Attributing Social Meaning to Animated Shapes: A New Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior

Abstract

In 1944, Heider and Simmel reported that observers could perceive simple animated geometric shapes as characters with emotions, intentions, and other social attributes. This work has been cited over 3,000 times and has had wide and ongoing influence on the study of social cognition and social intelligence. However, many researchers in this area have continued to use the original Heider and Simmel black-and-white video. We asked whether the original findings could be reproduced 75 years later by creating 32 new colored animated shape videos designed to depict various social plots and testing whether they can evoke similar spontaneous social attributions. Participants (N = 66) viewed our videos and were asked to write narratives which we coded for indicia of different types of social attributions. Consistent with Heider and Simmel, we found that participants spontaneously attributed social meaning to the videos. We observed that responses to our videos were also similar to responses to the original video reported by Klin (2000), despite being only 13-23 s and portraying a broader range of social plots. Participants varied in how many social attributions they made in response, and the videos varied in how much they elicited such responses. Our set of animated shape videos is freely available online for all researchers to use and forms the basis of a multiple-choice assessment of social intelligence (Brown et al., 2019).

Using game‐like animations of geometric shapes to simulate social interactions: An evaluation of group score differences

“…This format can easily be implemented as a non-proctored, online assessment that makes it convenient for organizational research. The animations used in the Shapes Test have been found to evoke a similar degree of social attribution compared to the original Heider and Simmel film (Ratajska et al, 2020). Scores on this test also correlate positively with other validated social intelligence measures, including the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test (Baron-Cohen et al, 2001) and the Situational Test of Emotion Understanding (MacCann & Roberts, 2008), while displaying discriminant validity from measures of verbal ability or abstract reasoning (Brown et al, 2019).…”

“…A frame from the original Heider and Simmel (1944) film is displayed on the left (a) and a frame from one of the Social Shapes Test animations is shown on the right (b). This figure also appears in Ratajska et al (2020) descriptions provided by test takers after viewing the shape animations (Klin, 2000). This is an obstacle to organizational use where assessments are typically administered and scored electronically without a proctor or administrator (Tippins, 2009).…”

Imagination and Social Cognition in Childhood

“…It is not something we necessarily notice or reflect on, but our knowledge of the physical world makes social events meaningful. Heider & Simmel (1944;Ratajska et al, 2020) demonstrated this in their classic study of social perception: shapes moving on a screen become meaningful social agents with interpretable goals, beliefs, desires, emotions, and relationships under certain physical conditions. Most reviews of this work focus on the autonomous movement of the shapes, as autonomous movement is a salient cue to agency, and potentially a core-cognition of agents from birth (Leslie, 1995;Spelke & Kinzler, 2007;Xu, 2016).…”

Imagination and social cognition in childhood

“…In their classic study, Heider & Simmel (1944;Ratajska et al, 2020) demonstrated how physical understanding informs social perception: shapes moving on a screen become meaningful social agents with interpretable goals, beliefs, desires, emotions, and relationships under certain physical conditions.…”

“…In their classic study, Heider and Simmel (1944); Ratajska et al, 2020) demonstrated how physical understanding informs social perception: shapes moving on a screen become meaningful social agents with interpretable goals, beliefs, desires, emotions, and relationships under certain physical conditions. Most reviews of this work focus on the autonomous movement of the shapes, as autonomous movement is a salient cue to agency, and potentially a core‐cognition of agents from birth (Leslie, 1995; Spelke & Kinzler, 2007; Xu, 2016).…”