CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Török, Georgina |
|---|---|
| Title | Co-efficiency - An Empirical Investigation of the Principle of Rational Joint Action |
| Summary | People routinely engage in joint actions, coordinating their actions with others to bring about change in the environment. Previous research found that actors plan joint actions with their partner in mind: they take over some of the effort that the partner would have to expend to complete an action sequence. At first glance, this simply reduces the individual action costs of the interaction partner. In this dissertation, I examine the alternative explanation that this kind of behavior is part of rational decision-making in joint action planning. I propose the principle of rational joint action as the normative principle underlying action planning: according to this, joint actions should be performed in a co-efficient way, by minimizing the joint costs of the action sequence. This would make cooperation more instrumentally efficient and predictable for interaction partners. I present four series of behavioral experiments tackling co-efficiency from different perspectives. In work reported in Chapter 2, I investigated how people distribute the costs of a joint action sequence between themselves and a co-actor. I predicted that a decision-making actor will maximize the co-efficiency of the dyad by choosing an action plan that minimizes the overall costs of a sequence, given the available options. In a sequential object transfer task, participants made binary choices between paths to move along. The findings suggest a robust effect of total path minimization, providing initial evidence for co-efficiency. Chapter 3 asks how people estimate the joint costs of an action sequence. I tested the hypothesis that when the costs of individual co-actors’ actions are on the same scale, people compute the potential joint action costs as a weighted sum of the individual costs. Using an object matching task, I analyzed binary object choices as functions of individual costs and of their linear combination. Findings from three experiments show that participants minimize the combination of expected Self (decision-maker’s) and Other (partner’s) action costs. Chapter 4 investigates if the co-efficiency hypothesis holds in contexts where different action types must be combined to achieve a shared goal. I predicted that people who consistently minimize a particular variable in individual action planning will also take into account a co-actor’s costs in joint action planning, even when individual costs are on different scales. Overall, I found support for this hypothesis, but participants focus more on minimizing their own costs than their partner’s. Finally, Chapter 5 tests the hypothesis that when interaction partners lack information about their partners’ actions or an opportunity to communicate, co-efficiency might help coordination by being recognizable as a focal point. In an online version of the task, participants had to choose the same object as a remote partner, without feedback. I found a moderate effect of co-efficiency: some people recognize it as a potential focal point. The findings of this dissertation together suggest that the expectation that social interactions unfold based on a principle of rational joint action is based in actual behavior. These studies open up new directions for research treating cooperative action planning in an economic framework. |
| Supervisor | Sebanz, Natalie ; Csibra, Gergely |
| Department | Cognitive Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/torok_georgina.pdf |
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