Throughout their lifetime, humans and other mammals display affectional relationships in some or the other way. From the perspective of psychological theories, individual humans seem to hold variable subjective values over their social experience, but what values they place on certain types of interpersonal relationships have not been directly addressed before.
The investigators at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have found elements of behaviour that evidence the social roles people accord to the relationship they culturally ascribe to relevant others. In their paper featured in Communications Psychology, the authors provide researchers with a valid experimental method to quantify this signature and, therefore, conduct novel psychological research centred around relationships.
“The study inspiration sort of came as a roundabout way that is common in science,” first author of the paper, João Guassi Moreira told Medical Xpress.
In previous research, I had reported several papers on social decision making where people had to make choices that impact two close others. In those studies, we made the participants make choices that benefited a parent and prejudiced a friend or vice versa .
In their previous studies, Guassi Moreira and his colleagues noted that many people preferred their parents to friends and attempted to make inference as to why this could be. They predicted these patterns depended on particular aspects of their subjects’ social relationships.
Looking into these shortcomings, we finalised that perhaps the amount of worth that someone attaches to relating with a specific social other would be the novel kind of motivation, but measuring value did not lend itself easily to a way that would merely replicate relationship quality, explained Guassi Moreira.
Guassi Moreira and Parkinson then used these weights to assign an ‘ensembling’, or ‘fingerprint’, to behaviours in terms of a particular context of interaction with another person. To do this, they examined the strength with which the weights of the behavioural signature manifested in participants’ relationships with specific people in their lives.
Moreira said: “With our study, we add another avenue for behavioural science to search for mechanistic specificity to motivated behaviour that involves known relationships.” But done that way, I think it can help us make more precise predictions and measurements about why we behave this way with certain people we know in our life.
This recent study by this research team pinpoints the behaviours that give them information about the value that people assign to different interpersonal relationships.
The researchers will then compare their social value scores to data collected in previous studies with large numbers of participants to determine how much the scores represent the value that people attach to relationships.
For example, Guassi Moreira and Parkinson aim to examine whether the derived social value scores bear an appreciable resemblance to more naturalistic behaviours and neurobiological correlates of value (fMRI).
Reference:
Fadelli I. New behavioural signatures could help quantify the value that people attribute to specific interpersonal relationships
