Create your own stimulus: Manipulating movements according to social categories.

Markus Koppensteiner,Georg Primes,Pia Stephan

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0174422

Abstract

People ascribe purposeful behaviour to the movements of artificial objects and social qualities to human body motion. We investigated how people associate simple motion cues with social categories. For a first rating-experiment we converted the body movements of speakers into stick-figure animations; for a second rating-experiment we used animations of one single dot. Rating-experiments were “reversed” because we asked participants to alter the movements (i.e., vertical amplitude, horizontal amplitude, and velocity) of the stimuli according to different instructions (e.g., create a stimulus of high dominance). Participants equipped stick figures and dot animations with expansive movements to represent high dominance. Expansive and fast movements (i.e., high velocity) were mainly associated with high aggressiveness. Fast movements were also associated with low friendliness, low trustworthiness, and low competence. Overall, patterns found for stick figure and dot animations were similar indicating that certain motion cues convey social information even when only a dot and no body form is visible. The “reverse approach” we propose here makes the impact of different components directly observable. The data generated by this method offers better insights into the interplay of these components and the ways in which they form meaningful patterns. The proposed method can be extended to other types of nonverbal cues and a variety of social categories.

Highlights

IntroductionChanges in the physical and social environment can have positive or negative consequences for an organism
We compared manipulations of stick-figure animations, which still give an impression of body form, with manipulations of single dot animations, in order to test whether people make similar adjustments even when information about body form is missing
We turned the common procedure of performing rating experiments upside-down and asked people to match the movements of stick-figure animations and single dot animations to different qualities of social relevance

Summary

Introduction

Changes in the physical and social environment can have positive or negative consequences for an organism. For this reason, quickly detecting and categorizing motion and motion cues can be regarded as an important ability that helps to assess a situation and to make predictions. People’s propensity to perceive motion as a mediator of relevant information is strong and makes them attribute personality traits to featureless moving objects or interpret the movements of these objects as purposeful and as being of animal or human origin [1,2,3,4]. People tend to over-generalize in interpreting motion as purposeful behaviour, such misinterpretations may be less costly than ignoring potentially relevant information

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Discussion

Conclusion