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The fruits of our labour : Interpersonal coordination generates commitment by signalling a willingness to adapt
Title / Series / Name
Publication Volume
Publication Issue
Pages
Editors
Keywords
Coordination
adaptation
commitment
cooperation
decision-making
Physiology
Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
General Psychology
Physiology (medical)
adaptation
commitment
cooperation
decision-making
Physiology
Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
General Psychology
Physiology (medical)
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/27464
Abstract
Countless everyday activities require us to coordinate our actions and decisions with others. Coordination not only enables us to achieve instrumental goals, but has also been shown to boost commitment, leading people to persevere with an interaction even when their motivation wavers. So far, little is known about the mechanism by which coordination generates commitment. To investigate this, we conducted two experiments that represented very different coordination problems: coordination of movement timing on a joint drumming task (Experiment 1) and coordination of decision-making on a joint object matching task (Experiment 2). In both experiments, the similarity of the participant and partner was manipulated by varying whether or not they had perceptual access to the participant’s workspace, and the participants’ attribution of (un)willingness to invest effort into the joint action by adapting was manipulated by varying whether or not the participant believed their partner had perceptual access. As a measure of commitment, we registered how much participants’ persisted on a boring and effortful task to earn points for their partners. Participants were significantly less committed to earning points for unadaptive partners than for adaptive partners, but only when they believed that their partner was unwilling to adapt rather than unable to adapt. This demonstrates that coordination can generate commitment insofar as it provides a cue that one’s partner is willing to invest effort to adapt for the good of the interaction. Moreover, we demonstrate that this effect generalises across different kinds of coordination.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2022-01-27
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1177/17470218221079830