Joint Commitment: An Analysis of Emotions and Non-Verbal Behaviors

Joint Commitment: An Analysis of Emotions and Non-Verbal Behaviors Francesca Morganti (francesca.morganti@unibg.it) Dipartimento di Scienze Umane e Sociali, University of Bergamo, 2 Piazzale S. Agostino, Bergamo, 24129 Italy Antonella Carassa (antonella.carassa@usi.ch) Faculty of Communication Sciences, University of Lugano, 13 Via Giuseppe Buffi, Lugano, 6904 Switzerland Marco Colombetti (marco.colombetti@usi.ch) Faculty of Communication Sciences, University of Lugano, 13 Via Giuseppe Buffi, Lugano, 6904 Switzerland DEIB, Politecnico di Milano, 32 Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, Milano, 20135 Italy Paride Braibanti (paride.braibanti@unibg.it) Dipartimento di Scienze Umane e Sociali, University of Bergamo, 2 Piazzale S. Agostino, Bergamo, 24129 Italy Giorgio Rezzonico (giorgio.rezzonico@unimib.it) Dipartimento di Scienze della Salute, Universita di Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo, 1 Milano, 20126 Italy Ivana Sgro (ivana.sgro@studenti.unibg.it) Dipartimento di Scienze Umane e Sociali, University of Bergamo, 2 Piazzale S. Agostino, Bergamo, 24129 Italy Abstract According to Margaret Gilbert, a joint commitment (JC) is a commitment of two or more agents, called the parties of the JC, to engage in a common project. Creating a JC often involves an explicit agreement, carried out in a conversa- tional interaction through overt communication. We ex- plored aspects of such interactions that can be considered as complementary to verbal exchanges, focusing on how a JC is managed by the parties by means of emotional and other non-verbal bodily expressions. We analyzed three phases of the JC lifecycle (creation, maintenance, and violation), and in particular the emotional reaction of the participants to two types of violations by the experimenter. In our analysis we used standardized tools such as the Ethological Coding System for Interviews, the Mind Reading Emotional Li- brary, and the Facial Action Coding System. Our results show that certain non-verbal behaviors in the phase of JC creation are characteristic of the participants who later did not fulfill their commitment. Moreover, the participants’ emotional reactions to JC violation by the experimenter turned out to depend on the type of violation. Finally, the creation and maintenance of JC, and the emotional reaction to its violation, appear to be independent of the participants’ personality and empathic disposition. Introduction The theoretical background of this paper is Gilbert’s plural subject theory (Gilbert, 1989) together with some develop- ments by Carassa, Colombetti & Morganti (2008). Accord- ing to Gilbert, all genuinely collective phenomena (like joint activities, collective beliefs, group feelings, etc.) in- volve a special kind of commitment, namely, a joint com- mitment (JC). An agent may be personally committed to do something as a result of an individual decision; in this case the agent is the only ‘owner’ of the commitment, and can rescind it as he or she pleases. Contrary to personal com- mitments, a joint commitment is a commitment of two or more agents, called the parties of the JC, to engage in a common project. The main feature of JC is that it consists of normative re- lationships between the parties. If two parties are jointly committed to do something, then each one is obligated to the other one to do their part, and has the right that the other one do their part. Accordingly, a JC is violated when a party does not live up to their obligations. Gilbert often remarks that making a JC does not necessar- ily require an explicit agreement: certain subjects may enter a joint commitment by starting to interact in certain ways, without ever trying to describe what they do together as a matter of agreement. Making explicit agreements, on the other hand, is very common in everyday life, and in the cur- rent paper we concentrate on this type of situation. Accord- ing to Carassa & Colombetti (2009), explicit agreements to joint projects are typically created in a conversational inter- action through overt communication, where an agent per- form speech acts with a communicative intention, in the