Central European - 1 years ago

PhD graduate Francesca Bonalumi from CEU’s Adaptive Cognition in Economics and Society Research Group (ACES) in the Department of Cognitive Science, received one of the university’s Best Dissertation Awards this year in recognition of her research titled “How We Rely on Each Other: The Perception of Commitment in Joint Activities and Communication . The dissertation, which Bonalumi defended in September of 2022*, explores how a sense of commitment is created in social intera which cues lead to the perception that a commitment is in  and potential practical implications of said findings.  The research argues that people rely on another to do something when they perceive the other is committed to it. Bonalumi finds that perception of commitment is based on various cues including verbal promises, and also on more subtle cues and the recognition that a partner is relying on them.  Bonalumi’s interdisciplinary approach is at the crossroads of moral cognition, developmental psychology, linguistics and communication. Several chapters from her dissertation have already been published in leading journals including PLoS ONE, Language and Cognition, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, and Mind and Language.   CEU spoke with Bonalumi to learn about her research on commitment and what the findings could mean for debates on current issues.  What is your research aim with this line of studies on commitment?  In exploring the topic of commitment, I was especially interested in how people conceptualize such dynamics. What are the series of thought processes that are going on when we feel obligated toward each other? Ever since I can remember, I have had an interest in morality and what makes us do things that we think are the right thing to do but that are sometimes costly to do.  This dynamic is quite evident when we do things together, so that was really my starting point – exploring how a set of obligations emerges from doing things together and from the fact that others rely on us. I studied philosophy for my master’s degree, and in moving into cognitive science, I started to be more interested in how this dynamic actually works in our mind. I also realized that some of these thought processes influence the way in which we construct language. So, I got a bit more interested in the communication aspect, which was part of some of the studies.    One part of my dissertation is about children, approaching commitment from a more developmental angle: How and when do we start to have these types of relations with others? How do children start to have these feelings and thoughts that if you do something together with someone else, then you re expected to finish that? Or under which circumstances do you expect someone else to live up to a prior commitment, entitling you to manifest disappointment and demand some explanation if such commitment is violated. I was and still am interested in these questions also from a developmental perspective. Overall, the theme throughout the studies that compose my dissertation is commitment.  What did your research find?   One of my main findings, which builds upon other results that we have in the field, is how a commitment emerges from joint activities and communication without making things explicit. Of course, there is a naive intuition that when we say things very explicitly, that is more helpful in terms of creating common ground, coordination, and the avoidance of ambiguities. Many of our expectations are created by means of making things explicit, but they can also be created in other ways, such as the repetition of a joint activity.   For instance, I found in one experiment that the repetition of a joint activity creates the expectation that the joint action will happen in the future, regardless of whether it was explicitly promised. I found in another experiment that effort investment also generates the same type of expectation. For example, when someone puts a lot of effort into a joint activity, it signals to others that the joint activity is very valuable and raises expectations about its recurrence. We observed similar expectations about the future (and moral disapproval if the expectations are not met) and whether these expectations are inferred from these minimal cues or explicitly stated. I found that particularly interesting.  What kind of experiments did you use for this research?   For our experiments with adults, we mainly used vignettes, which are basically made-up stories. We asked participants to read stories and make evaluations about certain aspects of those stories. We then manipulated one element of these stories, perhaps the length of the interaction or the cost investment, and then we compared how the different groups responded to our target question.   For another study included in this dissertation, I visited the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, and with their collaboration, I ran an experiment on children and joint commitment. In our experiment, we wanted to see whether children take into account one’s justification for abandoning a joint activity and breaking a joint commitment or not. We set up a situation in which three-years-olds were playing together with a puppet, which I was the voice of. This is a classical methodology used in developmental psychology, especially in labs that are interested in the development of social and moral cognition. Three-year-olds manage to detach the two characters – the puppet and me. It was fun. I would not have imagined before starting this research how many different ways a working day could look. Every session with children changes depending on the day, and there is definitely a theatrical aspect.  This experiment takes a completely different approach from the vignette-based studies. It s also recorded and analyzed in a different way. When you have online studies and ask people explicit questions, you get to record a specific type of answer. Whereas, when running this type of study with children, you need to analyze and categorize children’s verbal and nonverbal reactions. Is the child unhappy? Yes or no? Is the child expressing disagreement with what you re doing? We need a couple of people to handle this coding task, and then we compare the responses in order to have a reliable data set that we can use to run statistical analyses and answer our question.  What surprised you in doing this research?   I really didn t expect to have so much interaction with other people: my supervisor, colleagues and collaborators. The whole enterprise is really collaborative. On the one hand, there is a strong pull in general to put yourself out there and take ownership of the things that you re doing. On the other hand, so much of what you present to the world is inherited – from the literature that you have been reading, the perspectives of the supervisors or other colleagues who are discussing the topics with you, the research assistants who are helping you in developing a project.  I had the illusion that research was about one person being particularly bright and cracking a problem. Of course, there are cases like this, but even the bright person that gets the groundbreaking idea cannot do that by themselves. Research is not about the genius person. It’s more about a lot of people who are working, collaborating and contributing in this relationship.  Can you discuss some of the practical implications of your findings on commitment?   The last part of my thesis touches upon practical implications of this view of commitment - including topics related to digital communication. These topics are important, and I hope I can contribute to the debates more substantially in the future. However, the applications of my research in this direction are still highly speculative at the moment.   I was recently involved in projects related to digital competence and misinformation from a developmental perspective in children and teenagers. How do children modulate their trust in a source? Does the way in which online messages are constructed influence whether children believe them? Do they believe everything they share, or does their audience influence their motivation to share? I am excited to see how the ideas I developed on commitment attribution could be useful to understand online information sharing context and potentially give insight to educators and policy makers.  *Dissertations defended during academic years 2022-23 and 2023-24 were eligible for CEU s 2024 Best Dissertation Awards. Unit: Department of Cognitive ScienceResearch Area: Cognitive ScienceCategory: NewsImage: Content Priority: High

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