This study investigates interpersonal processes underlying dialog by comparing two approaches, interactive alignment and interpersonal synergy, and assesses how they predict collective performance in ...a joint task. While the interactive alignment approach highlights imitative patterns between interlocutors, the synergy approach points to structural organization at the level of the interaction—such as complementary patterns straddling speech turns and interlocutors. We develop a general, quantitative method to assess lexical, prosodic, and speech/pause patterns related to the two approaches and their impact on collective performance in a corpus of task‐oriented conversations. The results show statistical presence of patterns relevant for both approaches. However, synergetic aspects of dialog provide the best statistical predictors of collective performance and adding aspects of the alignment approach does not improve the model. This suggests that structural organization at the level of the interaction plays a crucial role in task‐oriented conversations, possibly constraining and integrating processes related to alignment.
This study investigates the presence of dynamical patterns of interpersonal coordination in extended deceptive conversations across multimodal channels of behavior. Using a novel "devil's advocate" ...paradigm, we experimentally elicited deception and truth across topics in which conversational partners either agreed or disagreed, and where one partner was surreptitiously asked to argue an opinion opposite of what he or she really believed. We focus on interpersonal coordination as an emergent behavioral signal that captures interdependencies between conversational partners, both as the coupling of head movements over the span of milliseconds, measured via a windowed lagged cross correlation (WLCC) technique, and more global temporal dependencies across speech rate, using cross recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA). Moreover, we considered how interpersonal coordination might be shaped by strategic, adaptive conversational goals associated with deception. We found that deceptive conversations displayed more structured speech rate and higher head movement coordination, the latter with a peak in deceptive disagreement conversations. Together the results allow us to posit an adaptive account, whereby interpersonal coordination is not beholden to any single functional explanation, but can strategically adapt to diverse conversational demands.
Convergent Cross-Mapping (CCM) has shown high potential to perform causal inference in the absence of detailed models. This has implications for the understanding of complex information systems, as ...well as complex systems more generally. This article assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the CCM algorithm by varying coupling strength and noise levels in a model system consisting of two coupled logistic maps. As expected, it is found that CCM fails to accurately infer coupling strength and even causality direction in strongly coupled synchronized time-series, but surprisingly also in the presence of intermediate coupling. It is further found that the presence of noise reduces the level of cross-mapping fidelity, where the converged value of the CCM correlation decreases roughly linearly as a function of the noise, while the convergence rate of the CCM correlation shows little sensitivity to noise. The article proposes controlled noise injections in intermediate-to-strongly coupled systems could enable more accurate causal inferences. Initial investigation of an external driving signal indicates robustness of CCM toward this potentially confounding influence. Given the inherent noisy nature of real-world systems, the findings enable a more accurate evaluation of CCM applicability and the article advances suggestions on how to overcome the method’s weaknesses.
•The CCM algorithm is tested on a model system of two coupled logistic maps.•Noise and an external driving signal are added to test CCM robustness.•CCM can fail even for low and intermediate coupling.•We propose low R2 of fit to exponential convergence as indicator of CCM failure.•Controlled injection of noise can be used to improve accurate causal inference.
Theory of mind (ToM) is considered crucial for understanding social-cognitive abilities and impairments. However, verbal theories of the mechanisms underlying ToM are often criticized as ...under-specified and mutually incompatible. This leads to measures of ToM being unreliable, to the extent that even canonical experimental tasks do not require representation of others’ mental states. There have been attempts at making computational models of ToM, but these are not easily available for broad research application. In order to help meet these challenges, we here introduce the Python package tomsup: Theory of mind simulations using Python. The package provides a computational eco-system for investigating and comparing computational models of hypothesized ToM mechanisms and for using them as experimental stimuli. The package notably includes an easy-to-use implementation of the variational recursive Bayesian
k
-ToM model developed by (Devaine, Hollard, & Daunizeau,
2014b
) and of simpler non-recursive decision models, for comparison. We provide a series of tutorials on how to: (i) simulate agents relying on the
k
-ToM model and on a range of simpler types of mechanisms; (ii) employ those agents to generate online experimental stimuli; (iii) analyze the data generated in such experimental setup, and (iv) specify new custom ToM and heuristic cognitive models.
