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Building Trust: Heart Rate Synchrony and Arousal During Joint Action Increased by Public Goods Game
... While a system could routinely ask its user to evaluate his/ her trust, there are potential methodological concerns (e.g., anchoring and response bias) in addition to concerns over whether such a redundant request may be seen as an annoying behavior which could impact the use of such a system (Segura et al., 2012). In an effort to develop a real-time assessment of trust, research has examined the utility of physiological and behavioral measures such as heart rate (Khalid et al., 2016;Mitkidis et al., 2015;Perello-March et al., 2022;Tolston et al., 2018), galvanic skin response (Akash et al., 2018;Chen et al., 2015), interventions (Tenhundfeld et al., , 2020, monitoring behaviors (Bahner et al., 2008;Bailey & Scerbo, 2007;Banks et al., 2018;Endsley, 2017), and eye-tracking (Hergeth et al., 2015;Lu & Sarter, 2019). ...
... We have therefore run a study in which physiological, behavioral, and subjective self-report measures are used, to assess trust of participants interacting with an autonomous golf-cart. Some of the techniques we used have been routinely relied upon for trust assessment, such as subjective self-reports (Brown & Galster, 2004;Foroughi et al., 2021;Seet et al., 2022;Wojton et al., 2020), heart rate (Mitkidis et al., 2015;Tolston et al., 2018), and monitoring behaviors (Bailey & Scerbo, 2007;Ferraro et al., 2018;Tenhundfeld et al., 2019). However, we also selected measures that have been linked to trust through being measures of stress but have not had the same breadth of use in empirical studies, such as heart-rate variability (HRV) (Petersen et al., 2019) and displacement behaviors (Fratczak et al., 2021). ...
... that HRV and HR may increase when a user's workload is higher due to lower trust resulting in a greater degree of monitoring of the system (Khalid et al., 2016;Mitkidis et al., 2015;Perello-March et al., 2022;Tolston et al., 2018). Additionally, these measures are indications of stress which may be caused by decreased levels of trust (Reimer et al., 2010(Reimer et al., , 2016. ...
As automated and autonomous systems become more widely available, the ability to integrate them into environments seamlessly becomes more important. One cognitive construct that can predict the use, misuse, and disuse of automated and autonomous systems is trust that a user has in the system. The literature has explored not only the predictive nature of trust but also the ways in which it can be evaluated. As a result, various measures, such as physiological and behavioral measures, have been proposed as ways to evaluate trust in real-time. However, inherent differences in the measurement approaches (e.g., task dependencies and timescales) raise questions about whether the use of these approaches will converge upon each other. If they do, then the selection of any given proven approach to trust assessment may not matter. However, if they do not converge, it raises questions about the ability of these measures to assess trust equally and whether discrepancies are attributable to discriminant validity or other factors. The present study used various trust assessment techniques for passengers in a self-driving golf-cart. We find little to no convergence across measures, raising questions that need to be addressed in future research.
... Studies analyzing physiological time series data in couples have found that romantic partners are interconnected in daily fluctuations of heart rate, a phenomenon that has been called "physiological synchrony" or "physiological linkage" [27][28][29]. Physiological linkage has been associated with central interpersonal outcomes such as trust, empathy, and effective cooperation [28,[30][31][32], and could thus be important for social processes such as supportive interactions in managing a chronic health condition. For example, synchrony in skin conductance levels predicted higher cooperative success in 76 dyads (college students) playing a Prisoner's Dilemma game [30]. ...
... For example, synchrony in skin conductance levels predicted higher cooperative success in 76 dyads (college students) playing a Prisoner's Dilemma game [30]. In addition, heart rate linkage was increased in 110 college student dyads when randomized to playing a trust-related game versus a control condition [32]. A recent meta-analysis of 60 published and unpublished experiments also demonstrated that synchrony exhibits a medium-sized effect on prosocial attitudes and behaviors [33]. ...
Background
Technology has become an integral part of our everyday life, and its use to manage and study health is no exception. Romantic partners play a critical role in managing chronic health conditions as they tend to be a primary source of support.
Objective
This study tests the feasibility of using commercial wearables to monitor couples’ unique way of communicating and supporting each other and documents the physiological correlates of interpersonal dynamics (ie, heart rate linkage).
Methods
We analyzed 617 audio recordings of 5-minute duration (384 with concurrent heart rate data) and 527 brief self-reports collected from 11 couples in which 1 partner had type II diabetes during the course of their typical daily lives. Audio data were coded by trained raters for social support. The extent to which heart rate fluctuations were linked among couples was quantified using cross-correlations. Random-intercept multilevel models explored whether cross-correlations might differ by social contexts and exchanges.
Results
Sixty percent of audio recordings captured speech between partners and partners reported personal contact with each other in 75% of self-reports. Based on the coding, social support was found in 6% of recordings, whereas at least 1 partner self-reported social support about half the time (53%). Couples, on average, showed small to moderate interconnections in their heart rate fluctuations (r=0.04-0.22). Couples also varied in the extent to which there was lagged linkage, that is, meaning that changes in one partner’s heart rate tended to precede changes in the other partner’s heart rate. Exploratory analyses showed that heart rate linkage was stronger (1) in rater-coded partner conversations (vs moments of no rater-coded partner conversations: rdiff=0.13; P=.03), (2) when partners self-reported interpersonal contact (vs moments of no self-reported interpersonal contact: rdiff=0.20; P<.001), and (3) when partners self-reported social support exchanges (vs moments of no self-reported social support exchange: rdiff=0.15; P=.004).
Conclusions
Our study provides initial evidence for the utility of using wearables to collect biopsychosocial data in couples managing a chronic health condition in daily life. Specifically, heart rate linkage might play a role in fostering chronic disease management as a couple. Insights from collecting such data could inform future technology interventions to promote healthy lifestyle engagement and adaptive chronic disease management.
International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID)
RR2-10.2196/13685
... The study found that heart rate variability and self-report measures of trust in the agent from round one were significant predictors of trust behavior in an agent for round two. Mitkidis et al. (2015) conducted a study observing heart rate synchrony and arousal as a predictor of trust during a public goods game. Thirty-seven pairs of participants' constructed LEGO model cars during four consecutive sessions lasting 10 minutes each. ...
... This is desirable as trust is thought to fluctuate rapidly in response to trust-related events like violation and repair (Glikson & Woolley, 2020). For example, Mitkidis et al. (2015) used heart rate synchrony as a predictor of trust in an experimental setting where participants engaged with an agent for four consecutive sessions that each lasted ten minutes. Using heart rate data collected both within and across the four 10-minute sessions, it was found that heart rate was more synchronized in the trusting condition. ...
Key to studying and assessing trust and other team emergent states in human-agent teams (HATs) is the ability to measure trust, which has predominantly been assessed through self-report survey methodologies. However, on their own, self-report measures are limited by issues such as social desirability (e.g., Arnold & Feldman, 1981; Taylor, 1961), inaccuracies due to retrospective assessments of abstract concepts (Podsakoff & Organ, 1986), the assessment of trust as static rather than a dynamically emerging state (Kozlowski, 2015), and the impracticality of asking team members to pause tasks to complete surveys. There is a clear need for innovative approaches to better capture trust for both research and applied purposes. Recently, researchers have recommended and begun incorporating more unobtrusive measurement methodologies such as physiological measures, event-based behavioral assessments, and analysis of language/communication (Azevedo-Sa et al., 2021; Hill et al., 2014; Marathe et al., 2020; Waldman et al., 2015). Unobtrusive measures offer many benefits beyond self-report measures, including being more objective, more predictive, more dynamic and real-time, and interfering less with taskwork and teamwork. Meanwhile, behavioral measures of trust, such as allocating tasks to autonomous agents and manually controlling agents, are readily available and also correlated with trust (Schaefer et al., 2021; Khalid et al., 2021). On their own, none of these approaches comprehensively measure trust across a variety of HAT domains and interactions. By evaluating and mapping out known measures of trust to use cases, this paper presents a review of the literature in this field and proposes a theoreticallygrounded Integrative Measurement Framework of Trust Dynamics in HATs that will more accurately, effectively, and practically capture trust in HATs by combining traditional and contemporary measurement approaches.
... Oxytocin is capable of amplifying both positive and negative social interactions (Bernaerts et al., 2016;Bellosta-Batalla et al., 2020;Peen et al., 2021;Leeds et al., 2020;Steinman et al., 2019). The dynamic nature of trust, as indicated by changes in trust levels during trust games, could also parallel how exercise-induced physiological changes (like fluctuations in oxytocin levels) may influence social behaviors and trust in a sports setting, even synchronize heart rates and arousal (Hahn et al., 2015;Mitkidis et al., 2015). Oxytocin was found to lower the moral acceptability of outcome-maximizing choices, which might take part in moral decision-making (Palumbo et al., 2020) of athletes indirectly, leading to a more humanistic behavior in sports through empathy. ...
... Play and eliciting playful behavior in both animals and humans show a significant link to oxytocin levels, particularly in social contexts. This is evident in studies examining interactions between pets and their owners, as well as father-infant dynamics, highlighting oxytocin's role in enhancing social bonding and trust, potentially influencing sports performance (Mitkidis et al., 2015;Gray et al., 2017;Nagasawa et al., 2020;Rossi et al., 2018;Schreiner, 2016). Oxytocin's role in sports-related physical contact underlines its significance in enhancing team cohesion, trust, and overall wellbeing in athletes (Mitsui et al., 2011;Kociuba et al., 2023;Frey Law et al., 2008;Bellosta-Batalla et al., 2020;McGuire et al., 2015;Rossi et al., 2018). ...
Introduction
This systematic review investigates the interplay between oxytocin and exercise; in terms of analgesic, anti-inflammatory, pro-regenerative, and cardioprotective effects. Furthermore, by analyzing measurement methods, we aim to improve measurement validity and reliability.
Methods
Utilizing PRISMA, GRADE, and MECIR protocols, we examined five databases with a modified SPIDER search. Including studies on healthy participants, published within the last 20 years, based on keywords “oxytocin,” “exercise” and “measurement,” 690 studies were retrieved initially (455 unique records). After excluding studies of clinically identifiable diseases, and unpublished and reproduction-focused studies, 175 studies qualified for the narrative cross-thematic and structural analysis.
Results
The analysis resulted in five categories showing the reciprocal impact of oxytocin and exercise: Exercise (50), Physiology (63), Environment (27), Social Context (65), and Stress (49). Exercise-induced oxytocin could promote tissue regeneration, with 32 studies showing its analgesic and anti-inflammatory effects, while 14 studies discussed memory and cognition. Furthermore, empathy-associated OXTR rs53576 polymorphism might influence team sports performance. Since dietary habits and substance abuse can impact oxytocin secretion too, combining self-report tests and repeated salivary measurements may help achieve precision.
Discussion
Oxytocin’s effect on fear extinction and social cognition might generate strategies for mental training, and technical, and tactical development in sports. Exercise-induced oxytocin can affect the amount of stress experienced by athletes, and their response to it. However, oxytocin levels could depend on the type of sport in means of contact level, exercise intensity, and duration. The influence of oxytocin on athletes’ performance and recovery could have been exploited due to its short half-life. Examining oxytocin’s complex interactions with exercise paves the way for future research and application in sports science, psychology, and medical disciplines.
Systematic Review Registration
https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?RecordID=512184, identifier CRD42024512184
... Collective task performance is predicted by such interbrain synchrony (11) which can be enhanced by consensus-building discussions (12). Interpersonal heart rate synchrony, a peripheral index of shared arousal, has been associated with joint attention, empathic accuracy and group cohesion (13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19). Whether heart rate synchrony between group members can predict the quality of group discussion outcomes remains unknown (20). ...
... A phase space is a collection of all possible states of the system plotted as a function of time. How often a trajectory revisits a point in the phase space, or recurrence, indicates how different components of a multivariate system interact and converge on the same state across time (16). The phase space of a multidimensional system can be reconstructed using Taken's time-delayed embedding theorem (68), which states that if one has access to only one variable from a complex system governed by multiple interdependent variables, then one can reconstruct the dynamics of this system by utilizing (D number of) time-delayed versions of the observable x as (D-dimensional) coordinates of the phase space (69). ...
