How do people go about reading a room or taking the temperature of a crowd? When people catch a brief glimpse of an array of faces, they can focus their attention on only some of the faces. We propose that perceivers preferentially attend to faces exhibiting strong emotions and that this generates a crowd-emotion-amplification effect—estimating a crowd’s average emotional response as more extreme than it actually is. Study 1 (N = 50) documented the crowd-emotion-amplification effect. Study 2 (N = 50) replicated the effect even when we increased exposure time. Study 3 (N = 50) used eye tracking to show that attentional bias to emotional faces drives amplification. These findings have important implications for many domains in which individuals must make snap judgments regarding a crowd’s emotionality, from public speaking to controlling crowds.

人们如何阅读房间或测量人群的温度？当人们对一系列面孔进行短暂的一瞥时，他们只能将注意力集中在其中的一些面孔上。我们建议感知者优先关注表现出强烈情绪的面孔，这会产生人群情绪放大效应——估计人群的平均情绪反应比实际情况更极端。研究 1 ( N = 50) 记录了人群情绪放大效应。研究 2 ( N = 50) 即使我们增加了暴露时间，也复制了这种效果。研究 3 ( N= 50) 使用眼动追踪来表明对情绪化面孔的注意力偏差会导致放大。这些发现对许多领域都有重要意义，在这些领域中，个人必须对人群的情绪做出快速判断，从公开演讲到控制人群。