Effective coordination is necessary for social interactions as varied as conversation among friends, driving and walking in high-traffic areas, playing sports and working in teams. This project distinguishes between two types of coordination -tacit and explicit coordination while distinguishing matching from mismatching problems. In matching, it is mutually beneficial for actors to choose the same action. Conversely, in mismatching, it is mutually beneficial for actors to choose different actions (e.g., divisions of labor in work teams). Matching and mismatching are expected to foster different interpersonal impression and feelings. These expectations are based on a model that integrates social categorization theory and the concept of focal points from behavioral economics. The proposed work uses a combination of computational modeling and empirical studies. This project will explore 1) how people use social knowledge to coordinate tacitly with others; 2) how successful matching and mismatching emerges over repeated interactions; and 3) how coordination success on matching and mismatching problems affect subsequent interpersonal impressions and team performances. The planned experiments will examine the conditions under which coordination does and does not foster cohesion. Ultimately, the PIs plan to : a) model the effects of task and social factors and decision rules on the development of coordinated matching and mismatching, b) use the modeling results to design efficiently empirical studies with live participants, and c) refine the computational model based on the empirical findings. Findings from the proposed research should contribute to both economic and psychological theorists. The use of a psychologically-themed simulation to represent theoretical assumptions and to derive predictions is both novel and exemplary.
Coordination: Fundamental Process in Social Functioning Bob’s dog noses his food bowl as Bob rushes out the door to catch the train. Bob assumes that his wife fed the dog before she left earlier. Bob’s wife knew he had to meet a business associate for breakfast and surely she would have anticipated that he would have been too rushed to feed the dog. As he boards the train, he remembers that he agreed to meet at the coffee shop next to his office building but there are three coffee shops nearby. His associate is always early and he guesses that she will have already gone to the one directly across the street from the main entrance. As the foregoing scenario illustrates, the consequences of one’s action or decision frequently depend on what others do. Not feeding the dog if Bob’s partner had and going to the same coffee shop as the business associate are good outcomes, but failures to coordinate in either case would not be desirable. These examples illustrate the ubiquity of coordination problems in social life. However, unlike for these commonplace examples, coordination failures can also have dire consequences as Schelling (1960) noted in his seminal work, The Strategy of Conflict. If one individual knows what the other party did or will do, many coordination problems would be easy to solve. The problem arises because the actors often do not know in time what the other parties are doing because the actors lack the opportunity to communicate or because they assume, either explicitly or implicitly, that they can predict each other’s actions. Matching versus Mismatching Abele & Stasser (2008) distinguished two types of coordination problems. Matching coordination problems are those that require the agents to choose the same action as in meeting at the same coffee shop. Mismatching coordination problems are those that require the agents to choose different actions for successful coordination as in the feeding-the-dog example. Several studies demonstrated that matching and mismatching elicit different patterns of downstream social consequences. Success coordination, whether matching or mismatching, leads to the impression that one’s partner is smart. However, successful matching induces one to see the partner as similar to oneself and enhances liking for the partner whereas successful mismatching does not. We have also shown that mismatching is more difficult than matching even when matching and mismatching are structurally equivalent. Social Knowledge in Coordination A series of studies documented that people spontaneously use knowledge about others to identify potential solutions to coordination problems. For this knowledge to be perceived as relevant, it must be seen as applicable to the choices of the coordination task. For example, knowing that your partner volunteers at a pet store does not help when the coordination problem is picking up milk at the grocery store. But this knowledge could be a useful coordination cue for deciding who feeds the dog. We found that people readily use information about social characteristics of their coordinating partner, and they spontaneously select a relevant cue out of a broad range of social information. Coordination performance was promoted for matching tasks when coordinating partners were the same on a relevant trait and for mismatching tasks when coordinating partners differed on the relevant trait. Moreover, one actor can be focal depending on the structural elements of the decision task and environment. For example, we have shown that people tend to take the perspective of a person who decides first even when that person’s actual decision is unknown (as in the business meeting example) and the person deciding first assumes that the others will correctly anticipate her decisions. Even against the backdrop of much information about one’s partner, coordination tasks still affected perceptions. For example, when partners knew many things about each other, coordination success enhanced mutual perceptions of intelligence, and successful matching increased interpersonal liking whereas successful mismatching did not. Coordination in Ongoing Relationships Extending the work on social knowledge, we investigated whether romantic couples are better in coordinating than strangers. Couples were better in predicting their partner’s choices than were strangers. When dyads were asked to coordinate their choices, couples performed better than strangers when the task was to match each other’s response, but couples performed as poorly as strangers when the task was to choose different options than the partner. Note that couples’ advantage in coordination by matching does not seem to be due to their romantic connectedness but to their social knowledge of each other. Couples were only better at matching if their preferences were related to the coordination task and both partners correctly knew each other’s preference. This social knowledge did not help, however, when trying to mismatch each other’s response. Consistent with our other findings, mismatching tasks are inherently more difficult even for people who know each other well.
