Recipient design in tacit communication

摘要

The ability to design tailored messages for specific listeners is an important aspect ofhuman communication. The present study investigates whether a mere belief about anaddressee's identity influences the generation and production of a communicative messagein a novel, non-verbal communication task. Participants were made to believe they wereplaying a game with a child or an adult partner, while a confederate acted as both childand adult partners with matched performance and response times. The participants' beliefinfluenced their behavior, spending longer when interacting with the presumed childaddressee, but only during communicative portions of the game, i.e. using time as a toolto place emphasis on target information. This communicative adaptation attenuated withexperience, and it was related to personality traits, namely Empathy and Need for Cogni-tion measures. Overall, these findings indicate that novel nonverbal communicative inter-actions are selected according to a socio-centric perspective, and they are stronglyinfluenced by participants' traits.