Groups often outperform individuals in problem-solving. Nevertheless, failure to critically evaluate ideas risks suboptimal outcomes through so-called groupthink. Prior studies have shown that people who hold shared goals, perspectives, or understanding of the environment show similar patterns of brain activity, which itself can be enhanced by consensus-building discussions. Whether shared arousal alone can predict collective decision-making outcomes, however, remains unknown. To address this gap, we computed interpersonal heart rate synchrony, a peripheral index of shared arousal associated with joint attention, empathic accuracy, and group cohesion, in 44 groups (n = 204) performing a collective decision-making task. The task required critical examination of all available information to override inferior, default options and make the right choice. Using multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis (MdRQA) and machine learning, we found that heart rate synchrony predicted the probability of groups reaching the correct consensus decision with >70% cross-validation accuracy–significantly higher than that predicted by the duration of discussions, subjective assessment of team function or baseline heart rates alone. We propose that heart rate synchrony during group discussion provides a biomarker of interpersonal engagement that facilitates adaptive learning and effective information sharing during collective decision-making.
... They also provide the researcher with a set of analytics and concepts that can give more insight into the formation, stabilization, transitions, and emergence of the team phenomenon being studied (Meinecke et al., 2019). Other scoring methods, such as Pearson correlation (e.g., Slovák et al., 2014), frequency-based measurement techniques (e.g., weighted cross-coherence; Henning et al., 2001), time series analysis, which uses the autoregressive moving-average model combined with generalized linear model and crosscorrelation (e.g., Feldman et al., 2011), or nonlinear modeling (e.g., cross-recurrence analysis; Mitkidis et al., 2015) are not suited to combine with physiological data. Namely, these methods assume stationarity, implying that statistical properties such as the mean and variance remain constant over time (Palumbo et al., 2017). ...
... Namely, research on emotional contagion and social appraisal theory shows that stress convergence or divergence are asymmetrical processes (Anderson et al., 2003). The degree to which members will converge to others can differ based on their social status, role, the extent to which they are liked (Kaplan et al., 1963), the social relationship we have with them (Anderson et al., 2003), and how we perceive them (e.g., as trustworthy or competent; Anderson et al., 2003;Mitkidis et al., 2015). As such, a single member, such as a leader, may physiologically lead and affect others more during some phases of the task (Butler & Randall, 2013). ...
Recent studies have come to recognize the benefit of adopting a team-level perspective when studying stress in a team. However, most studies on team stress still rely on traditional scoring methods that provide limited insight into the dynamics that characterize team stress as a temporal and multilevel construct. This article explores how state space grids (SSGs) can identify, track, and visualize physiological stress dynamics over time and between members during a task. We collected electrodermal activity data from nine teams to demonstrate the application of SSGs during a flight simulator task. The results show that SSGs enable researchers to capture and visualize dynamic changes in stress levels and the association between member’s stress levels in teams. SSG analytics illustrate the importance of capturing stress variability over time and between members as, in this sample, teams were most attracted toward a state of shared low–low or high–high states in the grid, while shared and affiliated intermediated states in the middle of the SSGs were often just “passed” through by teams. In the Discussion section, this article elaborated more on how SSGs can lead to more novel and nuanced insights into the nature and impact of stress in teams as well as applied in other contexts.
... Other group physiological synchrony research has demonstrated that physiological synchrony is beneficial to the group in that it facilitates group interactions. For example, in one group study (Mitkidis et al., 2015), in which the results of a public goods game were manipulated to reveal the causal effect of perceived trust on group members' HR synchrony, findings indicated that physiological synchrony prevailed when there was trust (versus mistrust) among group members. Several studies further demonstrated relationships between physiological synchrony and group performance. ...
... Unlike survey-based measures, physiological synchrony indices capture group synchronization in milliseconds and provide a highly-sensitive, dynamic index of group interactions that captures expressions of covert forms of social alignment (Waldman et al., 2019). Our approach is consistent with previous research that examined biological forms of synchrony as predictors of behavioral forms of social alignment (Chatel-Goldman et al., 2014;Dikker et al., 2017;Gordon et al., 2020;Mayo & Gordon, 2020;Mitkidis et al., 2015;Mønster et al., 2016;Noy et al., 2015;Palumbo et al., 2017). Nevertheless, to date, the implications of deep-seated synchrony to group performance have been rarely examined. ...
Groups are an inherent part of our lives. We form and join social groups from kindergarten and school through college and the workplace to the nursing home. Throughout our lifespan, the groups we belong to shape our identity and social self. Overall, groups have a profound role in shaping our behavior, mental well-being, and even physical health. Decades of research from social, clinical, cognitive, and organizational psychology taught us a great deal about intra-group processes. However, we do not yet fully understand the mechanisms that allow group formation. A relatively new and promising line of research may fill this gap of knowledge by examining how physiological and biological markers underpin social processes in our groups.
Our tendency to form and join social groups is considered evolutionary-based. In order to survive and thrive, humans and some other animals, must be a part of social groups and connect with their members. This promises reproductivity options and security to the individual. Further, contemporary theories posit that our brains are wired to form and join social groups. According to these theories, when we act as a group, rather than a set of individuals, our brains become coordinated in function and allow us to shape relations and processes in our groups. Thus, it is not surprising that scholars call to study groups from a physiological perspective.
Indeed, this line of research finds that the group becomes more cohesive when members' physiological functions are synchronized. For example, past research finds that synchrony in heart rate (HR) and electrodermal activity (EDA) is reflected in group members' reports of cohesion, rapport, and trust. Some research even finds that physiological synchrony positively predicts the group's performance. However, we are just beginning to decipher the complex interconnections between shared physiological patterns and group relations.
One advancement in the research is the recent notion that physiological synchrony is not always beneficial for the group and its members, i.e., resulting in higher cohesion and improved performance. According to this conception, the social context may moderate the relationships since physiological synchrony derives its meaning from context. Therefore, it is crucial to assess how the situation may influence the implications of synchrony in groups.
In the first part of the dissertation, following this contemporary notion, I argue that physiological synchrony, specifically in EDA, is not always related to better group outcomes (i.e., improved group performance). Here I focus on the justice enacted by the group leader as a contextual factor that moderates the benefits of physiological synchrony on the group's performance.
I rely on justice theories (e.g., De Cremer & Tyler, 2005), which state that group members would be more engaged with groups that are treated fairly by their leader and that physiological synchrony in EDA would reflect the level of group engagement. Furthermore, I argue that physiological synchrony cannot contribute to group outcomes when group members are treated unfairly by their leader, thus not feeling secure in the group and not functioning as a group. This is especially true for newly-formed groups, where the leader has an essential role in shaping members' attitudes inside and toward the group and other members.
In this study, I report on a controlled experiment where 150 participants, nested in fifty 3-member groups, were asked to complete a group decision-making task in which they had to reach a group agreement. Half of the groups were treated fairly by the group leader (i.e., the experimenter), whereas the other half were treated unfairly (see details below). I calculated the group's performance scores, which represented the group's success in the task beyond the individual’s contribution. I also calculated a group EDA synchrony score and revealed, in line with the hypothesis, that group physiological synchrony was positively correlated with the group's performance, but only when the group was treated fairly by the leader.
After presenting evidence showing that the effect of physiological synchrony on group outcomes depends on the justice enacted by the group's leader, I turn to discuss future directions of group physiological synchrony research. In the second part of the dissertation, I present a methodological validation of the Empatica E4 wristband (Empatica, Milan, Italy) and suggest how it could be best used in future synchrony research. This sort of tool, I believe, can be valuable to group physiological synchrony research and thus, promoting group physiological synchrony research and psychophysiology research at large.
The Empatica E4 is a portable, wireless, and light-weighted wristband that allows an online collection of several physiological measures, including HR, interbeat intervals (IBIs; from which it is possible to calculate certain heart rate variability measures), EDA, movement, and body temperature. One of the significant advantages of the E4 is that it enables the collection of online high-frequency HR/IBI and EDA data, which enables calculating dyadic and group physiological synchrony also outside the lab. In this chapter, I report a validation study of the E4. I collected data from 15 dyads during baseline measurements and while engaging in a conversation. The data were collected simultaneously by the E4 and a well-validated and well-established device (MindWare Impedance Cardiograph; MindWare Technologies, Gahanna, Ohio) that collects ECG and EDA data via electrodes. Results showed that the E4 is a reliable tool for collecting HR/IBI data, but not heart rate variability and EDA data. Thus, with the E4, researchers may be able to calculate dyadic and group HR/IBI synchrony in field and lab studies. In this chapter, I further discuss the advantages of the E4 in collecting continuous IBI data and detail how researchers may best integrate this device when conducting group physiological synchrony research involving HR/IBI. I end this chapter by calling future group physiological synchrony to consider this tool when conducting synchrony research in field settings.
Next, in the third chapter, I suggest that group physiological synchrony research can be conducive in the context of rivalry by promoting our understanding of the mechanism underlining in this phenomenon. Rivalries are widespread in our lives and in many contexts. One can easily name famous rivalries such as the rivalry between Burger King and McDonald's, Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics, or the Republican and the Democrat parties. The relationships between rivals are unique and intense. When competing against a rival, compared to a non-rival competitor, groups and individuals are putting extra effort into the contest.
Before calling to explore the role of physiological synchrony in rivalry-performance relationships, I review the current status of empirical findings regarding rivalry and performance. An electronic wide-scale search yielded 22 papers from diverse research fields such as management, sports, and cognitive psychology. These papers include 35 studies and 26,215 observations. The studies compared the performance of individuals or groups when competing against a rival versus a non-rival competitor or measured linear relations between rivalry and performance. I systematically reviewed these studies. In line with the hypothesis, it was found that most of these studies reported a positive relationship between rivalry and the performance of the competing actors. I further used a meta-analysis technique to provide quantitative evidence that, as hypothesized, rivalry is positively and significantly related to performance. Moderation analyses indicated that in some
research fields (e.g., sports), these relations are more robust as compared to others (e.g., cognitive psychology) and that these relations exist for both individual rivalry (rivalry between two individuals) and group rivalry (rivalry between two groups, or two individuals identifying with rival groups), although stronger for individual rivalries.
After providing evidence that both individual and group rivalry are related to increased performance, I call for physiological research to better understand rival groups' relations and rivalry effects. We know very little about the physiology that underlies the increased motivation and performance that we experience when we compete against a rival versus a neutral team or a stranger. I speculated that group rivalry is a potential antecedent of group physiological synchrony that at least partially explains group members' elevated performance when competing against a fierce rival. I end this chapter by suggesting that the unique effects of rivalry may be even stronger in the context of political rivalry. Thus, group physiological synchrony may promote our understanding of political rivalry and its unique effects.
... Different neuroscience studies explored the effects of interpersonal synchrony, the temporary alignment of periodic behaviors with another person. 26,27 These studies underline that the main effect is the emergence of a brain ''we-mode'' through the synchronization of different neurophysiological parameters, including heart rate 27 and neural oscillations 28 that demonstrate an amplified awareness of the other participant. For example, Cacioppo et al. 26 found that interpersonal synchrony also enhances the participant's ratings of perceived interpersonal synchrony and social affiliation with the partner. ...
... Different neuroscience studies explored the effects of interpersonal synchrony, the temporary alignment of periodic behaviors with another person. 26,27 These studies underline that the main effect is the emergence of a brain ''we-mode'' through the synchronization of different neurophysiological parameters, including heart rate 27 and neural oscillations 28 that demonstrate an amplified awareness of the other participant. For example, Cacioppo et al. 26 found that interpersonal synchrony also enhances the participant's ratings of perceived interpersonal synchrony and social affiliation with the partner. ...
