Synchrony Influences Estimates of Cooperation in a Public-Goods Game

Luke McEllin*, Natalie Sebanz

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

Benefiting from a cooperative interaction requires people to estimate how cooperatively other members of a group will act so that they can calibrate their own behavior accordingly. We investigated whether the synchrony of a group’s actions influences observers’ estimates of cooperation. Participants (recruited through Prolific) watched animations of actors deciding how much to donate in a public-goods game and using a mouse to drag donations to a public pot. Participants then estimated how much was in the pot in total (as an index of how cooperative they thought the group members were). Experiment 1 (N = 136 adults) manipulated the synchrony between players’ decision-making time, and Experiment 2 (N = 136 adults) manipulated the synchrony between players’ decision-implementing movements. For both experiments, estimates of how much was in the pot were higher for synchronous than asynchronous groups, demonstrating that the temporal dynamics of an interaction contain signals of a group’s level of cooperativity.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)202-212
Number of pages11
JournalPsychological Science
Volume35
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 29 Jan 2024

Keywords

  • action perception
  • cooperation
  • joint action
  • open data
  • preregistered
  • social cognition
  • synchrony

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