Coordination Games

The Mating Game is a Team Sport

Josh Ackerman, Ph.D. — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:06:15 +0000

Are you looking for love but having trouble convincing the target of your infatuation to take you seriously? Or maybe hoping that certain unsavory types will stop looking for love with you? Well I'd recommend maybe updating your wardrobe and not hanging out in seedy bars by yourself anymore, but you might also be interested in new research suggesting that a important means of achieving your romantic goals involves less about what you do or where you do it, and more about who you do it with. That is, social coordination can improve your love life, whether that means finding the right person or avoiding the wrong one.

The idea that other people often factor into our search for romance is not new. Overbearing parents and desirable-but-pompous peers are two classic archetypes of history, literature and Hollywood movies (think Egeus in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Iceman in Top Gun). In scientific research, the role these other people play has by and large been restricted to competition. If you're a guy, other men represent people to trump in status or best in fights. If you're a girl, being more attractive or popular than other women is the name of the game. However, this other-people-as-competition framework misses a huge chunk of how we interact socially within romantic situations. We also: talk about potential romantic partners with people, find people to date by socially networking, and even directly help each other perform better on the mating market. You've probably done such things with your friends and family members. You may even have actively refrained from competing over the same guy or girl. These more cooperative forms of courtship behavior emerge through successful coordination of our own romantic interests with the interests of people with whom we share close, platonic relationships.

These behaviors may be immediately familiar, but research is now examining the evolutionary basis for "cooperative courtship" and identifying its differential appeal for women and men. Evolutionarily, the mating behavior of males and females (in all species) tends to be influenced by the physical and resource-based costs of pregnancy. Pregnancy is expensive, on the body as well as the pocketbook. The biological sex that spends the most effort gestating and rearing kids has the most to invest, and thus tends to be the most picky about choosing romantic partners (i.e., if you have to pay the cost, make sure to get a good deal). In many animals, including people, females are relatively more choosy. When it comes to cooperative courtship, therefore, females help each other to evaluate potential mates and avoid mates who don't make the grade. Males, on the other hand, tend to help each other get chosen. We see evidence for these strategies in animals, as when male turkeys help each other attract mates and when female bonobo chimpanzees form alliances to reduce sexual coercion.

People use very similar strategies, even though birth control has lowered the actual chance of unintended pregnancy. With my colleague Douglas Kenrick, I conducted several studies looking at how people coordinate their romantic interests. In one study, we showed people drawings of flirtatious scenes (see one in the image below) and asked them to identify who was a woman and who was a man.

Who would you guess? In other studies, we asked people about what kind of help people give to their friends and what kind of help they want to receive. We consistently found that everyone wants to help-competition is not the inevitable outcome. And though everyone helped in multiple ways, we found that women tended to help their friends build romantic barriers (weeding out the undesirable guys and testing the desirable ones), and men tended to help their friends break down those barriers (attempting to counter women's strategies). People used all sorts of techniques to do this, including having friends pose as counterfeit romantic partners (this worked for women AND men). Not only that, people also switched the kind of help they gave to their opposite-sex friends-now men helped women build barriers and women helped men break down barriers.

We even set up a Dating Game experiment in which people came to the lab expecting to be a contestant on a game show. The show wasn't all about competition though. At one point in the game, contestants had the option to act cooperatively with other contestants. Interestingly, in this "real-world" environment, women still gave more help when the potential date was an undesirable guy (suggesting barrier-building) and men still gave more help when the potential date was a desirable woman (suggesting barrier-breaking). We concluded that many of the romantic behaviors we think of as unique to our time and culture actually have their roots in universal biological principles.

There is still a lot of research to be done. I'd love to hear from people who have observed cooperative courtship in other cultures. Not all of the behaviors I mentioned will be cross-culturally identical, but I expect that people everywhere are helping each other achieve their romantic goals (e.g., in some cultures, family might provide more help than friends). I also think these findings are interesting because of their implications for cooperation in other contexts. For instance, how do people cooperate in business negotiations or in non-romantic social networking, and might women and men be better at certain negotiation and networking strategies than at others? Leave some comments below and let me know your thoughts.

