Synchrony Influences Estimates of Cooperation in a Public-Goods Game
通过两个实验（各136名成人），发现群体决策或执行动作的同步性会提高观察者对群体合作程度的估计，表明互动的时间动态传递了合作信号。
Benefiting from a cooperative interaction requires people to estimate how cooperatively other members of a group will act so that they can calibrate their own behavior accordingly. We investigated whether the synchrony of a group’s actions influences observers’ estimates of cooperation. Participants (recruited through Prolific) watched animations of actors deciding how much to donate in a public-goods game and using a mouse to drag donations to a public pot. Participants then estimated how much was in the pot in total (as an index of how cooperative they thought the group members were). Experiment 1 ( N = 136 adults) manipulated the synchrony between players’ decision-making time, and Experiment 2 ( N = 136 adults) manipulated the synchrony between players’ decision-implementing movements. For both experiments, estimates of how much was in the pot were higher for synchronous than asynchronous groups, demonstrating that the temporal dynamics of an interaction contain signals of a group’s level of cooperativity.