What distinguishes real-world communities from their online counterparts? Social and cognitive neuroscience research on social networks and collective intentionality will be used in the article to answer this question. Physical communities are born in places. And places engage "we-mode" neurobiological and cognitive processes as behavioral synchrony, shared attention, deliberate attunement, interbrain synchronization, and so on, which create coherent social networks of very different individuals who are supported by a "wisdom of crowd." Digital technologies remove physical boundaries, giving people more freedom to choose their activities and groups. At the same time, however, the lack of physical co-presence of community members significantly reduces their possibility of activating "we-mode" cognitive processes and social motivation. Because of this, unlike physical communities that allow interaction between people from varied origins and stories, digital communities are always made up of people who have the same interests and knowledge (communities of practice). This new situation disrupts the "wisdom of crowd," making the community more radical and less accurate (polarization effect), allowing influential users to wield disproportionate influence over the group's beliefs, and producing inequalities in the distribution of social capital. However, a new emergent technology-the Metaverse-has the potential to reverse this trend. Several studies have revealed that virtual and augmented reality-the major technologies underlying the Metaverse-can engage the same neurobiological and cognitive "we-mode" processes as real-world environments. If the many flaws in this technology are fixed, it might encourage people to engage in more meaningful and constructive interactions in online communities.
... human cognitive system has a finite number of resources (Chiu & Egner, 2015) and tying that to the dual-process theory, we expected that by limiting the cognitive capacity, we diminish deliberation (Schulz et al., 2014) and reveal the fundamental, automatic, deep-skin human social preferences of system 1. The Operation Span task was used to load WM to varying degrees in both studies; the Public Goods Game (PGG) was used to measure cooperation (Mitkidis et al., 2015); the Dots task was used to measure dishonesty . ...
... The investment was an index of the degree of cooperation, i.e., the higher the investment, the higher the cooperation. The PGG is generally used to test whether individuals are willing to ignore strictly personal interests and favor the collective ones (Mitkidis et al., 2013) and it is a classic method to measure cooperation in laboratory settings (Fehr & Gachter, 2000;Fischbacher et al., 2001;Mitkidis et al., 2015). ...
Though human social interaction in general seems effortless at times, successful engagement in collaborative or exploitative social interaction requires the availability of cognitive resources. Research on Dual-Process suggests that two systems, the affective (non-reflective) and the cognitive (reflective), are responsible for different types of reasoning. Nevertheless, the evidence on which system leads to what type of behavioral outcome, in terms of prosociality, is at best contradicting and perplexing. In the present paper, we examined the role of the two systems, operationalized as working memory depletion, in prosocial decision-making. We hypothesize that the nature of the available cognitive resources could affect whether humans engage in collaborative or exploitative social interaction. Using Operation Span to manipulate the availability of working memory, we examined how taxing the cognitive system affects cooperation and cheating. In two experiments, we provide evidence that concurrent load, but not cumulative load is detrimental to cooperation, whereas neither concurrent nor cumulative load seems to affect cheating behavior. These findings are in contrast to several previous assumptions. We discuss limitations, possible explanations, and future directions.
... But what are the neurophysiological effects of collective action? Different neuroscience studies explored the effects of interpersonal synchrony, the temporary alignment of periodic behaviors with another person (Cacioppo et al., 2014, Mitkidis et al., 2015. ...
... These studies underline that the main effect is the emergence of a brain we-mode through the synchronization of different neurophysiological parameters, including heart rate (Mitkidis et al., 2015) and neural oscillations (Reinero et al., 2020) that demonstrate an amplified awareness of the other participant. For example, Cacioppo and colleagues (Cacioppo et al., 2014) found that interpersonal synchrony also enhance the participant's ratings of perceived interpersonal synchrony and social affiliation with the partner. ...
What makes physical and digital communities different? In this paper, I will attempt to answer this question using recent research findings from social and cognitive neuroscience related to social networks and collective intentionality. Physical communities are born in places. And places activate different “we-mode” neurobiological and cognitive processes – behavioral synchrony, joint attention, intentional attunement, inter-brain synchronization, etc.- that generate cohesive social networks composed of individuals who can be very different from each other. Digital technologies, by removing the physical boundaries that define a place, allow greater freedom in the behavior of individuals and the selection of community. At the same time, however, the lack of physical co-presence of community members significantly reduces their possibility of activating “we-mode” cognitive processes and their overall level of social motivation. For this reason, digital communities are communities of like-minded individuals, based on common interests and shared knowledge (communities of practice).
... In the context of physiological or behavioral signals, ISC is often referred to as "interpersonal synchronization," implying that 2 or more people are co-present in a given context. A variety of mechanisms have been proposed to cause ISC such as social interactions (1), physical interactions (4,7,22), shared emotions (9,10), and it has been argued that the strength of synchrony is modulated by empathy (23,24), arousal (4,25), attention (26), and more (1). The diversity of factors parallels the diversity of factors known to affect physiological signals. ...
... The co-modulation observed here is surprising given the diversity of factors that have been previously proposed to underlie interpersonal physiological synchrony. Leaving out brain signals, this includes emotions (HR (5-7, 10)), arousal (HR (4,25) and head velocity (38)), empathy (HR (6,8,24), skin conductance (23) A video stimulus is processed cognitively by the brain, similarly in different subjects (dashed arrows-indicate cognitive processing encompassing perception and cognition; obviously signals enter the brain through eyes and ears). This cognitive processing causes similar fluctuations in signals of the body that exhibit robust brain-body coupling (solid arrows). ...
Neural, physiological and behavioral signals synchronize between human subjects in a variety of settings. Multiple hypotheses have been proposed to explain this interpersonal synchrony, but there is no clarity under which conditions it arises, for which signals, or whether there is a common underlying mechanism. We hypothesized that similar cognitive processing of a shared stimulus is the source of synchrony between subjects, measured here as inter-subject correlation. To test this, we presented informative videos to participants in an attentive and distracted condition and subsequently measured information recall. Inter-subject correlation was observed for electro-encephalography, gaze position, pupil size and heart rate, but not respiration and head movements. The strength of correlation was co-modulated in the different signals, changed with attentional state, and predicted subsequent recall of information presented in the videos. There was robust within-subject coupling between brain, heart and eyes, but not respiration or head movements. The results suggest that inter-subject correlation is the result of similar cognitive processing and thus emerges only for those signals that exhibit a robust brain-body connection. While physiological and behavioral fluctuations may be driven by multiple features of the stimulus, correlation with other individuals is co-modulated by the level of attentional engagement with the stimulus.
... Recent studies have suggested the temporal ordering effects of system interactions influence subsequent decision-making outcomes (Blutner & Graben, 2014;Kvam et al., 2021). Moreover, researchers have recently advocated for understanding the relationship between trust in AI for decision-making (Atchley et al., 2022;Glikson & Woolley, 2020), cognitive behaviors (de Visser et al., 2018;, and associating trust with physiological measures Mitkidis et al., 2015;Tolston et al., 2018). Hence, this dissertation aims to empirically examine how trust in AI may temporally relate to a user's decision-making when supported by AI in dynamic domains. ...
Within the decision space that has traditionally been reserved for humans, artificial intelligence (AI) is set to take over a number of tasks. In response, human decision-makers interacting with AI systems may have difficulty forming trust around such AI-generated information. Decision-making is currently conceptualized as a constructive process of evidence accumulation. However, this constructive process may evolve differently depending on how such interactions are engineered. The purpose of this study is to investigate how trust evolves temporally through intermediate judgments on AI-provided advice. In an online experiment (N=192), trust was found to oscillate over time and it was discovered that eliciting an intermediate judgment on AI provided advice exhibited a bolstering effect. Additionally, the study revealed that participants exhibited violations of total probability that current modeling techniques are unable to capture. Therefore, an approach using quantum open system modeling, representing trust as a function of time with a single probability distribution, is shown to improve modeling trust in an AI system over traditional Markovian techniques. The results of this study should improve AI system behaviors that may help steer a human’s preference to more Bayesian optimal rationality, which is useful in time-critical decision-making scenarios in complex task environments.
... However, this approach is not as suitable for real-time applications. Prior research has identified a relationship between trust and physiological response [15]- [17]. However, these works often utilize more invasive and less readily accessible measures, which require sensors to be placed in restrictive areas such as the scalp or chest. ...
With robots becoming increasingly prevalent in various domains, it has become crucial to equip them with tools to achieve greater fluency in interactions with humans. One of the promising areas for further exploration lies in human trust. A real-time, objective model of human trust could be used to maximize productivity, preserve safety, and mitigate failure. In this work, we attempt to use physiological measures, gaze, and facial expressions to model human trust in a robot partner. We are the first to design an in-person, human-robot supervisory interaction study to create a dedicated trust dataset. Using this dataset, we train machine learning algorithms to identify the objective measures that are most indicative of trust in a robot partner, advancing trust prediction in human-robot interactions. Our findings indicate that a combination of sensor modalities (blood volume pulse, electrodermal activity, skin temperature, and gaze) can enhance the accuracy of detecting human trust in a robot partner. Furthermore, the Extra Trees, Random Forest, and Decision Trees classifiers exhibit consistently better performance in measuring the person's trust in the robot partner. These results lay the groundwork for constructing a real-time trust model for human-robot interaction, which could foster more efficient interactions between humans and robots.
... It has been suggested that joint actions, such as motor synchrony, increase interacting partners' sense of mutual commitment 49 , creating the expectation that they will engage in future reciprocal exchanges. By strengthening such expectations, interpersonal motor synchrony may also promote teaching and learning 24,[49][50][51] . Engaging in synchronous interactions, which are highly structured, may guide interacting partners to perceive the other person as reliable, and trustworthy and to provide useful information about how to attain one's desired goal. ...
Playful activities provide critical opportunities for rhythmic interactions, which may affect social and cognitive development in early childhood. Prior research suggests that motor synchrony promotes closeness and prosocial behaviour, but few studies have examined its role in social learning. This study investigated whether motor synchrony, through a clapping game, enhances preschoolers' closeness with others, imitation, over-imitation, and prosociality. We hypothesized that children would feel closer, imitate more, and share more with a partner who moved in synchrony compared to one who moved asynchronously. In a group setting, motor synchrony and asynchrony were experimentally induced between the child and two experimenters. Bayesian analyses revealed no credible evidence for differences in affiliation, imitation, over-imitation, or prosocial behaviour between experimenters (BF10=0.045-0.216). A manipulation check indicated low motor synchrony scores, suggesting the intended synchrony may not have been fully achieved, potentially influencing the outcomes. These findings highlight the challenges of inducing motor synchrony in playful group contexts and raise questions about the conditions necessary for synchrony to impact social learning in young children.
... This metric is assumed to quantify the extent of non-random recurrence (e.g. Mitkidis et al., 2015) and is used in this paper as the primary indicator of PS. ...
Manufacturing industries must address the needs of their human resources to maintain efficiency and profitability inthe global markets. By fostering safe, psychologically supportive working conditions, companies can improve workperformance and retain their workforce in the face of labor shortage. Monitoring mental workload, and in particularmental overload, which occurs when the cognitive resources needed for task performance exceed the operator'scapacity, is a promising approach when addressing this issue. Previous research has mainly focused on individualassessments of mental workload. When assessing workload at the team level, one approach is to simply aggregateindividual metrics. In order to reduce the loss of information due to this data aggregation, we are exploring a novelway of measuring the mental workload of teams: Physiological Synchrony (PS). This exploratory study, involving 75participants grouped into five-person teams, investigates the relationship between classical team-level metrics and PSduring a complex virtual reality task. PS is calculated using Multidimensional Recurrence Quantification Analysis. Asignificant difference in aggregated team workload was observed between high and low synchronized teams, withhigher synchronized teams exhibiting a lower aggregated workload. These results suggest that PS may be a suitablemeasure of mental workload at the team level.
... It has been suggested that joint actions, such as motor synchrony, increase interacting partners' sense of mutual commitment 49 , creating the expectation that they will engage in future reciprocal exchanges. By strengthening such expectations, interpersonal motor synchrony may also promote teaching and learning 24,[49][50][51] . Engaging in synchronous interactions, which are highly structured, may guide interacting partners to perceive the other person as reliable, and trustworthy and to provide useful information about how to attain one's desired goal. ...