You can read more about these studies here:
Ackerman, J. M., & Kenrick, D. T. (2009). Cooperative Courtship: Helping Friends Raise and Raze Relationship Barriers. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35, 1285-1300.

Getting Ahead By Getting Along

Josh Ackerman, Ph.D. — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:26:12 +0000

There are certain unfortunate truths in the world of business. One involves that classic question: "Why in the world did that person get promoted?" In most professions, people are hired because they demonstrate aptitude (or at least the potential for aptitude) at certain tasks. What matters is being better qualified, better educated, a better performer than other people. Well, that's what we tend to believe, anyway. But the key predictor of success in most professions is actually being well liked. And a key way to become well liked is through effective social coordination. Thus, social coordination may be a highly useful tool for achieving professional success.

Consider our now ex-president, George Bush. It could be (legitimately) claimed that, prior to his first term, he did not possess the most aptitude or experience of all the candidates vying for the Presidency. Yet, he reached what is arguably the pinnacle of professional success. He achieved this promotion in large part by being well liked and by exhibiting traits that allowed voters to get an easy read on him. He "fit" well with people. The same is true of many of our leaders and the people who move quickly up the corporate ranks.

This kind of interpersonal fit, and its beneficial effects, is referred to in the psychological literature by terms like fluency and flow. When a people's personality and behaviors map onto our expectations and are readily understandable (i.e., are fluent), when we are highly socially coordinated with them, we are better able to predict their future actions. This is one reason why supporters liked referring to Bush as "a man of strong convictions" and a "straight shooter." This ease of interpretation and prediction feels good, physically and mentally. Effective social coordination makes people happy and energized, and conversely, awkward coordination feels bad and wears people down. The positive feelings elicited by this interpersonal fit are unconsciously translated into feelings of trust for the people with whom we fit. That is, if we feel good around people and can easily understand where they are coming from, why not trust them?

It takes an extraordinarily minor amount of coordination to produce positive feelings. For example, research on nonverbal mimicry by Tanya Chartrand and colleagues has demonstrated that imitating a person's mannerisms (e.g., crossing your legs, touching your face, changing postures) can lead that person to like you more and to feel that the interaction went more smoothly. There are many practical business implications for such findings. In one relevant study, waitresses who repeated the order of their customers (mimicking their verbal behavior) received significantly larger tips. In another study, salespeople who mimicked customers both sold more product and were evaluated more positively by those customers. Directly matching a person's behavior isn't always the best strategy though. For actions that signal dominance such as postural and some emotional displays, behaviorally complementing the other person may work better than imitating that person. Larissa Tiedens and her colleagues have studied complementary behaviors extensively and found, for example, that sitting with a wide open posture when another person is sitting in a more closed, restrained manner increases the liking and comfort felt between those two people. Thus, think mimicry in most situations, but complementarity when a social interaction involves actions related to dominance or status.

The idea of trying to coordinate effectively with people who have a hand in your professional destiny sounds well and good, but it might leave some feeling uncomfortable. Does this count as sucking up? Would I be trying to subliminally persuade people to like me? Clearly, the answers are yes and yes. But perhaps using unconscious social coordination techniques is not as bad as it might seem. Coordinating with others need not involve parroting opinions you don't share or nefariously attempting to have people do things against their wishes. Effective social coordination is a natural component of social life, and it often can increase efficiency and productivity. So not only do you look better, but you perform better as well. And what's not to like about that?

You Wear Me Out

Josh Ackerman, Ph.D. — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:17:50 +0000

In the U.S., we generally see self-control as a positive trait. It's good when people refrain from gluttony, from overspending, from aggressive outbursts, and from listening to Lady Gaga. Therefore, when we want to prevent a slip-up or change an especially intransigent behavior, it seems like we should surround ourselves with people who exhibit self-control. And we do. People often diet together, shop with friends, attend group addiction meetings, and so on, typically presuming that they are able to coordinate their own self-control with those of others. If someone I know can resist that cigarette or that jelly donut, shouldn't I want to be around that person? But does this coordination of self-control always lead to positive outcomes, or might we sometimes over-coordinate with other people? When is it good and when is it bad to have others resist the same temptations that you face?

