John studied philosophy at Wesleyan University (Connecticut, USA), then at the University of Tübingen (Germany), and completed his PhD at the University of Vienna in 2010.
Social commitment influences our behavior in various ways. Recent studies suggest that social com... more Social commitment influences our behavior in various ways. Recent studies suggest that social commitment to other individuals or groups can increase dishonest behavior while feeling commitment to moral norms might decrease it. Here we show in a pre-registered series of 7 studies investigating the influence of social commitment on dishonest behavior by sampling 7566 participants across three countries (the UK, the US, and Mexico) that commitment to moral norms via honesty oaths might decrease dishonesty (OR = 0.79 [0.72, 0.88]). To the contrary, we found no credible evidence that social commitment to other individuals increases dishonesty (OR = 1.08 [0.97, 1.20]). Finally, we observed that commitment to moral norms was less effective if participants were committed to another individual at the same time (OR = 0.95 [0.86, 1.06]). Our findings point at the potential effectiveness of honesty oaths, while the observed effect sizes were small compared to previous studies.
Understanding when it is acceptable to interrupt a joint activity is an important part of underst... more Understanding when it is acceptable to interrupt a joint activity is an important part of understanding what cooperation entails. Philosophical analyses have suggested that we should release our partner from a joint activity anytime the activity conflicts with fulfilling a moral obligation. To probe young children's understanding of this aspect, we investigated whether 3-year-old children (N = 60) are sensitive to the legitimacy of motives (selfish condition vs. moral condition) leading agents to intentionally interrupt their joint activity. We measured whether children protested or released their partner by scoring their reactions. Our results indicate that children did not manifest different reactions when the motive behind their partner leaving was moral than when the motive was selfish. However, our data showed a stable pattern: regardless of the partner's motives, some 3-year-olds take initiatives to release their partners from joint activity, suggesting that measuring release is a valuable tool for investigating joint action.
Effort perception is a crucial capacity underpinning characteristically human forms of sociality,... more Effort perception is a crucial capacity underpinning characteristically human forms of sociality, allowing us to learn about others' mental states and about the value of opportunities afforded by our environment, and supporting our ability to cooperate efficiently and fairly. Despite the crucial importance and prevalence of effort perception, little is known about the mechanisms underpinning it. Across two online experiments (N = 462), we tested whether adults estimate others' cognitive effort costs by tracking perceptible properties of movement such as path length, time, and speed. The results showed that only time had a consistent effect on effort perception, that is, participants rated longer time as more effortful. Taken together, our results suggest that within the context of our task-observing an agent deciphering a captcha-people rely on the time of others' actions to estimate their cognitive effort costs.
A growing body of theoretical and empirical work suggests that our sense of fairness implies a pr... more A growing body of theoretical and empirical work suggests that our sense of fairness implies a preference for divisions of rewards that are proportional to contributions. However, there has been no study testing whether people distribute effort costs according to the expected reward distribution. We hypothesized that when people expect to share the reward of the joint task equally, they will ensure fairness by calibrating their effort investment such as to reduce inequity with respect to joint action partners' effort investment. We developed a task in which participants traded off effort costs against reward. Before making their decision, they observed as their partner performed an effort task. We examined how the perception of the partner's effort modulated effort-based decision-making in joint action, depending on whether participants were in a joint or separate reward structure, and on whether the available reward was known or unknown. Across two lab-based, pre-registered experiments (N = 57), we found support for our hypothesis, and we controlled for other candidate explanations for the observed effort matching effect such as a preference for acting jointly, learning about the value of opportunities afforded by the environment, learning the value of effort and competition.
The present study was designed to test whether actions on Facebook such as commenting on others' ... more The present study was designed to test whether actions on Facebook such as commenting on others' posts can create a sense of commitment to continue performing similar actions in the future. Across four online experiments, we found evidence that regularly commenting on others' Facebook posts generates a sense of commitment to commenting on similar posts in the future, leading people to feel worse about not commenting on a post if they have done so regularly in the past than if they have not done so, and leading them to expect a Facebook friend to be more disappointed if they do not comment when there has been this previous history of commenting. These findings may contribute to illuminating the feelings associated with social media use, including its compulsive aspects and its effects on well-being.
