At First Glance: Investigating How Vagueness Influences Verbal and Non-Verbal Shared Understanding of Concepts Among Couples

Introduction People commonly say that lovers understand each other “at first glance”. But is it true? Previous research suggests that abstract concepts evoke more social engagement and an increased need for collaboration to grasp their meaning, compared to concrete ones (Borghi, 2022). Here we propose a further factor impacting conceptual representation of abstract concepts, i.e., vagueness (the degree concepts have a precise and determinate meaning). This study explores how romantic couples and randomly paired strangers collaborate on defining concrete and abstract concepts, these last characterized by different degrees of vagueness. Specifically, the study aims to investigate how concepts’ vagueness influences cognitive processes involved in a collaborative task, i.e., the creation of an educational post on a concept—addressing whether more abstract and vague concepts lead to more negotiation. To this aim, we will examine the role of each partner in creating the post and the frequency of eye contact in conveying understanding and fostering mutual understanding among participants. Method In this ongoing research, we examine romantic couples against couples of strangers in a concept-definition task. Couples are instructed to craft a brief, educational message targeted at students who are deciding on their university path. We present couples with concepts differing in their degree of abstractness and vagueness—but comparable for familiarity—and instruct them to agree on a definition for each concept and write a post. We equip each couple with glasses measuring eye-contact occurrences between partners. After writing the post, participants must identify and attribute the keywords used in their posts. At the end, participants separately rate their and their partner’s levels of expertise in the topic, engagement in the interaction, overall pleasantness of the task, and report how much each written post differs from the initial idea and how much they negotiated. Expected Results We expect that highly vague abstract concepts will require a higher degree of negotiation compared to both less vague abstract concepts and concrete concepts, as their meaning is more undetermined. This will lead to more mutual glances and will influence the contribution needed from each participant to the interaction. We expect participants will report a greater difference between the initial post idea and the final post output with highly vague concepts compared to concrete concepts, with less vague abstract concepts lying in the middle. In addition, we anticipate semantic alignment gradually increasing across participants from highly vague abstract concepts (lowest) to less vague abstract concepts (medium), up to concrete concepts (highest). Finally, due to their established common ground, romantic couples might achieve a higher degree of agreement with less need for negotiation, difficulty, and effort compared to the control group. Moreover, we expect them to find the interaction more enjoyable and value their partner’s contributions more highly.