Playful activities provide critical opportunities for rhythmic interactions, which may affect social and cognitive development in early childhood. Prior research suggests that motor synchrony promotes closeness and prosocial behaviour, but few studies have examined its role in social learning. This study investigated whether motor synchrony, through a clapping game, enhances preschoolers' closeness with others, imitation, over-imitation, and prosociality. We hypothesized that children would feel closer, imitate more, and share more with a partner who moved in synchrony compared to one who moved asynchronously. In a group setting, motor synchrony and asynchrony were experimentally induced between the child and two experimenters. Bayesian analyses revealed no credible evidence for differences in affiliation, imitation, over-imitation, or prosocial behaviour between experimenters (BF10=0.045-0.216). A manipulation check indicated low motor synchrony scores, suggesting the intended synchrony may not have been fully achieved, potentially influencing the outcomes. These findings highlight the challenges of inducing motor synchrony in playful group contexts and raise questions about the conditions necessary for synchrony to impact social learning in young children.
... Previous research has suggested that there may be psychophysiological changes, as measured by electrodermal activity (EDA), heart rate (HR), and heart-rate variability (HRV), associated with a change in trust or the onset of a trust-based decision (Montague et al. 2014;Mitkidis et al. 2015). While this is new research, these types of measures have a long history of being associated with cognitive effort and decision-making capability that is critical to understanding interaction with human-autonomy teams. ...
This report presents the results from collaborative exploratory research designed to identify and assess different metrics of team trust and team cohesion that may be relevant to military human–autonomy teams. This was a simulation study using the Wingman Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration simulation testbed to conduct manned–unmanned teaming scenarios on Table VI gunnery evaluations. Participants worked as a team to operate a simulated robotic ground vehicle from a simulated command-and-control vehicle to identify and engage targets on a simulated Army gunnery range. Findings suggest the importance of a multimethod approach to analyzing team trust and team cohesion. Traditional metrics based on team performance ratings or self-report are not indicative of the full team-trust relationship. This research provides valuable insights into how different measurement techniques can provide a more global understanding of the trust relationship.
... Cardiovascular activity can be assessed through HR [255,256], inter-beat interval [238,257], or HRV-related features [257,258]. Similarly to the EDA signal, there is still little consensus in the literature. ...
Emotions are a powerful phenomenon that influences the way we think and behave. Affective Computing is the field dedicated to the development of automatic emotion recognition systems. These systems can be used to improve the quality of life through the development of, for example, mental health applications, providing personalized services, or improving the quality of entertainment content, among others. This work began by exploring the state of the art in intra-personal emotion recognition through physiological signals, making a quantitative analysis of the existing approaches in the literature.
... In keeping with the idea of the ripple effect, both postural and physiological synchrony were highest among neighbours, highlighting the pivotal role of interpersonal dynamics in ritualistic practices. This alignment in posture and HR may have important social implications, as previous studies suggest that it might be key to social cohesion [39] by promoting trust [40], cooperation [41] and prosocial tendencies [42]. Taken together, corporeal co-presence and spatial alignment appear to facilitate social and physiological alignment within the context of shared intentionality of a community ritual. ...
Collective rituals involve the coordination of intentions and actions and have been shown to promote the alignment of emotional states and social identities. However, the mechanics of achieving group-level synchrony is yet unclear. We report the results of a naturalistic study in the context of an Islamic congregational prayer that involves synchronous movement. We used wearable devices to capture data on body posture, autonomic responses and spatial proximity to investigate how postural alignment and shared arousal intertwine during this ritual. The findings reveal a dual process at play: postural alignment appears to be more localized, with worshippers synchronizing their movements with their nearest neighbours, while physiological alignment operates on a broader scale, primarily driven by the central role of the religious leader. Our findings underscore the importance of interpersonal dynamics in collective gatherings and the role of physical co-presence in fostering connections among participants, with implications extending to our understanding of group dynamics across various social settings.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Minds in movement: embodied cognition in the age of artificial intelligence’.
... In psychobiology, dyadic synchrony refers to the temporal matching of rhythms in physiology, behavior, or affective states between two partners 29 . Synchrony between humans has been widely documented across different measures and time scales, including neural function [30][31][32][33][34][35] , arousal 36 , respiration [37][38][39][40][41] , heart rate 40,[42][43][44][45][46] , hormones [47][48][49][50] , motion 34,[51][52][53] , and behavior 46,[54][55][56][57] . Across domains, physiological synchrony between adults is consistently associated with social cooperation 58 , romantic satisfaction 39 , and sexual satisfaction 59,60 . ...
The mechanisms of romantic bonding in humans are largely unknown. Recent research suggests that physiological synchrony between partners is associated with bonding. This study combines an experimental approach with a naturalistic dating setup to test whether the individual differences in social and nonsocial synchrony are interdependent, and linked to romantic attractiveness. In a preregistered online experiment with 144 participants, we discover that inducing physiological synchrony between an actor and an actress determines their attractiveness ratings by participants, indicating that synchrony can increase perceived attraction. In a lab-based naturalistic speed-dating experiment, we quantify in 48 participants the individual tendency for social physiological synchrony, nonsocial sensorimotor synchrony, and romantic attractiveness. We discover that the individual propensity to synchronize in social and nonsocial tasks is correlated. Some individuals synchronize better regardless of partners or tasks, and such Super Synchronizers are rated as more attractive. Altogether, this demonstrates that humans prefer romantic partners who can synchronize.
... The level of physiological synchrony has been reported to be predictive of relationship quality (Levenson and Gottman, 1983), psychotherapy success (Koole et al., 2020), empathy (Marci et al., 2007), team-performance (Elkins et al., 2009), collaborative learning (Malmberg et al., 2019) and more (Palumbo et al., 2017). Various factors have been proposed to underly physiological synchrony, such as shared attention among students in the classroom (Dikker et al., 2017), but also synchronized breathing among couples instructed with the abstract task to mirror each other's physiology , empathy among patient and therapist during a therapy session (Marci et al., 2007), shared arousal among performers of a fire-walking ritual and related spectators (Konvalinka et al., 2011;Mitkidis et al., 2015), shared metabolic demands through matched activity or behavior (Palumbo et al., 2017) and environmental influences (Strang et al., 2014). ...
Attentional engagement – the emotional, cognitive and behavioral connection with information to which the attention is focused – is important in all settings where humans process information. Measures of attentional engagement could be helpful to, for instance, support teachers in online classrooms, or individuals working together in teams. This thesis aims to use physiological synchrony, the similarity in neurophysiological responses across individuals, as an implicit measure of attentional engagement. The research is divided into two parts: the first investigates how different attentional modulations affect physiological synchrony in brains and bodies, the second explores the feasibility of using physiological synchrony as a tool to monitor attention in real-life settings.
In Part I, the effect of different manipulations of attention on physiological synchrony in brain and body is explored. We find that physiological synchrony does not only reflect attentional engagement when measured in the electroencephalogram (EEG), but also when measured in electrodermal activity (EDA) or heart rate. Moreover, we find that physiological synchrony can reflect both sensory and top-down variations in attention, where top-down focus of attention is best reflected by synchrony in EEG, and where emotionally salient events attracting attention are best reflected by EDA and heart rate.
Part II transitions into the practical applications of physiological synchrony in real-life contexts. Wearables are employed to measure physiological synchrony in EDA and heart rate, demonstrating comparable accuracy to high-end lab-grade equipment. The research also incorporates machine learning techniques, showing that physiological synchrony can be combined with novel unsupervised learning algorithms. Finally, measurements in classrooms reveal that physiological synchrony can be successfully monitored in real-life settings.
While the findings are promising, the thesis acknowledges limitations in terms of sufficient data that are required for robust monitoring of attentional engagement and in terms of limited variance in attention explained by physiological synchrony. To advance the field, future work should focus on the applied, methodological and ethical questions that remain unanswered.
... Couple's cardiac synchrony as measured by HR and HRV occurred during the couple's discussion of the positive and negative aspects of the relationship [33]. Evidence showed that high levels of heart rate synchrony led to higher of participants' expectations regarding their partners in the economic game, which suggested that interpersonal physiological synchrony might be a marker of interpersonal trust [45]. Another study reported that friends of adolescence showed synchrony in heart rate and negative affect during the course of a laboratory visit designed to induce stress [32]. ...
... Cardiovascular activity can be assessed through Heart Rate (HR) [30], [31], inter-beat interval [9], [32], HRV-related features [32], [33]. Similarly to the EDA signal, there is still little consensus in the literature. ...
During group interactions, we react and modulate our emotions and behaviour to the group through phenomena including emotion contagion and physiological synchrony. Previous work on emotion recognition through video/image has shown that group context information improves the classification performance. However, when using physiological data, literature mostly focuses on intrapersonal models that leave-out group information, while interpersonal models are unexplored. This paper introduces a new interpersonal Weighted Group Synchrony approach, which relies on Electrodermal Activity (EDA) and Heart-Rate Variability (HRV). We perform an analysis of synchrony metrics applied across diverse data representations (EDA and HRV morphology and features, recurrence plot, spectrogram), to identify which metrics and modalities better characterise physiological synchrony for emotion recognition. We explored two datasets (AMIGOS and K-EmoCon), covering different group sizes (4 vs dyad) and group-based activities (video-watching vs conversation). The experimental results show that integrating group information improves arousal and valence classification, across all datasets, with the exception of K-EmoCon on valence. The proposed method was able to attain mean M-F1 of
72.15% arousal and 81.16% valence for AMIGOS, and M-F1 of
52.63% arousal, 65.09% valence for K-EmoCon, surpassing previous work results for K-EmoCon on arousal, and providing a new baseline on AMIGOS for long-videos.
... Apart from complex systems theory, interpersonal coordination in humans has been identified as a phenomenon of interest and studied from different theoretical perspectives since at least Condon & Ogston (1966) forerunner study. Although it has been diversely denominated, the term interpersonal coordination generally encompasses the whole family of contingently coordinated patterns between interacting people at behavioral (Miles et al., 2010), linguistic (Fusaroli et al., 2012), neurophysiological (Yun et al., 2012), and psychophysiological (Mitkidis et al., 2015) levels. A conventional definition of interpersonal coordination is this: "the degree to which the behaviors in an interaction are non-random, patterned or synchronised in both timing [and] form" (Bernieri and Rosenthal, 1991, p. 403). ...
Complex systems theory has become one of the main frameworks to understand, model and explain interactional phenomena such as interpersonal coordination. In her paper, Butler (this issue) applies this approach to theorise about coordination at large, including human interactions. We argue that the all-encompassing language of complex systems theory leads to overemphasising the physical aspects that human interactions share with other coordinated systems in nature. This emphasis ultimately disregards the meaningful dimension implied in any human movement, understanding it as mechanical motion, rather than expressive actions.
... In particular, the RQA variable percent determinism (%DET) can quantify the degree to which a system is constrained by rules or randomness. Importantly, RQA can be extended to multivariate settings via multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis (MdRQA) [18], which can be used to assess team physio-behavioral coupling (PBC) [19]. PBC in turn is related to team cohesion, workload, and stress [20]. ...
... Beyond emotional arousal, researchers have interpreted MHR more specifically as a marker of stress (e.g., Von Dawans et al., 2011;Vrijkotte et al., 2000) or excitement (Drachen et al., 2010;Mitkidis et al., 2015;Wulfert et al., 2005). In the current study, increases in heart rate were linked to increases in token donation when adolescents transitioned from being alone to being observed by peers. ...
The current study investigated in-the-moment links between adolescents’ autonomic nervous system activity and susceptibility to three types of peer influence (indirect, direct, continuing) on two types of behavior (antisocial, prosocial). The sample included 144 racially ethnically diverse adolescents (46% male, 53% female, 1% other; M age = 16.02 years). We assessed susceptibility to peer influence behaviorally using the Public Goods Game (PGG) while measuring adolescents’ mean heart rate (MHR) and pre-ejection period (PEP). Three key findings emerged from bivariate dual latent change score modeling: (1) adolescents whose MHR increased more as they transitioned from playing the PGG alone (pre-influence) to playing while simply observed by peers (indirect influence) displayed more prosocial behavior; (2) adolescents whose PEP activity increased more (greater PEP activity = shorter PEP latency) as they transitioned from indirect influence to being encouraged by peers to engage in antisocial behavior (direct influence) engaged in more antisocial behavior; and (3) adolescents whose PEP activity decreased less as they transitioned from direct influence on prosocial behavior to playing the PGG alone again (continuing influence) displayed more continuing prosocial behavior (marginal effect). The discussion focuses on the role of psychophysiology in understanding adolescents’ susceptibility to peer influence.
