The interacting partner as the immediate environment: Personality, interpersonal dynamics, and bodily synchronization

The Dynamics of Social Interaction Among Evolved Model Agents

We offer three advances to the perceptual crossing simulation studies, which are aimed at challenging methodological individualism in the analysis of social cognition. First, we evolve and systematically test agents in rigorous conditions, identifying a set of 26 "robust circuits" with consistently high and generalizing performance. Next, we transform the sensor from discrete to continuous, facilitating a bifurcation analysis of the dynamics that shows that nonequilibrium dynamics are key to the mutual maintenance of interaction. Finally, we examine agents' performance with partners whose neural controllers are different from their own and with decoy objects of fixed frequency and amplitude. Nonclonal performance varies and is not predicted by genotypic distance. Frequency-amplitude values that fool the focal agent do not include the agent's own values. Altogether, our findings accentuate the importance of dynamical and nonclonal analyses for simulated sociality, emphasize the role of dialogue between artificial and human studies, and highlight the contributions of simulation studies to understanding social interactions.

Explicating narrow and broad conceptualizations of environmental influences on personality

BACKGROUND

A surge of studies aims to identify environmental factors that explain individual differences, personality stability, and personality development. This special issue builds on this large interest and solicited articles on broad and narrow environmental factors of personality.

OBJECTIVE

We provide an overview of the motivations behind the special issue, review each of the articles, and present data on researchers' perceptions of environmental factors contributing to personality expression and development.

METHOD

We review 16 special issue articles, thematically grouped into seven topics-culture and race, genes and environment, geography and habitat, major/minor life events, social relationships, socioeconomic status and economic inequality, and work. We also present data on researchers' (N = 223) responses and ratings of environmental influences on personality expression and development.

RESULTS

In the open-ended responses, the most important environmental influences were family, culture, peers, relationships, and trauma. Among the least important were weather, birth order, geography, climate, and shared environment. Nearly all the environmental influences featured in this special issue were considered at least somewhat important; however, there was considerable heterogeneity in how important researchers found each topic.

CONCLUSIONS

There is no perfect consensus among researchers as to which environmental factors contribute most to personality expression and development. We hope that there is a larger surge of studies on personality constructs beyond traits, that contextualize concepts within a cultural and historical framework and develop more stringent theories to hypothesize about the environmental influences on personality.

The Dynamical Hypothesis in Situ: Challenges and Opportunities for a Dynamical Social Approach to Interpersonal Coordination

Over the past three decades, Van Gelder's dynamical hypothesis has been instrumental in reconceptualizing the ways in which perception-action-cognition unfolds over time and in context. Here, I examine how the dynamical approach has enriched the theoretical understanding of social dynamics within cognitive science, with a particular focus on interpersonal coordination. I frame this review around seven principles in dynamical systems: three that are well-represented in interpersonal coordination research to date (emergent behavior, context-sensitive behavior, and attractors) and four that could be useful opportunities for future growth (hysteresis, sensitivity to initial conditions, equifinality, and reciprocal compensation). In addition to identifying specific promising lines of theoretical inquiry, I focus on the significant potential afforded by computationally intensive science-especially in naturally occurring data or trace data. Building on the foundation laid over the past three decades, I argue that looking to increasingly situated and naturalistic settings (and data) is not only necessary to realize the full commitment to the dynamical hypothesis but is also critical to building parsimonious and principled theories of social phenomena.