.1974). which is a p ask that Studv 4 hey may help es of survival if a pe n the s.we showed tha aiority's anger leads ianrindividualofelrejected.wh ch in tur c items the with the as inpu to which th study in which ltem generation. laboratory.the thre tionnaires that were lated to the pre ent h lesent que the nany items as possible that could be aseful in in such a circum outcome of the reiected.whichin u eads oneto .the influence of the individual ide hase had ended particinant I be re ely high ng the individual lists allowed,but Method ion of ideas,the instructions also m Thirty-th (99 partic duplicate,useless.or dangerous.ceived as cooperative, the higher conformity pressure experienced when the majority expressed more anger and/or less happiness was due to the fact that the group member felt rejected. In situations perceived as competitive, the majority’s angry and happy reactions to deviance were still associated with felt acceptance/rejection, but no relation with felt conformity pressure was found. Discussion The results of this study replicate our finding that majority’s emotions are associated with the extent to which a deviant indi￾vidual feels accepted or rejected. Furthermore, consistent with our motivational perspective on conformity, we showed that in situa￾tions that are perceived as cooperative, more conformity pressure was experienced to the extent that more anger and less happiness were expressed. Furthermore, supporting our general model (see Figure 1), this relation was mediated by feelings of rejection. In situations perceived as competitive, we did not find this relation￾ship, which is congruent with the idea that conformity is not a meaningful way of showing good group membership in a compet￾itive setting. Most important, we found these results across a wide range of social situations, which increases confidence in the gen￾eralizability of the findings from Studies 1 and 2. Although the critical incidents approach allows for high ecolog￾ical validity and a test of our hypotheses based on people’s recollections of actual situations, it also has several drawbacks, the most important of which is that it yields only correlational data. To address these limitations, we set out to replicate and extend these findings in two behavioral experiments. Study 4 In the previous studies, we showed that a majority’s anger leads a deviant individual to feel rejected, which in turn may lead this individual to experience a pressure to conform. In Study 4, we aimed to extend these findings by investigating whether anger, expressed in a cooperative setting, can lead to behavioral confor￾mity by inducing feelings of rejection. For this purpose, we con￾ducted an experimental group study in which groups, consisting of three participants, worked on a group problem-solving task. We manipulated the emotion expressed by the majority by instructing two of these participants to express either anger or happiness in response to ideas voiced by the third participant. A nonemotional condition, in which participants were instructed not to show their emotions, was also included as a reference condition. In this study, conformity was operationalized as the relative influence of this third participant (faced with either a happy or an angry majority) on the outcome of the group task. We reasoned that if being faced with an angry majority leads one to feel rejected, which in turn leads one to conform, the influence of the two angry group members should be relatively high relative to the third participant’s influence. Thus, we expected participants who were faced with an angry majority to have relatively less influence in their group than participants who were faced with a happy majority or those in the nonemotional condition. Method Participants and design. Thirty-three groups (99 partici￾pants, 22 men, Mage
20.99, range 15–29) participated in the experiment, which was advertised as a group creativity task. In exchange for their participation, participants received either course credit or 10.50 euro. Because we were concerned that familiarity between participants would hinder the effectiveness of the emotion manipulation, we invited four participants for each session, which allowed us to assign an individual backup task to a participant who coincidentally knew another participant (otherwise, a die roll de￾cided which participant would receive different tasks). A check at the end of the experiment (scale ranging from Never have seen this person to Best friend) confirmed that in the final sample, no pair of participants indicated more mutual familiarity than Have seen but have not spoken to this person. Groups were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: majority angry, majority happy, or majority nonemotional. Within groups in the former two conditions, two randomly selected par￾ticipants received an emotion instruction, and the remaining par￾ticipant (the “focal participant,” described later) received instruc￾tions to show no emotion. In the nonemotional condition, all three participants received the no emotion instruction. The only excep￾tion to this random assignment was that the manipulation was never aligned with salient demographic characteristics to avoid creating a salient diversity fault line (Homan, van Knippenberg, van Kleef, & De Dreu, 2007b). For instance, if the group consisted of one female and two male participants, it was always one of the male participants who received the no emotion instruction. Materials and procedure. The experiment consisted of a modified version of the desert survival task (Lafferty, Eady, & Elmers, 1974), which is a problem-solving task that is used in group research. In the original version of the task, the goal is to rank a list of items (e.g., a knife) according to the extent to which they may help promote chances of survival if a person is stranded in the desert. We used the Homan, van Knippenberg, van Kleef, and De Dreu (2007a) version of this task, in which participants do not receive a pre-existing list of items, but generate items them￾selves. By having participants first generate items individually, followed by group-wise selection of the best ideas with the indi￾vidual lists as input, we could estimate the extent to which the emotions expressed in the group influenced individual contribu￾tions to the group product. Item generation. Upon arrival in the laboratory, the three group members were seated separately and filled out a number of personality questionnaires that were unrelated to the present hy￾potheses. These questionnaires were followed by an introduction to the desert survival situation and an instruction to generate as many items as possible that could be useful in in such a circum￾stance. The only constraint was that it should be possible for one person to carry the item. Participants were given 10 min to gen￾erate items. Emotion instruction. After the individual idea generation phase had ended, participants received written instructions for the group task. These explained that the goal of the group task would be the group-wise creation of a list of as many ideas as possible, using the individual lists as input (generating new ideas during the group interaction was explicitly allowed, but too few groups made use of this possibility to analyze this variable). As an encourage￾ment for critical evaluation of ideas, the instructions also men￾tioned that a bonus of 75 euro (25 euro for each participant) would be awarded to the group that generated the most ideas that were not duplicate, useless, or dangerous. 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. ON THE SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF EMOTIONS IN GROUPS 271