New research published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience provides evidence that higher empathy and neurobiological similarity both play a role in successful communication. However, people tend to rate the quality of their interactions higher when they perceive a sense of similarity with their communication partner, regardless of their actual neural similarities.
Human beings are inherently social creatures. From casual conversations with strangers to deep bonds with close friends and family, our lives are filled with interactions. But what makes some of these interactions more successful and enjoyable than others?
Previous research has hinted at the importance of empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. Empathy has been linked to building supportive friendships and closer relationships. However, this study aimed to uncover the precise role empathy plays in interactions between strangers.
Additionally, the study explored the concept of similarity, both in terms of neural responses and perceived similarity. Neural similarity refers to how closely two individuals’ brains respond to external stimuli, while perceived similarity relates to how people feel about their shared commonalities with others. The question at the heart of the study was whether shared neural responses or perceived similarity had a greater impact on the success and quality of social interactions.
“I am interested in understanding what makes interactions successful, particularly among strangers who could be potential friends, as friendship and social connection is so important to well-being,” said study author Elizabeth Redcay, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. “Much of my work focuses on this question for autistic individuals. A dominant perspective in autism research is a “deficit’ model where a negative communication outcome between partners is attributed to social communication deficits in autism.”
“However, newer perspectives emphasize that conversation success requires both individuals to work to understand the other and in cases where social partners share neurotypes this burden may be less. While the current work focused on a community sample (i.e. not an autistic sample) we were testing the hypothesis that communication success would depend both on how similar two people were to each other and their general social-cognitive and socio-emotional abilities, that is, both individual and dyadic factors.”
In the study, a total of 86 adults (18 males, 66 females, and 2 non-binary individuals) engaged in a one-hour virtual interaction over Zoom with a partner whom they believed was another study participant. In reality, the partner was a lab confederate trained to engage naturally and provide consistent responses. The virtual interaction included three semi-structured introduction and discussion tasks where confederates gave similar answers to each participant, fostering a sense of familiarity.
Participants then played a cooperative “mind-reading” game called Telewave. In this game, one person provided a clue, and the other person tried to guess a specific value on a scale. The goal was to work together to get as close to the correct answer as possible. Communicative success was quantified based on the numerical distance between the participant’s guess and the correct answer, averaged over all trials. After the interaction, participants rated the overall quality of their interaction with their partner.
Among these participants, 60 also took part in an fMRI session where they passively viewed a series of naturalistic videos simulating channel surfing on television. The neural similarity between participants and their partner (the lab confederate) was calculated based on the brain activity while watching these videos.
Finally, the participants completed several social cognitive tasks and surveys to assess their social cognitive abilities, personality traits, hobbies, and perceived similarity with their partner.
The study unearthed a significant connection between empathy and communicative success. Participants with higher scores on the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, indicating greater empathy, were found to be more successful in their interactions during the Telewave game. This suggests that individuals who possess a higher capacity to understand and relate to the emotions and perspectives of others tend to excel in their communication efforts.
Neural similarity also played a role in communicative success. When participants exhibited more similar neural responses to their conversation partners, their communication tended to be more successful. This intriguing finding suggests that sharing similar cognitive processes and ways of thinking enhances effective communication, even among strangers.
Interestingly, the study found an interaction effect between empathy and neural similarity. Among pairs of participants with low neural similarity, those with higher empathy scores still managed to achieve successful communication. This implies that individual social-emotional traits, like empathy, can sometimes compensate for dissimilarity when people are trying to understand each other. However, among those who began with a more similar neural activity, the ability to share perspectives became less crucial for communication success.
“It takes two – miscommunications are a dyadic level thing,” Redcay told PsyPost. “Also there are many ways to achieve communication success. For those who view the world differently, then an individual’s ability to empathize and take another’s perspective is important but for those who view the world similarly individual cognitive abilities may be less important.”
When it came to how people rated the quality of their interactions, perceived similarity took center stage. Participants’ perception of how similar they felt to their conversation partners was found to strongly predict their perceived interaction quality. In simpler terms, if people felt they shared common ground or similarities with their partners, they reported higher-quality interactions.
The study also assessed mind-reading motivation, or the desire to understand the thoughts and feelings of others. While mind-reading motivation had some impact on perceived interaction quality, it didn’t significantly predict interaction quality on its own. This suggests that, during brief introductory social interactions, the ability to read others’ minds may not be as critical for perceived interaction quality as the perception of similarity.
Unlike communicative success, however, neural similarity and social cognitive abilities were not found to strongly predict perceived interaction quality. This suggests that, in certain contexts, the perception of similarity may be more critical than actual neural similarity for promoting positive feelings about an interaction.
“We were surprised that neural similarity to one’s partner did not predict their reports of how much they enjoyed the interaction,” Redcay said. “We also were surprised that people’s self-report of how similar they were to their partner was not related to how similar they were based on our neuroimaging measure. Both of these may have been due to the fact that we used a lab confederate as a social partner where the confederate may not be fully themselves in this lab context.”
These findings offer valuable insights into the dynamics of social interactions, particularly between strangers. They underscore the importance of both empathy and neural similarity in successful communication. But as with any study, there are limitations to consider.
“The caveat is as mentioned above that we used a lab confederate for these interactions,” Redcay explained. “This choice was based on practical constraints (we have the same sample size with half the scanning costs). The study leaves many open questions including examining how people come into alignment (i.e., looking at behaviors that lead to convergence and divergence within a real-time conversation) and how neural similarity may impact that.”
“We also only had one communication task but it will be important to understand how different contexts, tasks, and outcomes can be more or less impacted by similarity. In group contexts or problem-solving tasks, for example, less similarity might be preferred to bring diverse perspectives. Finally, we would like to examine how this combination of neural similarity and social abilities affect communication outcomes among neurodiverse social partners, including those who are on the autism spectrum.”
The study, “Partner similarity and social cognitive traits predict social interaction success among strangers“, was authored by Sarah L. Dziura, Aditi Hosangadi, Deena Shariq, Junaid S. Merchant, and Elizabeth Redcay.
