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Attributing social meaning to animated shapes: A new experimental study of apparent behavior.

ABSTRACT: In 1944, Heider and Simmel reported that observers could perceive simple animated geometric shapes as characters with emotions, intentions, and other social attributes. This work has been cited over 3000 times and has had wide and ongoing influence on the study of social cognition and social intelligence. However, many researchers in this area have continued to use the original Heider and Simmel black-and-white video. We asked whether the original findings could be reproduced 75 years later by creating 32 new colored animated shape videos designed to depict various social plots and testing whether they can evoke similar spontaneous social attributions. Participants (N = 66) viewed our videos and were asked to write narratives which we coded for indicia of different types of social attributions. Consistent with Heider and Simmel, we found that participants spontaneously attributed social meaning to the videos. We observed that responses to our videos were also similar to responses to the original video reported by Klin (2000), despite being only 13-23 s and portraying a broader range of social plots. Participants varied in how many social attributions they made in response, and the videos varied in how much they elicited such responses. Our set of animated shape videos is freely available online for all researchers to use and forms the basis of a multiple-choice assessment of social intelligence (Brown et al., 2019).

SUBMITTER: Ratajska A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7932368 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BackgroundContemporary mobile health (mHealth) interventions use various behavior change techniques to promote healthier lifestyles. Social comparison is one of the techniques that is consensually agreed to be effective in engaging the general population in mHealth interventions. However, it is unclear how this strategy can be best used to engage preadolescents. Nevertheless, this strategy has great potential for this target audience, as they are particularly developing their social skills.ObjectiveThis study aims to evaluate how social comparison drives preadolescents' engagement with an mHealth app.MethodsWe designed a 12-week crossover experiment in which we studied 3 approaches to implementing behavior change via social comparison. This study was hosted in a school environment to leverage naturally existing social structures among preadolescents. During the experiment, students and teachers used an mHealth tool that awarded points for performing healthy activities. Participants could read their aggregated scores on a leaderboard and compare their performance with others. In particular, these leaderboards were tweaked to implement 3 approaches of the social comparison technique. The first approach focused on intragroup comparison (ie, students and teachers competing against each other to obtain the most points), whereas the other two approaches focused on intergroup comparison (ie, classes of students and their mentoring teachers collaborating to compete against other classes). Additionally, in the third approach, the performance of teachers was highlighted to further increase students' engagement through teachers' natural exemplary function. To obtain our results, we used linear modeling techniques to analyze the dropout rates and engagement levels for the different approaches. In such analyses, we also considered individual participant traits.ResultsOur sample included 313 participants-290 students (92.7%) and 23 teachers (7.3%). It was found that student engagement levels dropped over time and declined during holidays. However, students seemed to monitor the intergroup competitions more closely than the intragroup competitions, as they, on average, checked the mHealth app more often when they were engaged in team-based comparisons. Students, on average, performed the most unique activities when they were engaged in the second intergroup setting, perhaps because their teachers were most active in this setting. Moreover, teachers seemed to play an important role in engaging their students, as their relationship with their students influenced the engagement of the students.ConclusionsWhen using social comparison to engage preadolescents with an mHealth tool, an intergroup setting, rather than an intragroup competition, motivated them to engage with the app but did not necessarily motivate them to perform more activities. It seems that the number of unique activities that preadolescents perform depends on the activeness of a role model. Moreover, this effect is amplified by preadolescents' perceptions of closeness to that role model.

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Attributing social meaning to animated shapes: A new experimental study of apparent behavior.

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