John Michael

A wealth of research in recent decades has investigated the effects of various forms of coordination upon pro-social attitudes and behavior. To structure and constrain this research, we provide a framework within which to distinguish and interrelate different hypotheses about the psychological mechanisms underpinning various prosocial effects of various forms of coordination. To this end, we introduce a set of definitions and distinctions that can be used to tease apart various forms of prosociality and coordination. We then identify a range of psychological mechanisms that may underpin the effects of coordination upon prosociality. We show that different hypotheses about the underlying psychological mechanisms motivate different predictions about the effects of various forms of coordination in different circumstances.

This is the first study to demonstrate interpersonal difficulties associated with borderline personality disorder (BpD) features in the domain of social media. Using crowdsourcing, we presented participants with a battery of questions about their recent social media use, and then assessed their BPD features using the short form of the five-factor Borderline inventory. the results revealed that individuals with higher BpD trait scores reported posting more often on social media, as well as a higher incidence of experiencing regret after posting on social media, and of deleting or editing their posts. they also report a higher degree of importance of social media in their social behavior and daily routines. These results highlight the pervasiveness of interpersonal difficulties associated with BPD features even in the non-clinical population, and demonstrate that these difficulties are also observable in social media behavior. Our findings may provide a starting point for research using data from social media to illuminate the cognitive and emotional processes underpinning the interpersonal difficulties associated with BPD features, and to inform and assess therapeutic interventions. Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe psychiatric condition associated with significant psychosocial impairments, high rates of comorbidity with other psychiatric conditions 1 , high rates of suicide 2 and considerable economic costs due to intensive use of treatment and loss of productivity 3. It is marked by conflicted relationships , difficulty trusting other people, fear of abandonment, and patterns of overinvolvement/withdrawal as well as idealization/devaluation of relationships 4. In more general terms, impairment in interpersonal functioning has been highlighted as a core feature of psychopathology in BPD, alongside affect dysregulation and behavioral dys-regulation (in particular impulsivity) 5. In addition to the clinical population-which makes up 2-4% of the general population 6,7-persistent impairment in interpersonal relationships has also been reported in non-clinical populations exhibiting high levels of BPD features 8,9. Thus, researchers have recently turned their attention to investigating the behavioral manifestations of BPD features in non-clinical populations. For example, it has been shown that individuals with BPD features exhibit deficits in emotional understanding and management of both their own and others' emotions 10,11. And it has also been found in one recent study 12 that people's sense of commitment in joint activities and relationships may be influenced by BPD features. Thus, we may expect to observe the difference in the emotional functioning of people with BPD features even without the presence of diagnosis of BPD. And yet there has been very little research so far investigating the behavioral manifestations of BPD features in the domain of social media. This is surprising insofar as social media constitute an increasingly central arena of social interaction for people in general 13. Indeed, we may expect this to be all the more true of individuals with high BPD features, given that the difficulties they typically experience with interpersonal relations may lead them to be particularly motivated to engage with social media in order to satisfy a pronounced need for social connection. In one of the few studies looking at BPD features within this domain, elevated risks of problematic Facebook use (addictive behaviors) were found in a group of adolescents and young adults exhibiting a 'borderline' profile (defined as showing a combination of high borderline personality features, depressive symptoms, social anxiety, and sensation seeking 14). It is unsurprising that maintaining social relationships was reported as one of the main motives for Facebook use in this study, plausibly to maintain a compensatory level of social engagement in those 1

In the current study, we presented participants with videos in which a humanoid robot (iCub) and a human agent were tidying up by moving toys from a table into a container. In the High Coordination condition, the two agents worked together in a coordinated manner, with the human picking up the toys and passing them to the robot. In the Low Coordination condition, they worked in parallel without coordinating. Participants were asked to imagine themselves in the position of the human agent and to respond to a battery of questions to probe the extent to which they felt committed to the joint action. While we did not observe a main effect of our coordination manipulation, the results do reveal that participants who perceived a higher degree of coordination also indicated a greater sense of commitment to the joint action. Moreover, the results show that participants' sensitivity to the coordination manipulation was contingent on their prior attitudes towards the robot: participants in the High Coordination condition reported a greater sense of commitment than participants in the Low Coordination condition, except among those participants who were a priori least inclined to experience a close sense of relationship with the robot.