In what sense is commitment essential to joint action, and do the participants in a joint action ... more In what sense is commitment essential to joint action, and do the participants in a joint action themselves perceive commitment as essential? Attempts to answer this question have so far been hampered by clashes of intuition. Perhaps this is because the intuitions in question have mostly been investigated using informal methods only. To explore this possibility, we adopted a more formal approach to testing intuitions about joint action, sampling naïve participants' intuitions about experimentally controlled scenarios. This approach did reveal patterns in participants' responses which may hint at potential conceptual links between commitment and joint action. It did not however provide evidence to support the view that commitment is essential to joint action, at least not from the agents' own perspective. We conclude that intuitions alone, even when drawn systematically from a large sample, may be a poor basis for theorising about joint action.
Paul Grice’s theory of meaning has been widely adopted as a starting point for investigating the ... more Paul Grice’s theory of meaning has been widely adopted as a starting point for investigating the evolutionary and developmental emergence of linguistic communication. In this picture, reasoning about complexes of intentions is a prerequisite for communicating effectively at the prelinguistic level, as well as for acquiring a natural language. We argue that this broadly ‘Gricean’ picture rests on an equivocation between theories of communication and theories of cognition, and that it leads to paradoxical or implausible claims about human psychology. We defend an alternative conception of prelinguistic communication, inspired by Bart Geurts and based on the notion of commitment. Adopting a commitment-first approach makes it possible to avoid the pernicious equivocation, and it provides a better systematization of the key empirical findings. We develop our argument with respect to (1) infants’ sensitivity to ‘ostensive signals’; (2) infants’ pointing; (3) and infants’ endorsement of no...
Can commitments be generated without promises or gestures conventionally interpreted as such? We ... more Can commitments be generated without promises or gestures conventionally interpreted as such? We hypothesized that people believe that commitments are in place when one agent has led a recipient to rely on her to do something, even without a commissive speech act or any action conventionalized as such, and this is mutual knowledge. To probe this, we presented participants with online vignettes describing everyday situations in which a recipient's expectations were frustrated by one's behavior. Our results show that moral judgments differed significantly according to whether the recipient's reliance was mutually known, irrespective of whether this was verbally acknowledged.
A fast-growing literature is establishing how moving in time together has pro-social consequences... more A fast-growing literature is establishing how moving in time together has pro-social consequences, though no work to date has explored the persistence of these effects over time. Across two studies, people who had previously performed coordinated movements were over three times more likely to give their time to help their coactor when asked 24 hours later than those who had performed a similar but uncoordinated task. Findings showed that group-level categorisation, but not social affiliation, partially mediated helping behaviour. This provides preliminary evidence that the pro-social effects of coordination are sustainable over a longer period than previously reported, and that the effects of coordination upon pro-social motivation may be more related to changes in group level categorisations than increased social affiliations. Rhythmically coordinating our movements with people over time is a common feature of everyday life. People regularly dance, sing, chant, play music and even walk together in coordinated ways (McNeil, 1995). These forms of interpersonal coordination have been repeatedly shown to promote a wide range of pro-social behaviours amongst co-actors, including increased liking, rapport, trust, helping, cooperation and even decreasing negative attitudes (
Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a pu... more Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a published version is known of, the repository item page linked to above, will contain details on accessing it.
The main aim of this article is to give an assessment of prediction error minimization (PEM) as a... more The main aim of this article is to give an assessment of prediction error minimization (PEM) as a unifying theoretical framework for the study of social cognition. We show how this framework can be used to synthesize and systematically relate existing data from social cognition research, and explain how it introduces new constraints for further research. We discuss PEM in relation to other theoretical frameworks of social cognition, and identify the main challenges that this approach to social cognition will need to address.
In this commentary, we examine Schaefer’s proposal to apply a hierarchical predictive proce... more In this commentary, we examine Schaefer’s proposal to apply a hierarchical predictive processing (HPP) framework to research on music perception and music performance. As we shall see, this proposal raises the possibility of enriching this research area with new theoretical and empirical resources from further afield. In order to tap the potential of such a project, it will be important to work towards the formulation of hypotheses that are uniquely generated by the HPP framework. We attempt to contribute to this project by specifying explanatory resources within the HPP framework that are well-suited to formulating such hypotheses, by articulating several novel questions that are generated by the attempt to apply the HPP framework to musical perception and performance, and by identifying potential challenges for such a project to address. We also provide reasons to expect that the HPP framework may be especially fruitful in the context of joint (musical) action.
