Spatio-Affective Consistency in Social Scenes: A Novel Multi-User Placement Paradigm

In this research project, we plan to conceptually replicate a study (see preregistration here: https://osf.io/6tjsw/overview) in which authors were interested in how the affective connotations of social identities relate to participants’ expectations in terms of the spatial distribution of the social identities in a long-term affiliation context. We plan to introduce several changes compared to the original study. In the present conceptual replication, participants will complete a multi-user placement task in which they organize the dwellings of different social identities in space. Unlike in the original single-participant version of the task, where participants remained external to the experimental scenario, each participant will take on one identity and be able to move only the dwelling corresponding to that identity, so that the spatial configuration emerges collectively through real-time coordination. This novel design allows us to study emergent group activity and the dynamics of spatial organization across successive trials. For exploratory purposes, we will introduce two moderator variables: temporal position within each set of social identities, and set position within the sequence of distinct sets. These moderators will enable us to examine a potential normalization process through which groups progressively converge toward an affectively consistent spatial organization.