New behavioral signature could help quantify the value people assign to specific interpersonal relationships

Over the course of their lives, humans and other mammals tend to interact with others in different ways. Psychological theories suggest that individuals assign varying values ​​to their social experiences, but the values ​​they assign to specific interpersonal relationships have rarely been studied until now.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have discovered a behavioral signature that can help quantify the social value people attribute to the relationships they have established with specific others. Their article, published in Communication psychology, presents a reliable experimental approach to measure this signature and thus conduct new psychological studies focused on interpersonal relationships.

“The inspiration for the study happened in a roundabout way, as is typical in science,” João Guassi Moreira, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress.

“I had previously published a number of studies on social decision-making in which individuals had to make choices that affected two other relatives. In these studies, we specifically asked participants to make choices that affected one relative and a friend in a competing manner (e.g., doing something that benefits a parent would disadvantage their friend and vice versa).”

In their previous studies, Guassi Moreira and his colleagues observed that many people preferred their parents over their friends and attempted to determine possible reasons. They hypothesized that this preference was related to specific characteristics of their participants’ interpersonal relationships.

“We started with the idea that the value a person places on their relationship with a given social other might be a unique motivator, but we found it difficult to assess value in a redundant way with the quality of the relationship,” said Guassi Moreira.

“This made us realize a subtle but important consideration: How much you value a relationship is different from how much you might value the relationship or how warm you feel toward it. They are correlated, of course, but necessarily capture scarcity and opportunity cost, while the respect or satisfaction you can have in relationships is virtually unlimited. This helped catalyze the idea for the study.

Building on their previous research, Guassi Moreira and Carolyn Parkinson set out to design a method for quantifying the social value of interpersonal relationships. In particular, they wanted to identify a measure of value that was not redundant with other aspects of relationships, because this would allow psychologists to study how the value assigned to relationships influences these other aspects.

“We also wanted to emphasize behavioral markers of social value to avoid confusion with other aspects of relationships based on attitudes or feelings (quality, satisfaction, warmth, etc.),” said Guassi Moreira .

“We took inspiration from a cognitive neuroscience technique, in which researchers create a neural signature: a pattern of activity distributed throughout the brain is thought to selectively encode a given mental process.”

To study and measure the value of social relationships, the researchers used an approach that resembles that used by neuroscientists to uncover the patterns of brain activity that underlie specific behaviors or mental processes. Specifically, they attempted to uncover behavioral signatures that captured the value that individuals attribute to specific activities, and then examined how these signatures manifested in their interactions with specific people (e.g., a relative, a friend, etc. .).

“This process involved researching activities that people do in their free time (like watching TV, seeing a show, organizing their household, etc.) and then asking people which ones they would be most and least likely to do given a limited amount of free time activities,” said Guassi Moreira.

“These scores were used to estimate weights that describe the value of each individual activity, that is, how much a person would prioritize each activity when faced with limited resources (e.g., having only ‘an afternoon of free time).”

After examining the value that study participants assigned to various daily activities, Guassi Moreira and Parkinson applied these weights as a set, a signature, to behaviors in the context of specific interpersonal relationships. To do this, they examined the extent to which the weight of the behavioral signature was expressed in each participant’s relationship with specific other people in their life.

“I think our study offers behavioral science another avenue to look for the mechanistic specificity behind motivated behavior involving known relationships,” Moreira said. “In other words, I think it can help us make more accurate predictions and measurements about why we behave the way we do with specific people we know in our lives.”

This research team’s recent study identifies behaviors that provide insight into the value people attribute to specific interpersonal relationships. In the future, these newly identified behavioral signatures could be used to study the link between the value people assign to important people in their lives and other facets of their relationships.

“We did our best to ensure that the approach we designed leveraged value, but we ultimately relied solely on self-reported surveys that someone completed at a computer,” Moreira added.

“This does not discredit our study, but it does mean that now that we have a procedure in place for estimating social value, we can check whether these social value scores converge with data obtained from intensive sampling designs (e.g. example when participants carry out many micro-samples) surveys from their phone during normal daily life) or with fMRI data.

By comparing the social value scores obtained in their study with data collected in previous studies with large samples of participants, the researchers will be able to assess the extent to which they reflect the value people attribute to relationships. For example, Guassi Moreira and Parkinson plan to study how the social value scores they obtained align with more naturalistic behaviors and neurobiological value correlates (fMRI).

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