Coordination enhances the implicit sense of commitment in joint action

This talk introduces a minimal framework for modeling the sense of commitment to joint action, and presents the results of a series of experiments testing the prediction that coordination is a key factor enhancing the sense of commitment. In all experiments, participants viewed brief videos of a joint action involving either a high degree or a low degree of coordination between two actors. In each experiment, one of the actors was presented with a tempting outside option (e.g. his phone rang). To probe participants' sense that the actors in the videos were committed to the joint action, we asked various questions about their expectation that the actor would resist the tempting outside option. The results showed that participants were more likely to expect the actor in the high coordination condition to resist the tempting outside option. This corroborates the hypothesis that coordination enhances the sense of commitment.