... Broadly, the concept of interpersonal or behavioral synchrony has been used to describe the mutual attunement of biological and behavioral rhythms between interactants Burgoon et al., 2007). Evidence for synchrony is found in the alignment of the amplitude (strength) and frequency (rate) of bio/behavioral cycles such as heart rate (Mitkidis et al., 2015), breathing rate (Müller & Lindenberger, 2011), affect (Rafaeli et al., 2007), speech, and other expressive behaviors (Cappella, 1981), as well as body movements (Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009). Restricting the current research's consideration of synchrony to the nonverbal domain, interpersonal synchrony is defined as the temporal coordination of motor behavior rhythms between interaction partners Bernieri et al., 1988;Delaherche et al., 2012). ...
Interpersonal synchrony serves as a subtle, yet powerful bonding mechanism in social interactions. Problematically, the term ‘synchrony’ has been used to label a variety of distinct aspects of interpersonal coordination, such as postural similarities or movement activity entrainment. Accordingly, different algorithms have been suggested to quantify interpersonal synchrony. Yet, it remains unknown whether the different measures of synchrony represent correlated features of the same perceivable core phenomenon. The current study addresses this by comparing the suitability of a set of algorithms with respect to their association with observers’ judgments of dyadic synchrony and leader-followership. One-hundred fifteen observers viewed computer animations of characters portraying the movements of real dyads who performed a repetitive motor task with instruction to move in unison. Animations were based on full-body motion capture data synchronously collected for both partners during the joint exercise. Results showed most synchrony measures significantly correlated with (a) perceived synchrony and (b) the perceived level of balance of leading/following by each dyad member. Phase synchrony and Pearson correlations were associated most strongly with the observer ratings. This might be typical for intentional, structured forms synchrony such as ritualized group activities. It remains open if these findings also apply to spontaneous forms of synchrony as, for instance, occurring in free-running conversations.
... They will become synchronized and desynchronize in time and will also quickly change over time (Kazi et al. 2021;Palumbo et al. 2017). Although these physiological associations have been related to diverse team processes such as shared regulation of collaborative learning (Pijeira-Díaz et al. 2018), several affective team emergent states (Häkonsson et al. 2016;Mitkidis et al. 2015), team coordination (Fusaroli et al. 2016), social presence Ekman et al. 2012), and team performance (Elkins et al. 2009;Henning et al. 2009), they have seldom been linked to team stress emergence. This seems odd, due to the close association already found between the reappraisal process and adaptive physiological stress responses within members (e.g., Bonifazi et al. 2006;Gaab et al. 2005;Gross 2001;Hammerfald et al. 2006;Jamieson et al. 2011;Mauss et al. 2005;Roberts et al. 2009). ...
Team stress is an emergent cognition in which members jointly appraise their current task situations. The sharedness of stress appraisals has been elaborately studied in social groups such as couples, families, friends, and small communities. However, insights into teams have been rather limited. Keeping in mind the effects of stress on teams, it is essential to understand how team stress will form in teams over time. Seven dyad teams were observed during a 13-min flight simulation task. Researchers used the course of action analysis to reconstruct and distinguish one top-down (i.e., the shared stress configuration) and three bottom-up configuration types (i.e., the mimic, interactive, and independent stress configurations). Our findings suggest that especially the bottom-up influence of social stressors plays an important role in the team stress, especially when members verbally interact with one another. This proposes that, in comparison to the influence of contextual factors, diverse empathic processes play a more distinct role in the formation of team stress than initially thought in teams. This article also intends to illustrate how team stress can be studied over time, and how this type of output can contribute to a more fine-grained theoretical understanding of how team stress forms over time in teams. Last, it also provides some basic practical insights into the design of stress feedback systems.
... The physiological layer is just one of them. Physiological behaviors, such as heart rate variability and higher-level mediators like trust, have been examined within the human factors field (Mitkidis, McGraw, Roepstorff, & Wallot, 2015;Tolston et al., 2018). For instance, Miktidis et al. (2015) used recurrence quantification analysis to discover how heart rate synchrony is associated with trust-building processes. ...
Teams are complex systems with many different layers that interact with one another to accomplish a common goal or task. The physiological layer is just one of them. In this study, first, we examined how the Holder exponent, which was extracted from heart rate variability, changed across the missions and roles, and then how the holder exponent is related to trust in the autonomous agent. The primary team task is taking photographs of predefined targets in a contested environment. The UAV ground station team is composed of three roles. The findings show that holder exponent differentiated across the roles and decreased across the missions. Another finding shows a positive association between holder exponent and trust in the autonomous agent. The findings suggest: holder exponent increased with trust in the autonomous teammate; holder exponent is predictive of the participant’s trust; physiological coordination may be a marker of trust in autonomy.
... Changes in shared physiological arousal (e.g., heart rhythms) have been associated with measures of trust [Mitkidis, McGraw, Roepstoroff & Wallot, 2015] and concern for others [Konvalinka, et al., 2011]. Additionally, in a cooperative gaming task, Mitkidis et al. [2015] found that heart rate and heart rate synchronization increased within a trust related condition. They also showed that the level of heart rate synchrony within a team led to higher expectations of their partners during a cooperative gaming task and may be a marker for interpersonal trust. ...
The rise in artificial intelligence capabilities in autonomy-enabled systems and robotics has pushed research to address the unique nature of human-autonomy team collaboration. The goal of these advanced technologies is to enable rapid decision making, enhance situation awareness, promote shared understanding, and improve team dynamics. Simultaneously, use of these technologies is expected to reduce risk to those who collaborate with these systems. Yet, for appropriate human- autonomy teaming to take place, especially as we move beyond dyadic partnerships, proper calibration of team trust is needed to effectively coordinate interactions during high-risk operations. But to meet this end, critical measures of team trust for this new dynamic of human-autonomy teams are needed. This paper seeks to expand on trust measurement principles and the foundation of human-autonomy teaming to propose a “toolkit” of novel methods that support the development, maintenance and calibration of trust in human-autonomy teams operating within uncertain, risky, and dynamic environments.
... There are various techniques used for characterizing the dynamics of the system, including attractor reconstruction (Abarbanel, 2012), stability analysis (Rosenstein et al., 1993), recurrence quantification analysis (Webber & Zbilut, 1994), and long-range correlation (Hurst, 1951). Some studies have already examined trust calibration by characterizing behavioral (Demir et al., 2021;Grimm et al., 2018) and physiological interaction dynamics (de Visser et al., 2018a;Mitkidis et al., 2015;Tolston et al., 2018;, sometimes relying on the application of layered dynamics (Gorman et al., 2019;Grimm et al., 2018), and joint recurrence quantification analyses methods. Much of the inspiration for these dynamic models comes from the work of John Gottman (e.g., Gottman, 2011;Gottman et al., 2005). ...
Trust in automation is a foundational principle in Human Factors Engineering. An understanding of trust can help predict and alter much of human-machine interaction (HMI). However, despite the utility of assessing trust in automation in applied settings, there are inherent and unique challenges in trust assessment for those who seek to do so outside of the confines of the sterile lab environment. Because of these challenges, new approaches for trust in automation assessment need to be developed to best suit the unique demands of trust assessment in the real world. This paper lays out six requirements for these future measures: they should (1) be short, unobtrusive, and interaction-based, (2) be context-specific and adaptable, (3) be dynamic, (4) account for autonomy versus automation dependency, (5) account for task dependency, and (6) account for levels of risk. For the benefits of trust assessment to be realized in the “real world,” future research needs to leverage the existing body of literature on trust in automation while looking toward the needs of the practitioner.
... McAssey and colleagues (2013) found that romantic couples who simply sat blindfolded next to each other would synchronize their heart rates, and that this coordination would increase if they looked into each other's eyes. Moreover, in small groups of people, heart rate coordination has been linked to team performance (Henning, Boucsein, and Gil, 2001), trust (Mitkidis et al., 2015) and empathy and liking of each other (Järvelä et al., 2013). Physiological synchrony can also be predictive of outcomes like improved team performance (Henning, Boucsein, and Gil, 2001) or even market performance (Dmochowski et al., 2014). ...
The performing arts are temporal arts. Experiencing dance, music and theatre is a dynamic process that occurs over time and is often shared between groups of people. The continuous and collective nature of the experience of any live performance poses unique challenges to a quantitative or neuroscientific approach to audience research. This chapter reviews the latest methodological approaches and techniques to quantify audience engagement in real-time and across multiple spectators. Three levels of real-time measures of audience engagement are discusses, including continuous behavioural, psychophysiological and brain signals. All three levels can be used to
measure what spectators do and feel – both individually and collectively – with a view to providing insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms that are at play when people engage with the performing arts. These measures complement, rather than substitute, traditional methodologies such as qualitative interviews, questionnaires, audience observation and phenomenology. The chapter discusses the chances and challenges of these new audience research tools and reviews key studies that employ these methods across a range of performance situations.
... In the context of physiological or behavioral signals, this is often referred to as "interpersonal synchronization", and a variety of mechanisms have been hypothesized to be the sources of inter-subject correlation such as social interactions 1 , physical interactions 4,7,21 , shared emotions 9,11 , empathy 22,23 , shared arousal 4,24 , shared attention 25 , and more 1 . The diversity of explanations parallels the diversity of factors known to affect physiological signals. ...
Neural, physiological and behavioral signals synchronize between human subjects in a variety of settings. Multiple hypotheses have been proposed to explain this interpersonal synchrony, but there is no clarity under which conditions it arises, for which signals, or whether there is a common underlying mechanism. We hypothesized that similar cognitive processing of a shared stimulus is the source of synchrony between subjects, measured here as inter-subject correlation. To test this we presented informative videos to participants in an attentive and distracted condition and subsequently measured information recall. Inter-subject correlation was observed for electro-encephalography, gaze position, pupil size and heart rate, but not respiration and head movements. The strength of correlation was co-modulated in the different signals, changed with attentional state, and predicted subsequent recall of information presented in the videos. There was robust within-subject coupling between brain, heart and eyes, but not respiration or head movements. The results suggest that inter-subject correlation is the result of similar cognitive processing and thus emerges only for those signals that exhibit a robust brain-body connection. While physiological and behavioral fluctuations may be driven by multiple features of the stimulus, correlation with other individuals is co-modulated by the level of attentional engagement with the stimulus.
... A multivariate extension of RQA investigates interaction patterns between the system components (in this case, either the heart rate of team members or their communication flow) and their change over time. Mitkidis et al. [17] studied how trust modulates the affective links between team members by applying multivariate RQA to assess the degree of synchrony in dyadic all-human teams. In general, team synchrony occurs when two or more systems (or two individuals in a team) are in behavioral sync, resulting in their recurrent behaviors being dependent on each other. ...
The current study considers Human-Autonomy teams (HATs) in which two human team members interact and collaborate with an autonomous teammate to achieve a common task while dealing with unexpected technological failures that were imposed either in automation or autonomy. A Wizard of Oz (WoZ) methodology was used to simulate the autonomous teammate. One of the critical aspects of HAT performance is the trust that develops over time as team members interact with each other in a dynamic task environment. For this reason, it is important to examine the dynamic nature of teammate trust through real-time measures of team interactions. This study examines team interaction and trust to understand better how they change under automation and autonomy failures. Thus, we address two research questions: (1) How does trust in HATs evolve over time?; and (2) How is the relationship between team interaction and trust impacted by the failures? We hypothesized that trust in HATs would decrease as autonomy failures increased. We also hypothesized that team interaction would be related to the development of trust and recovery from the failures. The results implicate three general trends: (1) team interaction dynamics were linked to the development of trust in HATs; (2) trust in the autonomous teammate was only associated with recovery from autonomy failures; (3) team interaction dynamics were related to both automation and autonomy failure recovery.
