
Mariëlle StelUniversity of Twente | UT · Department of Psychology, Conflict and Safety (PCRS)
Mariëlle Stel
Doctor of Psychology
About
70
Publications
26,831
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Introduction
My research focuses on empowering individuals and society to enhance their safety for both physical threats (disasters and crises) as well as social threats (other people). In four subdomains, I focus on 1) how to facilitate sustainable behaviors, with a particular emphasis on understanding the psychology of animal product consumption, 2) how to keep citizens safe from disasters and crises, 3) how to reduce deceptive behaviour, and 4) how nonverbal mimicry can foster emotional understanding.
Publications
Publications (70)
The way we use animals for human consumption, medicines, and entertainment causes problems for the environment, our health, and animal welfare. This research investigated an intervention aimed at reducing harmful attitudes and behaviours towards animals. As the underlying mechanism of prejudice towards animals is similar to human outgroup prejudice...
Consumers are using online reviews to decide which products to purchase. Cybercriminals produce fake reviews to influence unknowing consumers into buying products of lower quality, which can lead to financial, emotional and physical damage. We have little under-standing of how consumers make decisions about the veracity of online reviews, or incorp...
Deceiving others is generally viewed as immoral. However, most people lie on a daily basis. This article examines the psychological consequences for the liars themselves, as they are participating in what is generally perceived as immoral behaviour. More specifically, this article focuses on the effects of lying on the liar's self‐esteem and affect...
Zoonotic outbreaks are considered one of the most important threats to public health. Therefore, it is important to educate people on how to prevent zoonotic infections. The purpose of this research was to investigate an intervention aimed at changing people’s attitudes and behaviors toward more protective actions. In two studies (NStudy 1 = 402; N...
The current study tested the boundary conditions of ethical decision-making by increasing cognitive load. This manipulation is believed to hinder deliberation, and, as we argue, reduces the cognitive capacity needed for a self-serving bias to occur. As telling a lie is believed to be more cognitively taxing than telling the truth, we hypothesized t...
Background
Little research has been done on nonverbal deception cues in computer-mediated communication (CMC). However, deception is a daily occurrence and since much communication is shifting towards CMC, it is important to understand the difference between truthful and deceptive messages.
Objective
This research obtained more insight in the use...
Background
People deceive online. There is, however, mixed evidence about whether people present themselves falsely on Facebook. We investigated to what extent people present their true selves on Facebook. As generally, people estimate their own behavior as ‘less evil’ than the behaviors of others, we also assessed people’s estimations of whether o...
Faces play a central role in person perception. People spontaneously judge others' personality based on their facial appearance and these impressions guide many consequential decisions. When do people rely on facial appearance? In five studies (N = 1936, four preregistered), we test whether reliance on facial appearance depends on the goal of impre...
Zoonoses have become more frequent and intense. As intensive animal farming plays a role in the emergence of zoonoses, the increase in intensive animal farming increases the risk of future zoonotic outbreaks. This raises the question of to what extent people are aware that intensive animal farming poses a risk to zoonoses. Furthermore, if people wo...
Dit onderzoek heeft tot doel duidelijk te maken of de beheerslast van vreemdelingen die in bewaring zijn gesteld in het DC Rotterdam is toegenomen in de periode 2015-2019. Indien dit het geval blijkt, wordt achterhaald hoe deze toename kan worden verklaard. Blijkt er geen toename te zijn geweest in de beheerslast, dan dient dit onderzoek duidelijk...
Deceiving others is generally viewed as immoral. However, most people lie on a daily basis. This paper examines the psychological consequences for the liars themselves, as they are participating in what is generally perceived as immoral behavior. More specifically, this paper focuses on the effects of self-centered and other-oriented lying on the l...
