Investigating the effect of trustworthiness on instruction-based reflexivity

Instructing somebody else to act: motor co-representations in the instructor

Instructions enable humans to perform novel tasks quickly. This is achieved by creating and activating the instruction representation for upcoming tasks, which can then modulate ongoing task behaviour in an almost 'reflexive' manner, an effect called instruction-based reflexivity. While most research has focused on understanding how verbal instructions are represented within the 'instructed' (i.e. the person receiving instructions), here we focus on how the instructor's (i.e. the person giving instructions) behaviour is affected through instructing. In a series of three experiments and one pooled analysis, we extended the classical instruction-based reflexivity paradigm to a novel social variant in which the instructions are given by an instructor (rather than visual computer-generated instructions). We found an instruction-based reflexivity effect for the instructor, that is, the instructor's task performance was better on congruent compared to incongruent trials (i.e. Experiments 1 and 2, pooled analysis). This suggests that the instructor represents the instructions of the instructed in an action-oriented format. However, this did not depend on the specific task of the instructed (i.e. Experiment 1), nor is it exclusively social (i.e. Experiment 3).

Measuring trust with the Wayfinding Task: Implementing a novel task in immersive virtual reality and desktop setups across remote and in-person test environments

Trust is a key feature of social relationships. Common measures of trust, questionnaires and economic games, lack ecological validity. Hence, we sought to introduce an immersive, virtual reality (VR) measure for the behavioral assessment of trust across remote and in-person settings, building on the maze task of Hale et al. (2018). Our 'Wayfinding Task' consists of an interconnected urban environment for participants to navigate on the advice of two characters of differing trustworthiness. We present four studies implementing the Wayfinding Task in remote and in-person testing environments and comparing performance across head-mounted display (HMD)-based VR and desktop setups. In each study, the trustworthiness of two virtual characters was manipulated, through either a fact sheet providing trustworthiness information, or a behavior-based trustworthiness manipulation task termed the Door Game, based on Van der Biest et al., 2020. Participants then completed the Wayfinding Task. Overall, we found that participant behavior in the Wayfinding Task reflected the relative trustworthiness of the two characters; in particular, the trustworthy character was approached more often for advice, reflecting data from our Door Game. We found mostly null results for our novel outcome measure, interpersonal distance. Remote testing successfully achieved these effects. While HMD-based VR and desktop setups both showed these effects, there was a stronger effect of trustworthiness in the HMD VR version of the task. These results have implications for the measurement of trust in behavioral settings and the use of remote and VR-based testing in social experiments.

The Factorial-Reflexive Approach to Diagnosing the Executors’ and Contractors’ Attitude to Achieving the Objectives by Energy Supplying Companies

The article aims to enhance understanding of how relations, behavior and attitude of the executives and contractors to achieving the objectives by energy supplying companies affect the efficiency of the latter’s overall development. There is offered a factor-reflexive approach to diagnosing the executives’ and contractors’ attitude to realizing the tasks of developing the energy supplying companies. This approach includes models to identify and analyze the factors that influenced the change in contractors’ behavior based on the combination of expert techniques, correlation and regression analysis and evaluation of the personnel response to organizational, resource and staffing projects development, through accumulating sufficient statistical information based on the enterprise’s features, relations and environment. This approach to diagnosing executives’ and contractors’ response to the implementation of tasks and the resulting changes takes into account the subjective component of their response. Practical implementation of this approach in monitoring the conformity of the development tasks has proven the ability to identify problems from the viewpoint of the task executives.