Search for familiar and dangerous: not seeing a gopnik in the crowd

Abstract

Background: Subcultures often develop distinct fashion style, which eventually becomes their “trademark” and represents the culture. In post-soviet countries, “gopniks” are one of the most prominent subcultures that is also present in popular media. Nevertheless, it is unknown to which extent the established image of “gopniks” in common knowledge can influence low-level perceptual processes such as search asymmetry.
Objective: Our aim was to examine the influence of specific features of “gopnik” image on visual search.
Design: We conducted two experiments to investigate familiarity and threatening of the “gopnik” features. In experiment 1, participants had to find a man-like stimuli in two conditions: a man-like silhouette with vertical stripes on his trousers among similar figures, but with horizontal stripes and vice versa. In experiment 2, participants had to search for the same stripes pattern only (but without man-like silhouette). Conditions were the same as in the first experiment. The experiment 3 was conducted in order to replicate results from previous two experiments with better control.
Results: Overall, our results demonstrated visual search asymmetry for man-like (with horizontal stripes on trousers) and gopnik-like (with vertical stripes on trousers) objects, which could not be explained by the basic feature differences of these stimuli.
Conclusion: We suggest that nowadays in Russia “gopniks” are perceived as a familiar group rather than dangerous subculture with real power. Their image was successfully transmitted to the general cultural background for post-soviet communities.