... At a behavioral level, there is evidence of interpersonal coordination in bodily movement (Bernieri & Rosenthal, 1991;Condon & Ogston, 1966;Cornejo et al., 2018;Miles, Griffiths, Richardson, & Macrae, 2010) and speech (Fusaroli, Bahrami, et al., 2012;Pickering & Garrod, 2014). At a psychophysiological level, studies have shown coordination between individuals in breathing (McFarland, 2001) and cardiac response (Mitkidis, McGraw, Roepstorff, & Wallot, 2015;Thomas, Burr, Spieker, Lee, & Chen, 2014). Similarly, neurophysiological evidence has shown coordination in neural activity between interacting subjects (Astolfi et al., 2010;Lindenberger et al., 2009;Yun, Watanabe, & Shimojo, 2012). ...
Interpersonal coordination (IC) has become an area of growing interest in the last decades. Despite the accumulated evidence, we still do not have an encompassing explanative framework. However, a serious candidate is the interpersonal synergies theory (IST), a model part of the broader complexity approach. In the present paper, we analyze the suitability of IST as an explanation of IC. IST resolves the cognitivist theories’ difficulties on IC, but it exhibits inconsistencies that diminish its impact. We argue that IST can only fit from an epistemological (not an ontological) interpretation of the notion of emergence. Secondly, IST confuses ‘synergy’ with ‘coordination’, risking mixing explanans with explanandum. Third, as a formal theory, IST obliterates the meaning dimension of human movement. Therefore, it is necessary a more in-depth description of what motor coupling among people means. We argue that attending the vitality dynamics sheds light on the shared meaning implied in coordination.
... CRQA has been employed to observe the relationships such as joint activity and coordination between the team members [48,67,53,49,63]. Other versions of CRQA are multidimensional-RQA (MdRQA) [48,38] also referred to as multivariate-RQA (MvRQA) [76] offer similar measurements but with an advantage of comparing multiple signals originating from two team individuals. ...
This is a review-article which selectively reviews key concepts adopted in team performance evaluation literature. This review intends to promote future innovative methods for objective quantification and analysis of team performance. The review summarizes methods, experimental frameworks, sensors for physiological and behavioral recordings, data processing to derive team level objective measures, in the light of team performance evaluation. Observing the advancements in sensor technologies and computation power, towards advancing team performance evaluation, this review summarizes some of the current multimodal based team research. Finally, the review provides suggestions on aspects that the future research focus to overcome some of existing limitations and drawbacks. <br
... CRQA has been employed to observe the relationships such as joint activity and coordination between the team members [48,67,53,49,63]. Other versions of CRQA are multidimensional-RQA (MdRQA) [48,38] also referred to as multivariate-RQA (MvRQA) [76] offer similar measurements but with an advantage of comparing multiple signals originating from two team individuals. ...
This is a review-article which selectively reviews key concepts adopted in team performance evaluation literature. This review intends to promote future innovative methods for objective quantification and analysis of team performance. The review summarizes methods, experimental frameworks, sensors for physiological and behavioral recordings, data processing to derive team level objective measures, in the light of team performance evaluation. Observing the advancements in sensor technologies and computation power, towards advancing team performance evaluation, this review summarizes some of the current multimodal based team research. Finally, the review provides suggestions on aspects that the future research focus to overcome some of existing limitations and drawbacks. <br
How the temporal dynamics of social interactions are perceived arguably plays an important role in how one engages in social interactions and how difficulties in establishing smooth social interactions may occur. One aspect of temporal dynamics in social interactions is the mutual coordination of individuals' behaviors during social interaction, otherwise known as behavioral interpersonal synchrony (IPS). Behavioral IPS has been studied increasingly in various contexts, such as a feature of the social interaction difficulties inherent to autism. To fully understand the temporal dynamics of social interactions, or reductions thereof in autism, the neural basis of IPS perception needs to be established. Thus, the current study's aim was twofold: to establish the basic neuro‐perceptual processing of IPS in social interactions for typical observers and to test whether it might differ for autistic individuals. In a task‐based fMRI paradigm, participants viewed short, silent video vignettes of humans during social interactions featuring a variation of behavioral IPS. The results show that observing behavioral IPS modulates the Action Observation Network (AON). Interestingly, autistic participants showed similar neural activation patterns as non‐autistic participants which were modulated by the behavioral IPS they observed in the videos, suggesting that the perception of temporal dynamics of social interactions is spared and may not underly reduced behavioral IPS often observed in autism. Nevertheless, a general difference in processing social interactions was found in autistic observers, characterized by decreased neural activation in the right middle frontal gyrus, angular gyrus, and superior temporal areas. These findings demonstrate that although the autistic and non‐autistic groups indeed differed in the neural processing of social interaction perception, the temporal dynamics of these social interactions were not the reason for these differences in social interaction perception in autism. Hence, spared recruitment of the AON for processing temporal dynamics of social interactions in autism does not account for the widely reported attenuation of IPS in autism and for the widely reported and presently observed differences in social interaction perception in autism.
This research aims to study trust in Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT). A multiple regression model was employed to explore potential predictors in tasks that might dynamically influence trust levels. By computing entropy across different system layers of a remotely piloted aerial vehicle system, we measured the influence of these dynamic predictors on trust. The findings suggest the presence of potential trust predictors in human-autonomy interactions as measured using entropy. Some layers had to be combined due to high multicollinearity, addressed through Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Further research is required for a more in-depth understanding of these components and their implications for trust dynamics.
Interpersonal synchrony, the alignment of behavior and/or physiology during interactions, is a pervasive phenomenon observed in diverse social contexts. Here we synthesize across contexts and behaviors to classify the different forms and functions of synchrony. We provide a concise framework for classifying the manifold forms of synchrony along six dimensions: periodicity, discreteness, spatial similarity, directionality, leader–follower dynamics, and observability. We also distill the various proposed functions of interpersonal synchrony into four interconnected functions: reducing complexity and improving understanding, accomplishing joint tasks, strengthening social connection, and influencing partners’ behavior. These functions derive from first principles, emerge from each other, and are accomplished by some forms of synchrony more than others. Effective synchrony flexibly adapts to social goals and more synchrony is not always better. Our synthesis offers a shared framework and language for the field, allowing for better cross-context and cross-behavior comparisons, generating new hypotheses, and highlighting future research directions.
During performances, audiences experience various emotional states, and these are reflected in their ongoing facial expressions. We investigated if audience engagement could be determined by measuring the inter-subject correlation (ISC) of non-invasively recorded audience facial expressions. We filmed the faces of multiple audience members at theatrical performances and determined the intensity of their different facial expressions throughout the performances. Neutral, happy, anger, and disgust expression ISCs accounted for up to 24% of the performance dramaturge’s predictions of audience engagement. Expression synchrony was greater between individuals in close proximity, suggesting effects of emotional contagion or cognitive similarities between neighboring individuals, whereas expression synchrony was greatest between individuals who were younger, female, and with greater levels of empathy, showing that individual characteristics impact shared audience experiences. Together, our results show that facial expression synchronization could be used as a real-time non-invasive indicator of engagement in audiences larger than achieved using previous approaches.
We conducted a study to explore the effect of different types of Artificial intelligence (AI) explanations on the human trust in AI systems. An in person user study was conducted (n = 7) and the trust condition was induced by varying the accuracy of AI response. The human trust was measured by surveys administered after each trial. The participants physiological data was also collected during the experiment. Our results show that image based explanations induced higher level of arousal in the participants, and the participants preferred image based explanations. We also found that the AI response accuracy had an effect on the user acceptance of AI’s decision in the following trial. We also found that Photoplethysmography results had statistically significant correlation with the level of trust. The implications of this study are that AI performance and type of explanations both have an effect on the level of user trust in AI. Also this work could be extended to develop an objective measure of trust using physiological data.KeywordsHuman AI interactionTrustPhysiological measures
Impersonal cooperation among strangers enables societies to create valuable public goods, such as infrastructure, public services, and democracy. Several factors have been proposed to explain variation in impersonal cooperation across societies, referring to institutions (e.g., rule of law), religion (e.g., belief in God as a third-party punisher), cultural beliefs (e.g., trust) and values (e.g., collectivism), and ecology (e.g., relational mobility). We tested 17 preregistered hypotheses in a meta-analysis of 1,506 studies of impersonal cooperation in social dilemmas (e.g., the Public Goods Game) conducted across 70 societies (k = 2,271), where people make costly decisions to cooperate among strangers. After controlling for 10 study characteristics that can affect the outcome of studies, we found very little cross-societal variation in impersonal cooperation. Categorizing societies into cultural groups explained no variance in cooperation. Similarly, cultural, ancestral, and linguistic distance between societies explained little variance in cooperation. None of the cross-societal factors hypothesized to relate to impersonal cooperation explained variance in cooperation across societies. We replicated these conclusions when meta-analyzing 514 studies across 41 states and nine regions in the United States (k = 783). Thus, we observed that impersonal cooperation occurred in all societies-and to a similar degree across societies-suggesting that prior research may have overemphasized the magnitude of differences between modern societies in impersonal cooperation. We discuss the discrepancy between theory, past empirical research and the meta-analysis, address a limitation of experimental research on cooperation to study culture, and raise possible directions for future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Almost a century after Jacob Levy Moreno pioneered the group practice of psychodrama, research in this area has flourished to include different sub-fields of study and psychodramatic intervention for various psychological conditions. By making use of scientometric analysis, particularly document citation analysis and keyword analysis, this study maps out dominant research domains in psychodrama since its inception. From these findings, projections of future research trends and an evaluation of psychodrama research are discussed. Generally, there has been an increased adoption of technology to facilitate psychodrama practice, along with an increasing integration of psychodramatic principles with other psychotherapies. To improve research in this area, this paper recommends greater transparency in the reporting of materials, processes and data used in publications. Finally, we encourage embracing new technological methods such as neuroimaging to provide greater insight into mechanisms of change in psychodrama. The field of psychodrama remains full of potential and innovations to be developed.
Interpersonal physiological synchrony has been shown to play important roles in social activities. While most studies have shed light on the effects of physiological synchrony on recognition of the group state, such as cohesion or togetherness, the effect of physiological synchrony on the recognition of emotional experience has not been adequately researched. In this study, we examined how physiological synchrony is associated with first- and third-person emotion recognition during a joint task. Two participants played a cooperative block-stacking game (Jenga), alternating their roles as player and adviser, while their heart rates were recorded. The participants evaluated their own emotional experience for each turn. Bystanders watched the game to evaluate the players’ emotions. Results showed that the players’ subjective excitement increased not only with their own heart rate, but also with increased heart rate synchrony with their adviser. Heart rate synchrony between player and adviser also related to increased intensity in perceived excitement from the bystanders. Given that both first- and third-person emotion recognition can have cumulative impacts on a group, the relationship between physiological synchrony and emotion recognition observed in the present study will help deepen understanding of the psychophysiological mechanisms underlying larger group phenomena such as crowd excitement.
The purpose of this chapter is to describe a menu of experimental games that are useful for measuring aspects of social norms and social preferences. Economists use the term 'preferences' to refer to the choices people make, and particularly to tradeoffs between different collections ('bundles') of things they value-food, money, time, prestige, and so forth. 'Social preferences' refer to how people rank different allocations of material payoffs to themselves and others. We use the term 'self-interested' to refer to people who do not care about the outcomes of others. While self-interest can be a useful working assumption, experimental research of the 1980s and 1990s have shown that a substantial fraction of people in developed countries (typically college students) also care about the payoffs of others. In some situations, many people are willing to spend resources to reduce the payoff of others. In other situations, the same people spend resources to increase the payoff of others.
Subtle nonlinear behaviors of fluid-coupled mechanical oscillators at low and medium viscosities were better detected by cross recurrence analysis than spectral analysis. Cross recurrence with its high sensitivity to nonlinear dynamics may have applicability to weakly coupled oscillators prevalent in biology and physiology.
