ArticleEmotion (Washington, D.C.)2021
Fear in groups: Increasing group size reduces perceptions of danger.
Article in Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 19 citations in OpenAlex.
- Beyond Fear: Disgust, Anger, and the Affective Core of Interpersonal Phobias.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2026Article
- Endogenous opioid system modulates proximal and distal threat signals in the human brain.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Review
- Shared enemies as prosocial tool: how to infer positive relationships from negative relationships in social networks.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Interactions between neural representations of the social and spatial environment.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Hiding Uncertain Me in the Crowd: Avoidance-Oriented Affiliation Defense to Self-Uncertainty.Psychology research and behavior management · 2024Article
- The nature and neurobiology of fear and anxiety: State of the science and opportunities for accelerating discovery.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
When we face danger or stress, the presence of others can provide a powerful signal of safety and support. However, despite a large literature on group living benefits in animals, few studies have been conducted on how group size alters subjective emotional responses and threat perception in humans. We conducted 5 experiments (N = 3,652) to investigate whether the presence of others decreases fear in response to threat under a variety of conditions. In Studies 1, 2 and 3, we experimentally manipulated group size in hypothetical and real-world situations and found that fear responses decreased as group size increased. In Studies 4 and 5 we again used a combination of hypothetical and real-world decisions to test whether increased anxiety in response to a potential threat would lead participants to choose larger groups for themselves. Participants consistently chose larger groups when threat and anxiety were high. Overall, our findings show that group size provides a salient signal of protection and safety in humans. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
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Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.