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Does syntactic alignment promote cooperation? - An experimental study
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Description: We hypothesize that people are more likely to cooperate with individuals that align with them linguistically, i.e. share lexical or syntactic choices (Pickering & Garrod, 2004). Such correlations have already been observed with respect to task success (Reitter & Moore, 2014), and we expect that the same positive relationship exists between language and cooperation. To test this, we conduct an online experiment with 100 native English-speaking participants, in which we focus on syntactic alignment (using the to-dative vs. the double object construction for ditransitive events). Each participant communicates with several online interaction partners (who are in fact standardized chatbots) in a picture-naming task (Bock, 1986). In this task, the participants and their partners take turns describing pictures that represent ditransitive events. After each picture description round, the participants choose whom of their communication partners they prefer as a cooperation partner in a later stage of the experiment that will determine how much money they earn for their participation. We hypothesize that linguistically aligning communication partners will be preferred as cooperation partners over non-aligning ones.