Can psychological science make you more popular? That's what a journalist from Forbes claims in an article, "A science-backed way to up your popularity and friendship." Let's see what the journalist is claiming and see if we buy the evidence.
The journalist's summary focuses on an empirical article published in Psychological Science (may be paywalled).
The researchers started with a theory about...
...two types of behavior that can lead to liking during a first encounter:
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- Agentic behavior is usually exhibited when one wants to gain someone’s respect or admiration. Examples include dominant or confident behavior.
- Communal behavior, on the other hand, is shown when the goal is to form mutually supportive and trusting bonds with someone. Examples include warm, welcoming, and friendly behavior.
Both agentic and communal behavior have been studied in other social psychological research.
Here's how the study was conducted:
The study recorded brief, first encounter conversations between two participant groups such that each member of one group interacted with each member of the other.
Specifically, each member of a small group had a 5 minute introductory conversation with each other member of the group. After everybody had talked to everyone, each member of the group rated how much they liked each other person.
Importantly, the journalist explained that the researchers were interested in two types of liking:
- Popularity, i.e., how much is an individual generally liked by others
- Unique liking, i.e., how much an individual is particularly liked by a specific person
a) Now that you've got this background, make a prediction in your head. Which kind of behavior--agentic or communal--do you think will be most associated with popularity? Which kind of behavior will be most associated with unique liking?
Here's how the journalist summarized the study's results:
The study produced two key findings:
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- Showing frequent agentic and communal behavior can lead to high popularity.
- When it came to unique liking, exhibiting high levels of communal, but not agentic, behavior led to being particularly well-liked by the interaction partner, more than they liked their other partners as well as more than their other interaction partners liked them on average.
The Forbes journalist doesn't tell us much about how agentic and communal behaviors were measured in this study. Therefore, I turned to the original empirical journal article to find out. It turns out that they had a separate group of raters watch videos of the interactions, rating each participant's behaviors. Here's a passage from the study's Method section:
After the study was complete, independent observers watched the video material and rated the degree to which each participant showed agentic or communal behaviors toward each other group member during the getting-acquainted conversations. (Observers saw videos showing both interaction partners but were told to focus on one of them.)
A rating manual provided behavioral anchors of the four agentic and the four communal behaviors so that raters would have a common understanding of what these behaviors meant. As agentic behaviors, the observers indicated how “leading,” “dominant,” “confident,” and “boastful” a participant’s behavior was. As communal behaviors, the observers indicated how “polite,” “benevolent,” “warm,” and “friendly” a participant was .... Ratings were made on a 6-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 6 (very much).
b) In Chapter 5, you learn about three types of dependent measures: self-report, observational, and physiological. This is a clear example of an observational measure. Which of the three types of reliability is relevant for an observational measure?
Here is another passage from the empirical journal article:
The observer ratings demonstrated moderate to good interrater agreement for all eight interpersonal behaviors—the intraclass correlation coefficients(2, k) ranged from .66 to .84.
c) Imagine there are only two coders....could you graph the result of the passage above, following models in Chapter 5? Pick one of the ratings to focus on.
d) This was a correlational study, not an experimental one, which means that the journalist probably jumped the gun when he suggested "Showing frequent agentic and communal behavior can lead to high popularity." How might you change this study be experimental? Specifically which variables would you have to manipulate? Which would you measure?