Communication is increasingly taking place in Facebook Groups around the world. Yet, we have little scientific knowledge of Facebook Groups at scale, especially the extent to which general systemic ...gendering is a pattern in participation in such groups. This knowledge deficit is problematic for digitalized and data-driven democratic societies. Therefore, this article aims to investigate gender differences in open, closed, and secret Facebook Groups. The study relies on a unique large-scale Facebook Group dataset from a sample that reflects the gender of Facebook users and the Facebook Groups they belong to in both Denmark and South Korea. By applying Bayesian models and developing a notion of participation that consists of both structural and actual participation, the study finds that the relation between country, gender, and participation is strongly modulated by gender differences. Females are more engaged than males in Denmark, while the opposite is true for South Korea. In both countries, privacy affects females’ participation more than males’. This article contributes to the field by presenting new large-scale findings that explore gender differences on three levels of Facebook Group privacy settings (open, closed, and secret) in a hitherto understudied communication space and, by doing so, it highlights the importance of privacy and country in predicting systemic gendering.
Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of ...their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter—laugh types likely generated by different vocal-production systems. Using a set of 36 recorded laughs produced by female English speakers in tests involving 884 participants from 21 societies across six regions of the world, we asked listeners to determine whether each laugh was real or fake, and listeners differentiated between the two laugh types with an accuracy of 56% to 69%. Acoustic analysis revealed that sound features associated with arousal in vocal production predicted listeners’ judgments fairly uniformly across societies. These results demonstrate high consistency across cultures in laughter judgments, underscoring the potential importance of nonverbal vocal communicative phenomena in human affiliation and cooperation.
Schizophrenia is often associated with distinctive or odd social behaviours. Previous work suggests this could be due to a general reduction in conformity; however, this work only assessed the ...tendency to publicly agree with others, which may involve a number of different mechanisms. In this study, we specifically investigated whether patients display a reduced tendency to adopt other people's opinions (socially learned attitude change). We administered a computerized conformity task, assumed to rely on reinforcement learning circuits, to 32 patients with schizophrenia or schizo-affective disorder and 39 matched controls. Each participant rated 153 faces for trustworthiness. After each rating, they were immediately shown the opinion of a group. After approximately 1 hour, participants were unexpectedly asked to rate all the faces again. We compared the degree of attitude change towards group opinion in patients and controls. Patients presented equal or more social influence on attitudes than controls. This effect may have been medication induced, as increased conformity was seen with higher antipsychotic dose. The results suggest that there is not a general decline in conformity in medicated patients with schizophrenia and that previous findings of reduced conformity are likely related to mechanisms other than reinforcement based social influence on attitudes.
The past two decades have seen an upsurge of interest in the collective behaviors of complex systems composed of many agents entrained to each other and to external events. In this paper, we extend ...the concept of entrainment to the dynamics of human collective attention. We conducted a detailed investigation of the unfolding of human entrainment--as expressed by the content and patterns of hundreds of thousands of messages on Twitter--during the 2012 US presidential debates. By time-locking these data sources, we quantify the impact of the unfolding debate on human attention at three time scales. We show that collective social behavior covaries second-by-second to the interactional dynamics of the debates: A candidate speaking induces rapid increases in mentions of his name on social media and decreases in mentions of the other candidate. Moreover, interruptions by an interlocutor increase the attention received. We also highlight a distinct time scale for the impact of salient content during the debates: Across well-known remarks in each debate, mentions in social media start within 5-10 seconds after it occurs; peak at approximately one minute; and slowly decay in a consistent fashion across well-known events during the debates. Finally, we show that public attention after an initial burst slowly decays through the course of the debates. Thus we demonstrate that large-scale human entrainment may hold across a number of distinct scales, in an exquisitely time-locked fashion. The methods and results pave the way for careful study of the dynamics and mechanisms of large-scale human entrainment.
•We tested whether a confidence heuristic could replace interaction in a collective perceptual decision-making task.•For individuals of nearly equal reliability, the confidence heuristic is just as ...accurate as interaction.•For individuals with different reliabilities, the confidence heuristic is less accurate than interaction.•Interacting individuals use the credibility of each other’s confidence estimates to guide their joint decisions.•Interacting individuals face a problem of how to map ‘internal’ variables onto ‘external’ (shareable) variables.
In a range of contexts, individuals arrive at collective decisions by sharing confidence in their judgements. This tendency to evaluate the reliability of information by the confidence with which it is expressed has been termed the ‘confidence heuristic’. We tested two ways of implementing the confidence heuristic in the context of a collective perceptual decision-making task: either directly, by opting for the judgement made with higher confidence, or indirectly, by opting for the faster judgement, exploiting an inverse correlation between confidence and reaction time. We found that the success of these heuristics depends on how similar individuals are in terms of the reliability of their judgements and, more importantly, that for dissimilar individuals such heuristics are dramatically inferior to interaction. Interaction allows individuals to alleviate, but not fully resolve, differences in the reliability of their judgements. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of confidence and collective decision-making.
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