Joint actions often require agents to track others' actions while planning and executing physically incongruent actions of their own. previous research has indicated that this can lead to visuomotor interference effects when it occurs outside of joint action. How is this avoided or overcome in joint actions? We hypothesized that when joint action partners represent their actions as interrelated components of a plan to bring about a joint action goal, each partner's movements need not be represented in relation to distinct, incongruent proximal goals. instead they can be represented in relation to a single proximal goal-especially if the movements are, or appear to be, mechanically linked to a more distal joint action goal. To test this, we implemented a paradigm in which participants produced finger movements that were either congruent or incongruent with those of a virtual partner, and either with or without a joint action goal (the joint flipping of a switch, which turned on two light bulbs). Our findings provide partial support for the hypothesis that visuomotor interference effects can be reduced when two physically incongruent actions are represented as mechanically interdependent contributions to a joint action goal. From handshakes to music-making, dance and team sports, social interactions often require an efficient means of tracking others' actions while simultaneously planning and executing actions of one's own 1. A basketball player, for example, must monitor and anticipate her teammate's movements in order to successfully contribute to a pick and roll play. Given the broad range of social interactions in which it is important to anticipate, monitor and respond to others' actions, it is no surprise that a considerable amount of research has been devoted to investigating how we achieve this 2-5. An influential idea that has emerged is that the representation of others' actions is often supported by one's own motor system, implying that representations of others' actions are often functionally equivalent to the representations involved in action production 2-4,6,7. As a result, the observation of others' actions can result in action representations that do not clearly distinguish self from other 8-10. An upshot is that the observation of others' actions can give rise to representations that interfere with one's own task performance. In a striking illustration of this, Brass et al. 2 found that participants who were instructed to produce finger movements in response to symbolic cues responded more quickly when simultaneously observing irrelevant finger movements that were physically congruent to the ones they were instructed to produce, and more slowly when simultaneously observing irrelevant finger movements that were physically incongruent to these. These findings-and others that build on them 11-13-are taken to indicate that, when observing others' actions, we automatically represent those actions using motor representations of the same type as those subserv-ing action production. This neatly explains why the observation of congruent actions facilitates task performance, while the observation of incongruent actions leads to visuomotor interference effects. However, it also raises a challenge. This is because many joint actions require individuals to produce physically incongruent yet complementary actions 14 .

Joint action is often treated as a microcosm of human sociality in general, and as an ideal context in which to study characteristically human forms of social cognition and social interaction. Recently, it has become very common in joint action research to implement experimental paradigms which in various ways involve musical performance. In this chapter, I discuss several advantages of such paradigms, and identify theoretical questions for which musical paradigms are especially well-suited.

In order to sustain cooperation, it is important that we have a sense that the distribution of efforts is fair. But how proficient are we at comparing our effort relative to that of others? Does the perception of our effort differ in individual and joint action contexts? To address these questions, we asked participants to squeeze a hand dynamometer at varying degrees of force to meet three target levels alone and with a partner. The results do not reveal a significant difference in the perception of effort between the two conditions. However, participants’ estimation of their effort skewed towards half when they made partial contribution to the target and this effect was more pronounced in the joint action. Taken together, the findings suggest that participants might have applied heuristics when perceiving their effort and in addition, expected fairness in the effort
contribution in a joint action context.

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.

This is the first study to report evidence for the hypothesis that individuals' sense of commitment in joint activities and relationships may be influenced by personality traits characteristic of borderline personality disorder (BPD). This study consisted of 3 online experiments implemented via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants were presented with videos (Exp 1) or vignettes (Exp 2 and 3) describing situations in which everyday commitments were violated. Participants then reported their perceptions, interpretations, and affective and behavioral responses to those situations. Participants' BPD traits were assessed using the short form of the Five-Factor Borderline Inventory on the basis of which they were divided into two groups: High and Low BPD. The results revealed that participants with High BPD traits were less optimistic about others acting in accordance with an implicit sense of commitment (Exp 1), although there was no difference between groups when the commitment was explicitly stated (Exp 3). Participants in the High BPD group also reported heightened emotional responses (Exp 1-3) and less adaptive behavioral responses (Exp 1 and 3) to perceived or anticipated violations of commitment. Our findings suggest that high levels of BPD traits may give rise to a difficulty in adapting one’s social expectations and behavior in light of interpersonal commitments and in a manner that is calibrated to the social norms in the community. Future research should investigate to what extent a disturbed sense of commitment may contribute to the difficulties in interpersonal functioning experienced by many individuals with a clinical diagnosis of BPD.

Can the perception that one’s partner is investing effort generate a sense of commitment to a joint action? To test this, we developed a 2-player version of the classic snake game which became increasingly boring over the course of each round. This enabled us to operationalize commitment in terms of how long participants persisted before pressing a ‘finish’ button to conclude each round. Our results from three experiments reveal that participants persisted longer when they perceived what they believed to be cues of their partner’s effortful contribution (Experiment 1). Crucially, this effect was not observed when they knew their partner to be an algorithm (Experiment 2), nor when it was their own effort that had been invested (Experiment 3). These results support the hypothesis that the perception of a partner’s effort elicits a sense of commitment, leading to increased persistence in the face of a temptation to disengage.

