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 which 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.
Humans can vividly simulate hypothetical experiences. This ability draws on our memories (e.g., of familiar people and locations) to construct imaginings that resemble real-life events (e.g., of meeting a person at a location). Here, we examine the hypothesis that we also learn from such simulated episodes much like from actual experiences. Specifically, we show that the mere simulation of meeting a familiar person (unconditioned stimulus; US) at a known location (conditioned stimulus; CS) changes how people value the location. We provide key evidence that this simulation-based learning strengthens pre-existing CS-US associations and that it leads to a transfer of valence from the US to the CS. The data thus highlight a mechanism by which we learn from simulated experiences.
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