For over a century, psychology has focused on uncovering mental processes of a single individual. However, humans rarely navigate the world in isolation.
The most important determinants of successful development, mental health, and our individual traits and preferences arise from interacting with other individuals. Social interaction underpins who we are, how we think, and how we behave.
In the research paper “The Emerging Science of Interacting Minds”,
Thalia Wheatley, Mark A. Thornton, Arjen Stolk, and Luke J. Chang discuss the key methodological challenges that have limited progress in establishing a robust science of how minds interact and the new tools that are beginning to overcome these challenges.
A deep understanding of the human mind requires studying the context within which it originates and exists: social interaction.
Traditional research in psychology and neuroscience attempts to study psychological processes within a single individual using experimental paradigms devoid of social context (a);
social interaction research attempts to study the interaction between latent psychological processes and behaviors that occur within the context of an interaction (b).
This work tends to focus on dyads and small groups and has primarily sought to understand how individuals communicate and represent others’ unobservable mental states. Zooming out, collective behavior attempts to study emergent properties of the collective based on modeling behavioral processes with minimal consideration of the latent psychological processes of a single individual (c).
As detailed in this article, a diverse range of nascent tools is poised to transform the study of naturalistic social interaction. However, to wield these tools to their fullest potential will require changes to the way we train psychologists. This may pose a challenge to the field, given the slow pace of change in graduate training. …
Many of the techniques learned by today’s graduate students would not seem out of place in the classrooms of the 1970s. Here we make a set of recommendations for updating training programs to better prepare the next generation of interaction researchers to use the powerful toolkit available to them:
- Programming skills are essential for quantifying, intervening on, and modeling naturalistic social interactions.
- Modeling naturalistic interactions requires statistical techniques that go far beyond the traditional curriculum in psychology, such as artificial neural networks, time series modeling, network and graph theoretical models, and dynamical systems models.
- Experimentation on naturalistic interactions is a complex, multifaceted process.
The skills outlined here are highly valued both within academia and beyond it. Implementing these recommendations may thus have the beneficial effect of […] broadening career opportunities …
Our brains evolved in the social context.
Human perceptual, sensorimotor, affective, and cognitive processes are shaped by interaction and, in turn, shape future interactions. Through interaction, our brains distribute cognition, enabling widespread coordination and collective intelligence. Whether we focus on the individual or the collective, we must understand the interactions that constitute them.
The authors are excited by the promise this perspective holds to accelerate and deepen our understanding of the human mind.
Surtil : 