First, it's good to know just what self-control is and how it works. Self-control, sometimes referred to as a form of self-regulation, is essentially the inhibition of one's dominant tendencies, presumably for the purpose of achieving more rewarding long-term outcomes. For example, you are practicing self-control when you stop yourself from dumping your savings into Florida swampland because, just maybe, it would be good to keep that money for retirement. Experiences like this should be immediately recognizable to most people, as we constantly exercise self-control throughout our daily lives. Of course, we're not always effective (see: recent financial meltdown). One interesting fact about self-control that has been emphasized by psychologists Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs and their colleagues is that self-control is quite limited in capacity (if you're eating a jelly donut right now, you probably understand what I'm talking about). Self-control is effortful - use it in one situation, and you temporarily have less to use in a subsequent situation. Your self-control has been depleted. Resist that donut, and you might wind up spending more money at the next store you walk into.

The question here, though, is: What effect does another person's use of self-control have on you? To answer this question, a few researchers (Noah Goldstein, Jenessa Shapiro, John Bargh) and I conducted several experiments to test whether the act of "mentally simulating" someone's self-control might cause people to feel depleted even when they didn't exert self-control themselves. Here's where the strange world of unconscious social coordination rears its head... Past research has shown that people often "catch" the goals of others, much like we catch diseases. This is why surrounding yourself with someone who is good at self-control can be a good thing. When you watch a game show like The Biggest Loser, you might catch the goal of using self-control, and be inspired to diet yourself.

Research on mental simulation, however, suggests that if you were to really get inside that contestant's head, you might end up experiencing the end result of that self-control activity—depletion. Mentally simulating the actions of others involves the neural and physical replication of those actions, and has been found to result in consequences consistent with the actual performance of those actions. That's a mouthful, but think about imagining or taking the perspective of someone who eats a disgusting food (like on Fear Factor). When you imagine someone biting into a raw cow's eyeball, you could end up with a disgusted expression on your face, even though you haven't really eaten anything. A similar effect might apply to self-control as well.

We had participants in our experiments read several stories. In one version, a waiter comes to work without having eaten all day, and is really, really hungry. That waiter works at the best restaurant in town, and throughout his (or her) shift, he is surrounded by mouth-watering meals and tempting treats. He can't eat anything though, or else he might be fired. In another version of the story, the waiter comes to work having just eaten, and the restaurant he works at is more of a greasy spoon. So, in the first version, the waiter has to use self-control, and in the second, he doesn't need to use it. We also asked participants to either just read the story (which is similar to simply being in the presence of someone else during the day) or to take the perspective of the waiter. Really get inside his head. Then we had people do a bunch of things that benefit from self-control: decide how much money to spend on products, solve word problems, read ads, think about time, etc.

What we found was really interesting. People who simply read the stories did much better on the second tasks when the story involved the hungry waiter who used self-control than when the story involved the full waiter. Those people decided to spend less money on products, they solved more problems, they were less influenced by ads and they thought less time had passed during the study. Essentially, they had a lot of self-control to burn. But the people who took the perspective of the hungry waiter really suffered. They were willing to spend more money on the same products (over $6,000 more), they solved fewer problems, they agreed to things in ads they didn't even want, and they thought the study took over twice as long. They were burned out.

Studies like these show that our self-control abilities don't reside exclusively within us. Even though we might not realize it, we coordinate our mental and physical states with other people around us. In this research, social coordination can help or it can hurt, depending on how much we tend to get inside others' heads. In situations where we tend to simulate the feelings of others, this "vicarious depletion" could potentially result in small breakdowns of self-control, such as employees speaking out improperly during a meeting, to catastrophic ones, such as police officers responding to an emotionally charged encounter with deadly force. On the other hand, if people can maintain a degree of psychological separation, it seems that others' self-control can actually help us out. The key is finding the right balance in those situations where self-control is necessary. Keep that in mind the next time you're out with others, and don't let them lead you into temptation. The jelly donut is waiting.