Standard economic models portray decision makers as perfectly rational agents who act selfishly to maximize their total earnings. In contrast, ample evidence in behavioral research suggests that people systematically deviate from the extreme rational assumption of such economic models. Behavioral economics is aimed at identifying the forces which shape the economic decisions that people make, in order to provide important insights of the human nature. This type of research often deals with questions such as how the presentation of information effect decision making, how different types and valances effect behavior, and what are the social, emotional, and situational factors that underlie economic decision making. This article describes foundational research in behavioral decision making and economics that lead to the emergence of behavioral economics; outline cutting-edge research on applied behavioral economics, debiasing techniques, and neuroeconomics; and discusses key issues for future research, such as the use of field experiments and tailor-made methodologies, and focusing on a more comprehensive approach. Our hope is that as behavioral economics advances it will examine not only the nature of the decisions people make but also their underlying cognitive processes.
The role of effort and accuracy in the adaptive use of decision processes is examined. A computer simulation using the concept of elementary information processes identified heuristic choice strategies that approximate the accuracy of normative procedures while saving substantial effort. However, no single heuristic did well across all task and context conditions. Of particular interest was the finding that under time constraints, several heuristics were more accurate than a truncated normative procedure. Using a process-tracing technique that monitors information acquisition behaviors, two experiments tested how closely the efficient processing patterns for a given decision problem identified by the simulation correspond to the actual processing behavior exhibited by subjects. People appear highly adaptive in responding to changes in the structure of the available alternatives and to the presence of time pressure. In general, actual behavior corresponded to the general patterns of efficient processing identified by the simulation. Finally, learning of effort and accuracy trade-offs are discussed.
Trust is frequently espoused as being critical to effective team processes and performance. Yet, few studies have investigated the relationship between trust and team processes, or team effectiveness. There is currently a need to locate propensity to trust (a personality composition variable) and intragroup trust (an emergent state) within mainstream team effectiveness models, not only to provide much-needed theoretical and empirical support for trust's central role in team effectiveness, but also to increase our understanding of how trust influences team effectiveness. This paper argues that trust is a neglected variable within team effectiveness research that requires further empirical investigation.
One of the most essential but theoretically vexing issues regarding the notion of culture is that of cultural evolution and transmission: how a group’s accumulated solutions to invariant challenges develop and persevere over time. But at the moment, the notion of applying evolutionary theory to culture remains little more than a suggestive trope. Whereas the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory has provided an encompassing scientific framework for the selection and transmission of biological adaptations, a convincing theory of cultural evolution has yet to emerge. One of the greatest challenges for theorists is identifying the appropriate time scales and units of analysis in order to reduce the intractably large and complex phenomenon of “culture” into its component “building blocks.” In this paper, we present a model for scientifically investigating cultural processes by analyzing the ways people develop conventions in a series of LEGO construction tasks. The data revealed a surprising pattern in the selection of building bricks as well as features of car design across consecutive building sessions. Our findings support a novel methodology for studying the development and transmission of culture through the microcosm of interactive LEGO design and assembly.
This study addressed the nature and functioning of relationships of interpersonal trust among managers and professionals in organizations, the factors influencing trust's development, and the implications of trust for behavior and performance. Theoretical foundations were drawn from the sociological literature on trust and the social-psychological literature on trust in close relationships. An initial test of the proposed theoretical framework was conducted in a field setting with 194 managers and professionals.
The role of effort and accuracy in the adaptive use of decision processes is examined. A computer simulation using the concept of elementary information processes identified heuristic choice strategies that approximate the accuracy of normative procedures while saving substantial effort. However, no single heuristic did well across all task and context conditions. Of particular interest was the finding that under time constraints, several heuristics were more accurate than a truncated normative procedure. Using a process-tracing technique that monitors information acquisition behaviors, two experiments tested how closely the efficient processing patterns for a given decision problem identified by the simulation correspond to the actual processing behavior exhibited by subjects. People appear highly adaptive in responding to changes in the structure of the available alternatives and to the presence of time pressure. In general, actual behavior corresponded to the general patterns of efficient processing identified by the simulation. Finally, learning of effort and accuracy trade-offs are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Reviews evidence which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. Ss are sometimes (a) unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, (b) unaware of the existence of the response, and (c) unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response. This suggests that though people may not be able to observe directly their cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to report accurately about them. Accurate reports will occur when influential stimuli are salient and are plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not plausible causes. (86 ref)
The aim of this study was to develop a method for predicting the psychological states of spec-tators watching professional baseball games at a stadium. This method includes a real time measurement of instantaneous heart rate (i.e., the inverse of the RR interval) without prevent-ing the subject from watching the game and a mathematical procedure used to predict mo-ment by moment psychological states by cor-relating the degree of a psychological state with the strength of heart rate response, defined as the mean deviation of heart rate variability from a linear regression line from 5 sec before to 25 sec after an event during a baseball game. We recorded the instantaneous heart rates of 10 subjects (total of 27 cases) while they watched Japanese professional baseball games at a sta-dium and had them subjectively rate the degree of their psychological states in an after-event interview. We identified three psychological states (happiness, excitement, and vigor) whose strength can be predicted from the strength of heart rate response. Analysis of the measured data clarified that heart rate response had a sig-nificant correlation with the subjective rating of the intensity of happiness (r = 0.56, p < 0.0001), vigor (r = 0.55, p < 0.0001), and excitement (r = 0.49, p < 0.0001).
Over the last three decades, two major theoretical developments within cognitive science have enriched our understanding of
perceptual function and coordinated action in real-world environments.
In social dilemma situations, each individual always receives a higher payoff for defecting than for cooperating, but all are better off if all cooperate than if all defect. Often, however, people in social dilemmas attend more to the group's payoffs than to their own, either automatically or to behave “appropriately.” But whereas social identity elicits cooperative behaviour in dilemmas, it is generally only for the benefit of an “in-group.” Dilemmas between groups (requiring self-sacrificial behaviour within) are often the most extreme. Consequently, the framing and manipulation of group identity is critical to cooperation rate as demonstrated by careful laboratory experimentation. Dans les situations de dilemme social, il est plus rentable pour chaque individu de démissionner que de coopérer, mais tous s'en trouvent mieux si tous coopèrent que s'ils démissionnent. Cependant, les personnes aux prises avec des dilemmes sociaux considèrent davantage les retombées pour le groupe que pour elles-mêmes, de façon automatique ou pour se comporter de façon correcte. Bien que l'identification sociale favorise le comportement coopératif en situation de dilemme, cela ne vaut que pour le groupe d'appartenance. Les dilemmes entre groupes (qui requièrent le sacrifice de soi à l'intérieur du groupe) sont souvent les plus extrêmes. Des expériences en laboratoire montrent que l'encadrement et la manipulation de l'identification au groupe affectent fortement le taux de coopération.
A host of theoretical frameworks suggest associations of physiological signals between two individuals within a romantic relationship. However, few studies have provided empirical evidence of such associations using physiological reactivity from both partners in the dyad. In this study we use measures of respiration and heart rate from romantic partners recorded across three laboratory tasks. We examine the interrelations of each measure between both dyad members using coupled linear oscillators (Boker & Nesselroade, 2002). These models were used to capture oscillations in respiration and heart rate, and to examine interdependence in the physiological signals between both partners. Results show that associations were detectable within all three tasks, with different patterns of coupling within each task. Discussion centers on ways to investigate the synchrony of physiological responses across within relationships, including the promises of and obstacles for doing so.
Collective rituals are present in all known societies, but their function is a matter of long-standing debates. Field observations suggest that they may enhance social cohesion and that their effects are not limited to those actively performing but affect the audience as well. Here we show physiological effects of synchronized arousal in a Spanish fire-walking ritual, between active participants and related spectators, but not participants and other members of the audience. We assessed arousal by heart rate dynamics and applied nonlinear mathematical analysis to heart rate data obtained from 38 participants. We compared synchronized arousal between fire-walkers and spectators. For this comparison, we used recurrence quantification analysis on individual data and cross-recurrence quantification analysis on pairs of participants' data. These methods identified fine-grained commonalities of arousal during the 30-min ritual between fire-walkers and related spectators but not unrelated spectators. This indicates that the mediating mechanism may be informational, because participants and related observers had very different bodily behavior. This study demonstrates that a collective ritual may evoke synchronized arousal over time between active participants and bystanders. It links field observations to a physiological basis and offers a unique approach for the quantification of social effects on human physiology during real-world interactions.
With SACMEQ and PASEC there are now two large data bases available on student achievement, socio-economic background and school and teacher characteristics in both anglophone and francophone sub-Saharan Africa. A joint analysis of PASEC and SACMEQ in a common education production function framework allows us to estimate the impact of educational inputs on student achievement in 21 sub-Saharan African countries and to compare our results with those of earlier empirical studies for education systems in Africa and other world regions. In our analysis we focus on school equipment, teacher quality and class organisation. The issue of teacher and student incentives cannot be adequately addressed with the given data. Our results are based on a traditional retrospective analysis of student achievement in PASEC and SACMEQ countries. In contrast to the 'nothing works' result from most industrialized countries' studies we find robust positive correlations of achievement test scores and the possession of textbooks and negative correlations with teaching in shifts. The most striking result is the weak or even absent correlation of achievement test scores and teacher education and professional training. However, some differences between francophone and anglophone education systems can be observed in this context if differences in the sampling methodology are duly taken into account.
The recognition heuristic (RH; Goldstein \& Gigerenzer, 2002) suggests that, when applicable, probabilistic inferences are based on a noncompensatory examination of whether an object is recognized or not. The overall findings on the processes that underlie this fast and frugal heuristic are somewhat mixed, and many studies have expressed the need for considering a more compensatory integration of recognition information. Regardless of the mechanism involved, it is clear that recognition has a strong influence on choices, and this finding might be explained by the fact that recognition cues arouse affect and thus receive more attention than cognitive cues. To test this assumption, we investigated whether recognition results in a direct affective signal by measuring physiological arousal (i.e., peripheral arterial tone) in the established city-size task. We found that recognition of cities does not directly result in increased physiological arousal. Moreover, the results show that physiological arousal increased with increasing inconsistency between recognition information and additional cue information. These findings support predictions derived by a compensatory Parallel Constraint Satisfaction model rather than predictions of noncompensatory models. Additional results concerning confidence ratings, response times, and choice proportions further demonstrated that recognition information and other cognitive cues are integrated in a compensatory manner.
The tendency to mimic and synchronize with others is well established. Although mimicry has been shown to lead to affiliation between co-actors, the effect of interpersonal synchrony on affiliation remains an open question. The authors investigated the relationship by having participants match finger movements with a visual moving metronome. In Experiment 1, affiliation ratings were examined based on the extent to which participants tapped in synchrony with the experimenter. In Experiment 2, synchrony was manipulated. Affiliation ratings were compared for an experimenter who either (a) tapped to a metronome that was synchronous to the participant's metronome, (b) tapped to a metronome that was asynchronous, or (c) did not tap. As hypothesized, in both studies, the degree of synchrony predicted subsequent affiliation ratings. Experiment 3 found that the affiliative effects were unique to interpersonal synchrony.
Despite a general consensus that oxytocin (OT) has prosocial effects, there is no clear agreement on how these effects are achieved. Human research on OT is reviewed under three broad research initiatives: attachment and trust, social memory, and fear reduction. As an organizing perspective for scholars' current knowledge, a tentative model of the causes and effects of alterations in OT level is proposed. The model must remain provisional until conceptual and methodological problems are addressed that arise from a failure to distinguish between traits and states, differing research paradigms used in relation to OT as an independent versus dependent variable, and the possibility that OT effects depend on the initial emotional state of the individual. Social and personality psychologists have important roles to play in developing more rigorous and creative research designs.
Young adults in couple (pair-bond) relationships reported on the positive and negative aspects of their relationships and had blood drawn and assayed for oxytocin and vasopressin. Elevated plasma oxytocin was associated with distress in the pair-bond relationship for women, but not for men. Vasopressin, which is closely related to oxytocin in molecular structure and significantly related to male pair-bond behavior in animal studies, was elevated in men experiencing distress in the pair-bond relationship, but not in women. Controlling for estradiol and testosterone did not alter these findings. We conclude that plasma oxytocin in women and plasma vasopressin in men may be biomarkers of distressed pair-bond relationships.
