Year: 2022
Type: preprint
Abstract: Whether it is the first day of school or a new job, individuals often find themselves in situations where they must learn and integrate into novel social relationships. However, the mechanisms through which individuals evaluate the strength and nature of these existing relationships – social-relational inference – remain unclear. We posit that linguistic features of conversations may help individuals evaluate social relationships and may be associated with social-relational inference. Leveraging a naturalistic behavioral experiment (57 adults; 34,735 observations), participants watched a mid-season episode of Survivor and evaluated the observed dyadic relationships between contestants. We employed novel person- and stimulus-focused approaches to 1) investigate social-relational inference similarity between participants, 2) examine the association between distinct linguistic features and social-relational inference, and 3) explore the relationship between early season conversation similarity and later perceived relationship formation. We found high pairwise participant response similarity across three experimental conditions, distinct associations between relational judgments and linguistic features, including semantic similarity, sentiment, and clout, and no evidence of an association between early conversation similarity and later friendship inference. These findings suggest that naturalistic conversational content is both a potential mechanism of social-relational inference and a promising avenue for future research.
Authors: Helen Schmidt, Sophia Tran, John Medaglia, Virginia Ulichney, William John Mitchell, Chelsea Helion
Institutions: Temple University, Drexel University
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4301401129