Have you had similar experiences? Post about them in the Comments section!

You can read more about these studies in:
Ackerman, J. M., Goldstein, N. J., Shapiro, J. R., & Bargh, J. A. (2009). You Wear Me Out: The Vicarious Depletion of Self-Control. Psychological Science, 20, 326-332.

We Are Not Alone

Josh Ackerman, Ph.D. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:28:04 +0000

Are you an individual? The answer to this deceptively simple, but philosophically profound question is... of course you are. But as I hope to impress on you throughout the life of this blog, we are not only, or even mostly, "individual." The lines where our selves end and other selves begin are not as clear cut as the boundaries formed by skin, clothes or relationships. We are fundamentally connected to other people in essentially every way that makes life what it is.

This perspective tends to conflict with the dominant Western viewpoint. We tend to think of ourselves as independent creatures. We decide our own destinies, make our own decisions, act how we want to act. In the U.S., corporate America and the government tell us to "Think Different" and "Be an Army of One." But is every man and woman an island? Can we all think different? Is this even possible? In fact, the people that fill our daily lives affect us much more than we might otherwise believe. We are, in truth, social coordination machines. The aim of this blog is to explore the wonderful variety of ways that we synchronize, harmonize, imitate and complement others in virtually every aspect of our existence. Many forms of coordination are quite obvious. We understand and match people's actions when dancing, or playing sports and music. Talking to others also necessitates both speaking and listening—coordination is the very essence of communication. But we engage in additional forms of coordination without consciously realizing it, and it is these forms that are some of the most interesting and most revealing about what it means to be human.

Let's consider some examples of less obvious coordination. Imagine that you are about to walk inside of a building, and a person exiting the building holds the door open for you. What would you do-walk inside, do as the other person is doing and hold the door open as well, or maybe just stand there staring? If you are like most people practiced in the ways of social life, you would probably walk inside, perhaps expressing gratitude. You likely wouldn't think much about it. In fact, many of the behaviors we perform in the presence of other people are similar to this one in that they fulfill a learned script. You know that holding the door open is an invitation for you to enter, and it would be weird for you to do otherwise. Now imagine that you are out shopping and you happen upon a friendly coworker who is shopping as well. The coworker smiles in greeting. Would you be most likely to smile in return, frown, or remain totally and completely expressionless? Again, the script says that smiling in return is the correct behavior. These two examples highlight the two basic forms of social coordination we observe in the world. In the first example, holding the door invites a complementary action (walking inside), and in the second example, smiling invites an imitative action (smiling back). Imitation and complementation doesn't always require learned scripts. It can naturally emerge in any situation. Consider these scientific findings...

Liking another person (or wanting another person to like you) can lead you to rub your face and shake your foot when that other person is face rubbing or foot shaking. Further, people unconsciously follow the gaze of others, use their words and speech patterns in conversation, and even adopt their accents (this is one thing I hate about traveling in foreign countries—I often recognize, uncomfortably, that I'm speaking in Spanglish, Italianish or... British). Emotions can be synchronized as well. People can contagiously "catch" the feelings of others, and end up happy or sad for no identifiable reason. Our thoughts are not immune to contagion either. Simply being exposed to cues to the concept "elderly," for example, can lead people to walk and think more slowly. Even our very basic physiological systems are susceptible to social coordination. People's heart rates may become synchronized between mother and infant or between therapist and patient. There are countless other examples.

In future posts, we'll explore the impact of social coordination in innumerable aspects of daily life. We'll consider why people go through the trouble of coordinating (answer: a combination of learning and evolution). We'll talk about how coordination is not simply a consequence of engaging in social interactions, but also how it can change the course of those interactions. Finally, this won't be a blog that champions Eastern over Western wisdom (I could care less where the wisdom comes from), but instead focuses on what science tells us about how other people affect us, even when we don't realize it. Until then, stay aware of those around you and try not to stand there staring when someone holds the door open for you.