Joint Perception Biases Subjective Awareness Reports

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 computerised 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 non-social tasks revealed this effect to be a combination of social-specific 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.