As adults, we are quite proficient in generating commitments, and in identifying, keeping track of, and responding appropriately to our own and others' commitments. This proficiency is fundamentally important for uniquely human forms of sociality. By illuminating the cognitive processes underpinning commitments, we may therefore gain insight into the ways in which human cognition is unique, and into the ways in which it is shared with other species. In pursuing this aim, one valuable strategy is to investigate the emergence of an understanding of commitment in ontogeny, i.e. to isolate distinct components of this proficiency as they emerge, and to learn how they relate to each other, which are the most basic, etc. Our aim in this paper is to contribute to this project by articulating a theoretical framework to structure research on the emergence of an understanding of commitment in childhood.

In recent years, developmental psychologists have increasingly been interested in various forms of prosocial behavior observed in infants and young children – in particular comforting, sharing, pointing to provide information, and spontaneous instrumental helping. We briefly review several models that have been proposed to explain the psychological mechanisms underpinning these behaviors. Focusing on spontaneous instrumental helping, we home in on models based upon what Paulus (2014) has dubbed 'goal-alignment', i.e. the idea that the identification of an agent's goal leads infants to take up that goal as their own. We identify a problem with the most well-known model based upon this idea, namely the 'goal contagion' model. The problem arises from the way in which the model specifies the content of the goal which is identified and taken up. We then propose an alternative way of specifying the content of the goal, and use this as a starting point for articulating an alternative model based upon the idea of alignment, namely the 'goal slippage' model. By elucidating the difference between goal contagion and goal slippage, we contribute to the articulation of experimental criteria for assessing whether and when the mechanisms specified by these two models are at work.

Previous research has shown that interpersonal coordination enhances pro-social attitudes and behavior. Here, we extend this research by investigating whether the degree of coordination observed in a joint action enhances the perception of individuals' commitment to the joint action. In four experiments, participants viewed videos of joint actions. In the low coordination condition, two agents made independent individual contributions to a joint action. In the high coordination condition, the individual contributions were tightly linked. Participants judged whether and for how long the observed agents would resist a tempting outside option and remain engaged in the joint action. The results showed that participants were more likely to expect agents to resist outside options when observing joint actions with a high degree of coordination. This indicates that observing interpersonal coordination is sufficient to enhance the perception of commitment to joint action. Suggested Reviewers:

This paper provides a starting point for psychological research on the sense of commitment within the context of joint action. We begin by formulating three desiderata: to illuminate the motivational factors that lead agents to feel and act committed, to pick out the cognitive processes and situational factors that lead agents to sense that implicit commitments are in place, and to illuminate the development of an understanding of commitment in ontogeny. In order to satisfy these three desiderata, we propose a minimal framework, the core of which is an analysis of the minimal structure of situations which can elicit a sense of commitment. We then propose a way of conceptualizing and operationalizing the sense of commitment, and discuss cognitive and motivational processes which may underpin the sense of commitment.

In this paper, I propose a developmental explanation of the reliability of the intentional stance as an interpretive strategy, and by doing so counter an objection to Dennett’s intentional stance theory (i.e. the ‘If it isn’t true, why does it work?’ objection). Specifically, young children’s use of the intentional stance enables them to learn from and thereby to become more similar to the adults in their culture. As a result, they themselves become increasingly intelligible to other people taking the intentional stance. Thus, the intentional stance and cultural learning constitute a feedback loop that (partially) explains the reliability of the intentional stance, and does so – contra Dennett’s realist critics – without appealing to a realist interpretation of the descriptions speakers attach to intentional terms. However, I also suggest that this developmental perspective provides grist to the mill for a causal realist interpretation of the reference of intentional terms, insofar the causal interaction between intentional interpretations of behavior and cognitive development provides an anchor that links intentional terms to functional and/or neural processes. Importantly, causal (as opposed to descriptive) theories of reference make it possible to argue that intentional discourse can be referentially anchored to the causal machinery that produces behavior without generating true descriptions of it. I conclude by drawing out some consequences of the developmental perspective for the way in which we conceptualize the assumption of rationality that is at the core of the intentional stance theory.

In this brief discussion, we explicate and evaluate Heyes and colleagues’ deflationary approach to interpreting apparent evidence of domain-specific processes for social perception. We argue that the deflationary approach sheds important light on how functionally specific processes in social perception can be subserved at least in part by domain-general processes. On the other hand, we also argue that the fruitfulness of this approach has been unnecessarily hampered by a contrastive conception of the relationship between domain- general and domain-specific processes. As an alternative, we propose a complementary conception: the identification of domain-general processes that are engaged in instances of social perception can play a positive, structuring role by adding additional constraints to be accounted for in modelling the domain-specific processes that are also involved in such instances.

