Abstract
Tasks for which people must act together to achieve a goal are a feature of daily life. The present study explored social influences on joint action using a Simon procedure for which participants (n = 44) were confronted with a series of images of hands and asked to respond via button press whenever the index finger wore a ring of a certain color (red or green) regardless of pointing direction (left or right). In an initial joint condition they performed the task while sitting next to another person (friend or stranger) who responded to the other color. In a subsequent individual condition they repeated the task on their own; additionally, they completed self-report tests of empathy. Consistent with past research, participants reacted more quickly when the finger pointed toward them rather than their co-actor (the Simon Effect or SE). The effect remained robust when the co-actor was no longer present and was unaffected by degree of acquaintance; however, its magnitude was correlated positively with empathy only among friends. For friends, the SE was predicted by cognitive perspective taking when the co-actor was present and by propensity for fantasizing when the co-actor was absent. We discuss these findings in relation to social accounts (e.g., task co-representation) and non-social accounts (e.g., referential coding) of joint action.
Highlights
Social activities often require careful co-ordination of behaviors between people, for example, when they dance together, play games or competitive sport, work in unison to build things, and engage in cultural transmission of artifacts and technology
We explored whether any possible influence of empathy on the joint Simon Effect (SE) was affected by the degree of prior acquaintance between the co-actors; we were interested in the possibility that effects of empathy might be accentuated for actors who were well acquainted
Adopting a criterion of absolute z > 2.5, a single outlier was identified in the friends group; namely, an unusually low score on Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) Perspective Taking (z = −2.61)
Summary
Social activities often require careful co-ordination of behaviors between people, for example, when they dance together, play games or competitive sport, work in unison to build things, and engage in cultural transmission of artifacts and technology. Given the ubiquity of such activities in daily life, understanding the mechanisms of effective collaboration is essential. In an individual Simon task, participants are asked to respond to the color of stimuli presented on a computer monitor (e.g., pressing a left key when a red stimulus appears or pressing a right key when a green stimulus appears) while ignoring the spatial location of the stimulus (left versus right of the monitor). The term Simon Effect (SE) refers to the finding that participants react faster when the spatial relationship between stimulus and response is compatible (e.g., pressing a left key in response to a stimulus on the left) than when it is incompatible (e.g., pressing a left key in response to a stimulus on the right; review by Lu and Proctor, 1995). The SE typically vanishes when participants are asked to respond to only one stimulus color in a go/no-go version
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