Dit verkennende rapport bestudeert copycatgedrag bij terroristische aanslagen. Dit betreft gedrag dat iemand intentioneel en gemotiveerd vertoont om een bepaalde voorganger na te apen, met name een andere persoon of groep die met een terroristische aanslag in (sociale) mediaberichten de aandacht heeft getrokken. Kenmerkend aan dergelijk copycatgedr...
This study investigated the effectiveness and future orientation of the way in which the Dutch government communicates risks to the general public. Research questions focused on the extent that the communication aims were reached and fulfilled the information needs of the general public. It was further investigated to what extent the communication...
The government is responsible for emergency and disaster management. It is, however, important that citizens, companies and social organisations also feel responsible for keeping society safe during emergencies and disasters. A resilient society can help in averting crisis situations or limit the impact of these. The government would like to facili...
Faces play a central role in person perception. People spontaneously judge others’ personality based on their facial appearance and these impressions guide many consequential decisions. Under what conditions do people rely on facial appearance? Here, we test whether reliance on facial appearance depends on the goal of impression formation (i.e., on...
People are generally too trusting, which decreases their ability to detect deceit. This suggests that distrust could enhance our deception detection abilities. Yet, a state of distrust may induce deliberative conscious thought. This mode of thinking has been related to worse complex decision making. Hence, we investigate whether contextual distrust...
The treatment and support of crime victims during criminal proceedings is considered crucial in the Netherlands. Various improvements and extensions have been undertaken in this domain, such as the implementation of a European guideline that determines the minimal requirements to secure the rights, support and protection of crime victims. These inn...
The question of whether personality can be inferred from faces is contentiously debated. We propose that, irrespective of the actual accuracy of trait inferences from faces, lay beliefs about the manifestation of personality traits in facial features (i.e., physiognomic beliefs) have important consequences for social cognition and behavior. In five...
Impressions of trustworthiness based on facial cues influence many consequential decisions, in spite of their (generally) poor accuracy. Here, we test whether reliance on facial cues can be better explained by (a) the belief that facial cues are more valid than other cues or by (b) the quick and primary processing of faces, which makes relying on f...
Recently completed, together with colleague Mariëlle Stel, an investigation into crisis communication during and after a GRIP3 fire in Venlo-Blerick on 7 August 2018.
Characteristic aspects of this incident: fire with hazardous substances in the smoke, use of WAS and NL-Alert in the early morning, analysis of social media, and interviews with stake...
Online peer-to-peer markets, such as Airbnb, often include profile photos of sellers to reduce anonymity. Ert, Fleischer, and Magen (2016) found that more trustworthy-looking, but not more attractive-looking, Airbnb hosts from Stockholm charge higher prices for similar apartments. This suggests that people are willing to pay more for a night in an...
Impressions of trustworthiness based on facial cues influence many consequential decisions, in spite of their (generally) poor accuracy. Here, we test whether reliance on facial cues can be better explained by (a) the belief that facial cues are more valid than other cues or by (b) the quick and primary processing of faces, which makes relying on f...
Online peer-to-peer markets, such as Airbnb, often include profile photos of sellers to reduce anonymity. Ert and colleagues (2016) found that more trustworthy-looking, but not more attractive-looking, Airbnb hosts charge higher prices for similar apartments. This suggests that people are willing to pay more for a night in an apartment if the host...
Nonverbally-expressed emotions are not always linked to people’s true emotions. We investigated whether observers’ ability to distinguish trues from lies differs for positive and negative emotional expressions. Participants judged targets either simulating or truly experiencing positive or negative emotions. Deception detection was measured by part...
Detection deception in statements others make—whether directly or by an impression that something is off—is integral to everyday morality. Here we consider whether these statements are spontaneous or rehearsed. Participants (N = 147) watched spontaneous and rehearsed statements of liars and truth-tellers, and indicated whether they felt lied to as...
https://www.wodc.nl/binaries/2736_Summary_tcm28-257006.pdf
Establishing the origin of those seeking asylum is essential but difficult as asylum seekers often cannot corroborate their origin claim with documents. The aim of the present study was to assess whether asking knowledge questions, sketch questions and impossible questions are valid methods to determine the veracity of an origin claim. Participants...