In this paper, I show how theoretical discussion of recent research on the abilities of infants and young children to represent other agents’ beliefs has been shaped by a descriptivist conception of mental content, i.e., by the notion that the distal content of a mental representation is fixed by the core body of knowledge that is associated with that mental representation. I also show how alternative conceptions of mental content—and in particular Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantic approach—make it possible to endorse the view that infants have the ability to track beliefs by as early as 6 months while failing to understand some of the ways in which beliefs combine with each other and with other mental states in contributing to inferences and actions. In articulating this view, I will draw upon Millikan’s recently developed notion of ‘unicepts’. Unicepts, according to Millikan, are the basic representational vehicles that underpin our abilities to (re-) identify objects, properties, relations and kinds. When applied to research on mindreading in infancy and early childhood, Millikan’s approach generates fruitful new questions about the development of belief reasoning, and about the functions of belief reasoning in infancy and at different stages of childhood.

Abstract In recent years, several minimalist accounts of joint action have been offered (e.g. Tollefsen 2005; Sebanz, Bekkering and Knoblich 2006; Vesper et al. 2010), which seek to address some of the shortcomings of classical accounts. Minimalist accounts seek to reduce the cognitive complexity demanded by classical accounts either by leaving out shared intentions or by characterizing them in a way that does not demand common knowledge of complex, interconnected structures of intentions. Moreover, they propose models of the actual factors facilitating online coordination of movements. The present proposal aims to enrich a minimalist framework by showing how shared emotions can facilitate coordination without presupposing common knowledge of complex, interconnected structures of intentions. Shared emotions are defined for the purposes of this paper as affective states that fulfill two minimal criteria: (i) they are expressed (verbally or otherwise) by one person; and (ii) the expression is perceived (consciously or unconsciously) by another person. Various ways in which the fulfillment of (i) and (ii) can lead to effects that function as coordinating factors in joint action are distinguished and discussed.

In recent years, a number of theorists have developed approaches to social cognition that highlight the centrality of social interaction as opposed to mindreading (e.g. Gallagher and Zahavi 2008; Gallagher 2001, 2007, 2008; Hobson 2002; Reddy 2008; Hutto 2004; De Jaegher 2009; De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007; Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009; De Jaegher et al. 2010). There are important differences among these approaches, as I will discuss, but they are united by their commitment to the claim that various embodied and extended processes sustain social understanding and interaction in the absence of mindreading and thus make mindreading superfluous. In this paper, I consider various ways of articulating and defending this claim. I will argue that the options that have been offered either fail to present an alternative to mindreading or commit one to a radical enactivist position that I will give reasons for being skeptical about. I will then present an alternative and moderate version of interactionism, according to which the embodied and extended processes that interactionists emphasize actually complement mindreading and may even contribute as an input to mindreading.

The predominant view in developmental psychology is that young children are able to reason with the concept of desire prior to being able to reason with the concept of belief. We propose an explanation of this phenomenon that focuses on the cognitive tasks that competence with the belief and desire concepts enable young children to perform. We show that cognitive tasks that are typically considered fundamental to our competence with the belief and desire concepts can be performed with the concept of desire in the absence of competence with the concept of belief, whereas the reverse is considerably less feasible.

There is currently a great deal of debate in philosophy and cognitive neuroscience about how best to conceptualize empathy, with much of the controversy centering on the issue of how to articulate the common intuition that empathy involves the sharing of emotional experiences. In a recent paper in Philosophy of Science, De Vignemont and Jacob (2012) defend the view that empathy involves interpersonal similarity between an empathizer and a target person with respect to their internal affective states. To support this, they home in on a specific type of empathy, namely empathy for pain, and propose a theory of the neural substrate of pain empathy. We point out several flaws in their interpretation of the data, and argue that currently available data does not differentiate between De Vignemont and Jacob’s model of empathy and alternative models. Finally, we offer some suggestions about how this might be achieved in future research.

In recent years, there has been a great deal of controversy in the philosophy of mind, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience both about how to conceptualize empathy and about the connections between empathy and interpersonal understanding. Ideally, we would first establish a consensus about how to conceptualize empathy, and then analyze the potential contribution of empathy to interpersonal understanding. However, it is not at all clear that such a consensus will soon be forthcoming, given that different people have fundamentally conflicting intuitions about the concept of empathy. Thus, instead of trying to resolve this controversy, I will try to show that a fair amount of consensus is within reach about how empathy can be a source of interpersonal understanding even in the absence of a consensus about how to conceptualize empathy. As we shall see, the main controversy concerns a few phenomena that some researchers view as necessary conditions of empathy, but which others view either as merely characteristic features or as consequences of empathy. My strategy will be to try to show how empathy can generate interpersonal understanding by virtue of these phenomena – regardless of whether one chooses to conceptualize them as necessary conditions of empathy.