Over the past few years, the prediction error minimization (PEM) framework has increasingly been ... more Over the past few years, the prediction error minimization (PEM) framework has increasingly been gaining ground throughout the cognitive sciences. A key issue dividing proponents of PEM is how we should conceptualize the relation between brain, body and environment. Clark advocates a version of PEM which retains, at least to a certain extent, his prior commitments to Embodied Cognition and to the Extended Mind Hypothesis. Hohwy, by contrast, presents a sustained argument that PEM actually rules out at least some versions of Embodied and Extended cognition. The aim of this paper is to facilitate a constructive debate between these two competing alternatives by explicating the different theoretical motivations underlying them, and by homing in on the relevant issues that may help to adjudicate between them.
Synchronised and complementary coordination mechanisms in an asymmetric joint aiming task
Experimental brain research, 2015
Many forms of social interaction require that behaviour be coordinated in the here and now. Much ... more Many forms of social interaction require that behaviour be coordinated in the here and now. Much research has been conducted on how people coordinate their actions in real time to achieve a joint goal, showing that people use both synchronised (i.e. symmetric) and complementary (i.e. asymmetric) strategies. These two mechanisms have been mostly studied independently, the former in the context of rhythmic tasks, and the latter in non-rhythmic tasks. However, people often balance these two strategies in real-life social interactions, in order to achieve a joint goal more effectively. Here, our aim was to investigate how people may implicitly balance synchronisation and complementarity in a continuous joint aiming task. We asked dyads to synchronise the timing of their clicks between targets, while changing task constraints for one member of the dyad (i.e. different task difficulties) to asymmetrically perturb the continuous interaction. This allowed us to investigate how individuals i...
Although it is well established that regions of premotor cortex (PMC) are active during action ob... more Although it is well established that regions of premotor cortex (PMC) are active during action observation, it remains controversial whether they play a causal role in action understanding. In the experiment reported here, we used off-line continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) to investigate this question. Participants received cTBS over the hand and lip areas of left PMC, in separate sessions, before completing a pantomime-recognition task in which half of the trials contained pantomimed hand actions, and half contained pantomimed mouth actions. The results reveal a double dissociation: Participants were less accurate in recognizing pantomimed hand actions after receiving cTBS over the hand area than over the lip area and less accurate in recognizing pantomimed mouth actions after receiving cTBS over the lip area than over the hand area. This finding constrains theories of action understanding by showing that somatotopically organized regions of PMC contribute causally to actio...
In the current study, we separately tested whether coordinated decision-making increases altruism... more In the current study, we separately tested whether coordinated decision-making increases altruism and whether it increases trust. To this end, we implemented a paradigm in which participants repeatedly perform a coordinated decision-making task either with the same partner on every trial, or with a different partner on each trial. When both players coordinate on the same option, both are rewarded. In Experiment 1 (N = 52), participants were sometimes presented with tempting opportunities to defect. In Experiment 2 (N = 97), participants sometimes had to decide whether or not to trust that their partners had resisted such tempting opportunities. The results show that repeatedly coordinating with the same partner increased participants' resistance to temptation (Experiment 1) but did not increase trust (Experiment 2). These findings support the hypothesis that coordinating with a partner increases altruistic motivation towards that partner; they do not support the hypothesis that coordinating boosts trust.
A considerable body of research has documented the emergence of what appears to be instrumental h... more A considerable body of research has documented the emergence of what appears to be instrumental helping behavior in early childhood. The current study tested the hypothesis that one basic psychological mechanism motivating this behavior is a preference for completing unfinished actions. To test this, a paradigm was implemented in which 2-year-olds (n = 34, 16 females/18 males, mostly White middle-class children) could continue an adult's action when the adult no longer wanted to complete the action. The results showed that children continued the adult's actions more often when the goal had been abandoned than when it had been reached (OR = 2.37). This supports the hypothesis that apparent helping behavior in 2-year-olds is motivated by a preference for completing unfinished actions.
All authors contributed to the development of the study concept and design, as well as to the dat... more All authors contributed to the development of the study concept and design, as well as to the data collection. Alexander Green performed the data analysis. John Michael drafted the manuscript. All other authors provided critical revisions. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission. awarded to John Michael from the European Research Council (nr 679092, SENSE OF COMMITMENT).
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