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Predicting others’ actions from their social contexts
Title / Series / Name
Publication Volume
Publication Issue
Pages
Authors
Editors
Keywords
Cues
Humans
Social Environment
Humans
Social Environment
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/26812
Abstract
Contextual cues have been shown to inform our understanding and predictions of others’ actions. In this study, we tested whether observers’ predictions about unfolding actions depend upon the social context in which they occur. Across five experiments, we showed participants videos of an actor walking toward a piece of furniture either with (joint context) or without (solo context) a partner standing by it. We found greater predictive bias, indicative of stronger action expectations when videos contained a second actor (Experiment 1), even when the solo condition had a perceptually-matched control object in place of the actor (Experiment 2). Critically, belief manipulations about the actions the walking actor would perform suppressed the difference between social context conditions when the manipulation specified an action possible in both contexts (Experiment 5) but not when the action was one that would be difficult without a partner (Experiment 4). Interestingly, the social context effect persisted when the belief manipulation specified an unlikely action given the depicted scene (Experiment 3). These findings provide novel evidence that kinematically-identical actions can elicit different predictions depending on the social context in which they occur.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2023-12-12
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1038/s41598-023-49081-6