Although people tend to mimic others automatically, mimicry is facilitated or attenuated depending on the specific context. In the current paper, the authors discuss when mimicry is facilitated and attenuated depending on characteristics of situations, targets, and observers. On the basis of the review, the authors propose a new model – the Associa...
In everyday life we actively react to the emotion expressions of others, responding by showing matching, or sometimes contrasting, expressions. Emotional mimicry has important social functions such as signalling affiliative intent and fostering rapport and is considered one of the cornerstones of successful interactions. This book provides a multid...
A pre-registered experiment was conducted to examine psychophysiological responses to being lied to. Bridging research on social cognition and deception detection, we hypothesized that observing a liar compared to a truth-teller would decrease finger skin temperature of observers. Participants first watched two targets while not forewarned that the...
People's perceptions are often distorted in a way that aligns with their desires and goals. We argue that having a goal to affiliate changes the perception of interpersonal distance in a way that may help to fulfil this affiliation goal. As other people are goal-relevant when having an affiliation goal, we expected that people with affiliation goal...
People's eating behaviors tend to be influenced by the behaviors of others. In the present studies, we investigated the effect of another person's eating behavior and body weight appearance on healthy food consumption of young women. In Study 1, participants watched a short film fragment together with a confederate who appeared normal weight or ove...
Findings from the deception detection literature suggest that although people are not skilled in consciously detecting a liar, they may intuit that something about the person telling a lie is off. In the current proposal, we argue that observing a liar influences the observer’s physiology even though the observer may not be consciously aware of bei...
The current study tested the boundary conditions of ethical decision-making by increasing cognitive load. This manipulation is believed to hinder deliberation, and, as we argue, reduces the cognitive capacity needed for a self-serving bias to occur. As telling a lie is believed to be more cognitively taxing than telling the truth, we hypothesized t...
Voice pitch may not only influence the listeners but also the speakers themselves. Based on the theories of embodied cognition and previous research on power, we tested whether lowering their pitch leads people to feel more powerful and think more abstractly. In three experiments, participants received instructions to read a text out loud with eith...
Innocent victims of crime are often blamed for what happened to them. In this article, we examine the hypothesis that victim blaming can be significantly reduced when people mimic the behavior of the victim or even a person unrelated to the crime. Participants watched a person on a video after which we assessed the extent of their spontaneous mimic...
People's just world beliefs are related to how they feel and behave towards others: the stronger people hold beliefs that the world treats them fairly, the more they feel and act pro-socially towards others. It is conceivable, therefore, that pro-social feelings and behaviours towards others can strengthen people's personal belief in a just world,...
Commercials influence our attitudes and consumer behavior. We investigated whether mimicking product presenters in commercials adds to positive effects on attitudes and behavioral consumer intentions. Participants watched TV commercials and were instructed to mimic or not to mimic the movements of the model presenting a product. Then we measured th...
How can we be more successful in persuading others and increase the odds of behavioral compliance? We argue that when a verbal influence strategy is embedded in a nonverbal style that fits its orientation, this boosts the strategy's effectiveness, whereas a misfit attenuates its impact. In field-experiment 1, agents tried to persuade participants i...
Does mimicking affect the way you think about yourself in relation to other people? In the present study, we instructed participants to either mimic or not mimic the expressions of their interaction partner. After a 3-minute interaction, participants' self-view in relation to others was measured. Results revealed that mimickers defined themselves m...
People often mimic each other's behaviors. As a consequence, they share each other's emotional and cognitive states, which facilitates liking. Mimicry, however, does not always affect liking. In two studies, we investigate whether the mimicry–liking link is influenced by people's social value orientations. More specifically, we examine whether pros...
