A behavioural psychologist in Portsmouth hopes to identify the mechanisms we use when interacting with people from diverse backgrounds as part of a new study.
Dr Sophie Milward has received a Research Project grant worth £270,000 from the Leverhulme Trust to improve our current understanding of group dynamics.
Up until now research has focused on human interactions between just two people rather than several people. Studies have also been restricted to Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) cultures.
To truly understand the human mind, we need to embrace the diversity and complexity of human social interactions.
Dr Sophie Milward, University of Portsmouth's School of Psychology, Sport and Health Sciences
Dr Milward, from the University of Portsmouth's School of Psychology, Sport and Health Sciences , said: "Most studies focus on one-on-one social interactions, such as carrying an item with the help of a friend or having a conversation with a colleague. There is almost no research that looks at how individuals process information from multiple people at once.
"To truly understand the human mind, we need to embrace the diversity and complexity of human social interactions. This project will break from tradition by identifying the mechanisms we use when faced with a diverse group of people with different interacting relationships, as is often the case in real-life."
The study will monitor a group of individuals in a social situation and measure several key factors, including the influence of group size, inter-individual relationships, and culture.
It will use 'task co-representation' to test interactions, which is a way to study how people mentally share tasks with others. If your reactions are different in a group than if you are alone, it shows that your brain is 'co-representing' the task with your partner.
"Imagine you and a friend are playing a video game where you both control a single character", explained Dr Milward.
"You press a button to make the character jump, and your friend presses a button to make it duck. You both need to think about your own actions and what the other person is doing so that you don't mess up the game. Even though you're not pressing your friend's button, your brain still keeps track of their job - this is co-representing."
Co-representation experiments help psychologists understand how our brains process teamwork, which is important for things like sports, driving, and even parenting.
In natural settings we see the 'Dinner Party Problem', where individuals tend to break off into smaller groups once they exceed four members. This study will test whether task co-representation also shares a limit of four.
Dr Milward added: "If there is an upper limit on the number of people we can keep track of in a group, this could have serious implications for theories of social cognition. It can also have considerable consequences for situations where we're expected to collaborate in large groups and teams, like construction projects, corporate structures, or even sports."
The study will also test three cultures - the UK, Uganda and the Republic of Korea - that vary in average levels of individualist-collectivist mindsets, shared caregiving practices, and average birth rate.
Collectivist cultures like the Republic of Korea and Uganda prioritise the needs of the family, community or country, over individual desires. Dr Milward is interested to see whether people from these cultures work more effectively in larger groups, compared to more individualistic nations like the UK.
Dr Milward hopes her findings will provide a springboard for research on other social cognitive mechanisms to capture the true complexity of human social interactions.
