Rapport and collective attention: How we predict others will share knowledge

When we observe people playing cooperative games together, there are several factors such as their rapport, attention, and theory of mind reasoning ability that might influence the information we think they will prioritize. On the one hand, we might expect players to clear up uncertain information. On the other hand, we might expect them to instead share information that is unknown to their partner. Participants observed two players in a cooperative game and predicted how the players would choose to go about prioritizing the sharing of information. We found that participants generally chose to discuss private knowledge. Additionally, it appears that observed psychological rapport is not predicted by the type of rapport building task, but rather by the perception of their synchronicity. Further exploratory analyses demonstrated that observers who had the initial hunch to share information were more likely to want predict others would talk about private knowledge, which was the most rational decision available.