Coordinated behavior patterns are one of the pillars of social interaction. Researchers have recently shown that movement synchrony influences ratings of rapport, and the extent to which groups are judged to be a unit. The current experiments investigated the hypothesis that observers infer a shared psychological state from synchronized movement rh...
People's voting behavior has a great impact on the political road that is taken in our countries. The current research shows that mimicry, the imitation of nonverbal behavior, unconsciously affects our political voting behavior. Earlier research has shown that mimicry enhances prosocial thoughts and behaviors. As prosocial people are expected to be...
In situations of conflict, people not only attend to the verbal behaviors of others, but also to their nonverbal expressions. While these expressions can have a big impact on the conflict and its outcomes, there is little research on how people react to other’s nonverbal expressions, and how this affects their own behaviors. Two different lines of...
Over de rol van imitatiemechanismen bij het herkennen van emoties van anderen, en de beperkingen op dat gebied van mensen met autisme (ASS). Mensen met ASS nemen de gelaatsuitdrukkingen en gedragingen van anderen minder over; de spieren die actief worden wanneer wél geïmiteerd wordt, heebben geen effecten op de gevoelde emoties. Daardoor raken mens...
How do people understand what others are emotionally experiencing? We argue that mimicking the nonverbal expressions of other people (i.e., copying the behaviors of others) can be a tool for facilitating the understanding of the emotions that they are experiencing. People express their emotions nonverbally and when mimicking these nonverbal express...
Mimicry and prosocial feelings are generally thought to be positively related. However, the conditions under which mimicry and liking are related largely remain unspecified. We advance this specification by examining the relationship between mimicry and liking more thoroughly. In two experiments, we manipulated an individual's a priori liking for a...
Mimicry has benefits for people in social interactions. However, evidence regarding the consequences of mimicry is incomplete. First, research on mimicry has particularly focused on effects of being mimicked. Secondly, on the side of the mimicker evidence is correlational or lacks real interaction data. The present study investigated effects for mi...
The sharing of bodily states elicits in mimicker and mimickee corresponding conceptualisations, which facilitates liking. There are many studies showing the relatedness of mimicry and liking. However, the mimicry-liking link has not been investigated under conditions in which the mimickee is liked or disliked a priori. In two studies, we examined m...
Mimicry facilitates the ability to understand what other people are feeling. The present research investigated whether this is also true when the expressions that are being mimicked do not reflect the other person's true emotions. In interactions, targets either lied or told the truth, while observers mimicked or did not mimic the targets' facial a...
The present studies investigated whether mimicry effects on empathizing depend on whether emotional expressions are seen as acted or real. In Study 1, participants saw a fragment from a reality "soap." Half of them received an instruction to imitate facial expressions of the main character, while the other half were instructed not to imitate. Parti...
How do you decide whether the emotion expressed on another person’s face is positive or negative? Emotions may be perceived via two routes. The longer (slower) route involves matching visual input with stored knowledge about emotions. The shorter (faster) route involves empathic emotions that serve as proprioceptive cues in emotion recognition. In...
Mimicry is functional for empathy and bonding purposes. Studies on the consequences of mimicry at a behavioral level demonstrated that mimicry increases prosocial behavior. However, these previous studies focused on the mimickee. In the present paper, we investigated whether mimickers also become more helpful due to mimicry. In two studies, we have...
Facial feedback mechanisms of adolescents with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) were investigated utilizing three studies. Facial expressions, which became activated via automatic (Studies 1 and 2) or intentional (Study 2) mimicry, or via holding a pen between the teeth (Study 3), influenced corresponding emotions for controls, while individuals w...
This thesis deals with the social functions of mimicry. Mimicry was defined broadly as 'doing what others are doing'. This 'doing' can be verbal or nonverbal behaviors and expressions, like words, accents, speech rates, postures, gestures, and facial expressions. Part I of this thesis was aimed to provide insights on the social functions of mimicry...