Judging Social and Nonsocial Contingencies

Draws on data from four experiments involving undergraduates (total N = 218) at the U of New Hampshire (Durham) to examine the sensitivity of their judgments of relations between events in social & nonsocial situations. In Experiment 1, both social & nonsocial contingency judgments increased as a function of increasing objective contingency between on-off vocal activities (social) & between lights & tones (nonsocial). In Experiment 2, this effect was replicated for the social task when participants were not first told that they would be asked to judge contingencies. Experiments 3 & 4 replicated the results of Experiment 1 when procedural modifications were made. In Experiments 1 & 4, conversations with higher contingencies were evaluated more positively than those with lower contingencies. The contingency of the conversation still predicted contingency judgments when the judged quality of the conversations was statistically controlled. Findings suggest a generalizability from past research on nonsocial contingency judgment tasks to the judgment of contingency occurring in dyadic interaction. 2 Tables, 37 References. Adapted from the source document.