The fruits of our labour: Interpersonal coordination generates commitment by signalling a willingness to adapt

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.

Keywords: Coordination; adaptation; commitment; cooperation; decision-making.

Figure 1.

The left panel depicts the design of the two experiments. The arrows represent the direction of information flow in the two experiments (Experiment 1: tapping sounds and Experiment 2: visual access to partners’ workspace). The red arrow represents the participant, the blue arrow represents the adaptive partner, and the green arrow represents the unadaptive partner. The right panel depicts the structure of both experiments.

Figure 2.

Left panel displays commitment (indexed by persistence on the charging task) to the adaptive and unadaptive partner in the able-to-adapt and unable-to-adapt belief conditions. Right panel displays movement timing similarity (indexed by drumming asynchrony) with the adaptive and unadaptive partner in the able-to-adapt and unable-to-adapt belief conditions. Error bars represent within-subject confidence intervals.

Figure 3.

Left panel displays commitment (indexed by persistence on the charging task) to the adaptive and unadaptive partner in the able-to-adapt and unable-to-adapt belief conditions. Right panel displays decision similarity (indexed by number of same choices on the object matching task) with the adaptive and unadaptive partner in the able-to-adapt and unable-to-adapt belief conditions. Error bars represent within-subject confidence intervals.