Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Experimental Psychology

Major Professor

Garriy Shteynberg

Committee Members

Lowell Gaertner, Michael Olson, Jon Garthoff

Abstract

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.

Download
Files over 3MB may be slow to open. For best results, right-click and select "save as..."

Share

COinS