Joint perception biases subjective awareness reports.
Benjy Barnett, Daniel Yon
Journal of Experimental Psychology General September 10, 2026 DOI: 10.1037/xge0002001 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Experimental behavioral study Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key findings | Participants adjusted how often they reported detecting a hard-to-detect visual stimulus to match a computerized partner's detection reports, whether the partner detected it more or less often than they did. The matching persisted after the social interaction ended, which the authors argue indicates the effect penetrated private cognition rather than reflecting only public reporting. Social and nonsocial tasks suggest the effect combines social-specific and domain-general mechanisms. |
Abstract
Humans are fundamentally social creatures, yet how our social context modulates perceptual decision making remains unknown.In a joint decision-making paradigm, we examined whether participants' subjective awareness reports in a perceptual detection task are influenced by the awareness reports of a computerized partner.Across multiple experiments, we reveal that participants match their awareness reports to those of their partner-irrespective of whether the partner was prone to detecting the stimulus more or less often than themselves.Critically, "matched" awareness reports continued once the social interactions ended, suggesting that this effect outstripped public reports of awareness and penetrated participants' private cognition.Social and nonsocial tasks revealed this effect to be a combination of socialspecific and domain-general mechanisms.These results point to a mechanism that could enable sociocultural learning to alter awareness-with possible implications for understanding how extraordinary beliefs and visual experiences vary across cultures. Public Significance StatementWe usually think our perceptions are private-happening and accessible only to ourselves.However, as social creatures, we often find ourselves perceiving the external world with other people.While this kind of "perceiving together" is a remarkably common part of daily life, little is known about how social interactions influence private perception and cognition.Across four studies, we show that individuals will alter the rate at which they claim to see hard-to-detect stimuli in visual noise to match the behavior of a partner.Importantly, the influence of social interactions on detection behavior persists beyond the interaction, causing long-lasting changes to what individuals can detect or not.These results encourage consciousness researchers to take seriously the role of social interaction in altering perceptual experiences and provide a psychological mechanism through which known cultural variation in perceptual beliefs may emerge.