In this article we introduce a new experimental game called Prisoner’s Dilemma with Variable Dependence (PD/D), which allows players to separate their trust in their exchange partners from their cooperation with them in an ongoing relationship. The game allows researchers to observe the emergence of trust and cooperation separately, and ascertain the causal relationship between them. In six studies that use the PD/D design, we find that the players of PD/D consistently achieve very high cooperation rates, sometimes mean cooperation rates of about 95%, which are higher than in standard PD games sharing similar design features. These findings demonstrate that separating trust from cooperation is critical for building trust relations. They also show that the GRIT (Graduated Reciprocation In Tension reduction) strategy helps build such relations in the absence of mutual trust. Our results suggest that it is cooperation which leads to trust, not the other way around.
Environments with public goods are a wonderful playground for those interested in delicate experimental problems, serious theoretical challenges, and difficult mechanism design issues. In this chapter I will look at one small but fundamental part of the rapidly expanding experimental research. In Section 1, I describe a very simple public good experiment - what it is, what some theories predict, what usually happens, and why we should care - and then provide a methodological and theoretical background for the rest of the chapter. In Section 2, I look at the fundamental question: are people selfish or cooperative in volunteering to contribute to public good production? We look at five important early experiments that have laid the foundations for much that has followed. In Section 3, I look at the range of experimental research which tries to identify and study those factors which increase cooperation. In order to help those new to experimental work I have tried to focus on specific experimental designs in Section 2 and on general results and knowledge in Section 3. The reader will find that the public goods environment is a very sensitive one with much that can affect outcomes but are difficult to control. The many factors interact with each other in unknown ways. Nothing is known for sure. Environments with public goods present a serious challenge even to skilled experimentalists and many opportunities for imaginative work.
Evidence is reviewed which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. Subjects are sometimes (a) unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, (b) unaware of the existence of the response, and (c) unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response. This suggests that though people may not be able to observe directly their cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to report accurately about them. Accurate reports will occur when influential stimuli are salient and are plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not plausible causes.
In this article we introduce a new experimental game called Prisoner’s Dilemma with Variable Dependence (PD/D), which allows players to separate their trust in their exchange partners from their cooperation with them in an ongoing relationship. The game allows researchers to observe the emergence of trust and cooperation separately, and ascertain the causal relationship between them. In six studies that use the PD/D design, we find that the players of PD/D consistently achieve very high cooperation rates, sometimes mean cooperation rates of about 95%, which are higher than in standard PD games sharing similar design features. These findings demonstrate that separating trust from cooperation is critical for building trust relations. They also show that the GRIT (Graduated Reciprocation In Tension reduction) strategy helps build such relations in the absence of mutual trust. Our results suggest that it is cooperation which leads to trust, not the other way around.
The affect heuristic (Slovic, Finucane, Peters, & MacGregor, 2002) claims that people (sometimes) decide on the sole basis of automatic affective responses to options (affective tags / somatic markers; Damasio, 1994). Such affective responses can be considered as aspects of intuition that can be tracked physiologically using different methods, such as measuring Skin Conductance Response (SCR), Pupil Diameter (PD), and Peripheral Arterial Tone (PAT). These methods can be used to inform researchers about intuitive choice tendencies of which sometimes decision makers are not aware (Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1997). We discuss the application of these measures and outline decision tasks often used in this line of research (e.g., Iowa Gambling Task). Pros and cons of the methods and the tasks are discussed. Then we outline how SCR, PD, and PAT can be used to identify intuitive processes and their interplay with deliberation. Finally, we suggest several directions in which researchers who aim to apply physiological measures in their research could proceed.
Socio-economic performance differs not only across countries but within countries too and can persist even after religion, language, and formal institutions are long shared. One interpretation of these disparities is that successful regions are characterized by higher levels of trust, and, more generally, of cooperation. Here we study a classic case of within-country disparities, the Italian North-South divide, to find out whether people exhibit geographically distinct abilities to cooperate independently of many other factors and whence these differences emerge. Through an experiment in four Italian cities, we study the behavior of a sample of the general population toward trust and contributions to the common good. We find that trust and contributions vary in unison, and diminish moving from North to South. This regional gap cannot be attributed to payoffs from cooperation or to institutions, formal or informal, that may vary across Italy, as the experimental methodology silences their impact. The gap is also independent of risk and other-regarding preferences which we measure experimentally, suggesting that the lower ability to cooperate we find in the South is not due to individual "moral" flaws. The gap could originate from emergent collective properties, such as different social norms and the expectations they engender. The absence of convergence in behavior during the last 150 years, since Italy was unified, further suggests that these norms can persist overtime. Using a millennium-long dataset, we explore whether the quality of past political institutions and the frequency of wars could explain the emergence of these differences in norms.
When two or more people coordinate their actions in space and time to produce a joint outcome, they perform a joint action. The perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes that enable individuals to coordinate their actions with others have been receiving increasing attention during the last decade, complementing earlier work on shared intentionality and discourse. This chapter reviews current theoretical concepts and empirical findings in order to provide a structured overview of the state of the art in joint action research. We distinguish between planned and emergent coordination. In planned coordination, agents' behavior is driven by representations that specify the desired outcomes of joint action and the agent's own part in achieving these outcomes. In emergent coordination, coordinated behavior occurs due to perception–action couplings that make multiple individuals act in similar ways, independently of joint plans. We review evidence for the two types of coordination and discuss potential synergies between them.
The classical exchange theorists proposed that trust is more likely to develop between partners when exchange occurs without explicit negotiations or binding agreements. Under these conditions, the risk and uncertainty of exchange provide the opportunity for partners to demonstrate their trustworthiness. This study develops the theoretical implications of this proposition and conducts an experimental test that compares levels of both trust and commitment in two forms of direct exchange, negotiated and reciprocal. The results support the classical proposition, showing that reciprocal exchange produces stronger trust and affective commitment than negotiated exchange, and that behaviors signaling the partner's trustworthiness have greater impact on trust in reciprocal exchange.
Scholars in various disciplines have considered the causes, nature, and effects of trust. Prior approaches to studying trust are considered, including characteristics of the trustor, the trustee, and the role of risk. A definition of trust and a model of its antecedents and outcomes are presented, which integrate research from multiple disciplines and differentiate trust from similar constructs. Several research propositions based on the model are presented.
In this paper, we used a dynamical systems approach to examine the interrelations of the physiological signals in dyadic interactions. We introduced a system of differential equations developed for dyadic research (Felmlee and Greenberg, 1999) and applied it to time series of heart rate and respiration from individuals in 32 couples. The model included parameters representing self-regulation and coregulation for each individual in the dyad. We applied the model directly to each dyad's data and then examined the distributions of the parameters, and compared such parameters across the three laboratory tasks. In the final step, we explored the associations between the parameter estimates extracted from the physiological data with those parameters from a similar model fitted to daily self-reports of affect.
"Passions Within Reason" re-evaluates the traditional models of human behavior in light of "a simple paradox," as Frank states, "namely, that in many situations the conscious pursuit of self-interest is incompatible with its attainment."
The self interest theory inspires self-interest; we expect the worst of others and act accordingly. But Frank shows, with many eloquent examples taken from a whole range of human behavior, that pure self interest leads to disaster, for oneself and society.
In "Passions Within Reason" Frank incorporates new developments from biology, psychology, and game and bargaining theory into a micro-economic theory that transcends the traditional "rational choice" model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A considerable amount of research has examined trust since our 1995 publication. We revisit some of the critical issues that we addressed and provide clarifications and extensions of the topics of levels of analysis, time, control systems, reciprocity, and measurement. We also recognize recent research in new areas of trust, such as affect, emotion, violation and repair, distrust, international and cross-cultural issues, and context-specific models, and we identify promising avenues for future research.
We collect data on trust and trustworthy behavior from eighty-four iterations of the Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe Investment game (the trust game). We perform a meta-analysis of these games in order to identify the effect of experimental protocols and cross-country cultural differences on trust and trustworthiness. We find that approximately 40% of the variance in trust and 30% of the variance in trustworthiness is explained by changes to experimental protocols. We also find that cultural variables that are highly correlated with a country's stock of social capital, such as ethnic fractionalization and income inequality, are most closely related to trustworthiness rather than trust. We use these findings to show that the negative relationship between diversity and social capital disappears as competitive free markets become more prevalent in a country.
We report survey and experimental evidence on trust and voluntary cooperation from more than 630 non-student and student participants in rural and urban Russia. Our subjects have a diverse socio-economic background that we relate to the answers of a survey on trust attitudes and to contribution behavior in a one-shot public goods game. We find that the socio-economic background affects trust attitudes, but we find no separate influence of socio-economic variables on cooperative behavior in a one-shot public goods experiment. However, cooperation is significantly positively correlated to trust toward strangers and beliefs about the fairness and helpfulness of others.
We designed an experiment to study trust and reciprocity in an investment setting. This design controls for alternative explanations of behavior including repeat game reputation effects, contractual precommitments, and punishment threats. Observed decisions suggest that reciprocity exists as a basic element of human behavior and that this is accounted for in the trust extended to an anonymous counterpart. A second treatment, social history, identifies conditions which strengthen the relationship between trust and reciprocity.
Game theory, the formalized study of strategy, began in the 1940s by asking how emotionless geniuses should play games, but ignored until recently how average people with emotions and limited foresight actually play games. This book marks the first substantial and authoritative effort to close this gap. Colin Camerer, one of the field's leading figures, uses psychological principles and hundreds of experiments to develop mathematical theories of reciprocity, limited strategizing, and learning, which help predict what real people and companies do in strategic situations. Unifying a wealth of information from ongoing studies in strategic behavior, he takes the experimental science of behavioral economics a major step forward. He does so in lucid, friendly prose. Behavioral game theory has three ingredients that come clearly into focus in this book: mathematical theories of how moral obligation and vengeance affect the way people bargain and trust each other; a theory of how limits in the brain constrain the number of steps of "I think he thinks . . ." reasoning people naturally do; and a theory of how people learn from experience to make better strategic decisions. Strategic interactions that can be explained by behavioral game theory include bargaining, games of bluffing as in sports and poker, strikes, how conventions help coordinate a joint activity, price competition and patent races, and building up reputations for trustworthiness or ruthlessness in business or life. While there are many books on standard game theory that address the way ideally rational actors operate, Behavioral Game Theory stands alone in blending experimental evidence and psychology in a mathematical theory of normal strategic behavior. It is must reading for anyone who seeks a more complete understanding of strategic thinking, from professional economists to scholars and students of economics, management studies, psychology, political science, anthropology, and biology.
Oxytocin may be implicated in various sophisticated human processes, including attachment, trust, social perception, memory, and fear regulation. In this study, we explored the relationship between plasma oxytocin level measured after a task requiring intimate trust (secret sharing) and habituation of autonomic arousal (skin conductance response) in sixty healthy volunteers. Results revealed that oxytocin was elevated in the trust-related condition relative to a neutral baseline. In a cognitive stress condition (mental arithmetic task), there was no significant oxytocin elevation relative to the neutral condition. After controlling for age, gender, education, state anxiety and depression, we found a significant positive relationship between trust-related oxytocin level and habituation of autonomic arousal. This relationship was absent in the case of neutral (trust-unrelated) oxytocin level. These results suggest that the habituation of autonomic arousal is closely related to oxytocin released during trust-related social interactions.
Humans regulate intergroup conflict through parochial altruism; they self-sacrifice to contribute to in-group welfare and
to aggress against competing out-groups. Parochial altruism has distinct survival functions, and the brain may have evolved
to sustain and promote in-group cohesion and effectiveness and to ward off threatening out-groups. Here, we have linked oxytocin,
a neuropeptide produced in the hypothalamus, to the regulation of intergroup conflict. In three experiments using double-blind
placebo-controlled designs, male participants self-administered oxytocin or placebo and made decisions with financial consequences
to themselves, their in-group, and a competing out-group. Results showed that oxytocin drives a “tend and defend” response
in that it promoted in-group trust and cooperation, and defensive, but not offensive, aggression toward competing out-groups.