EXPRESS: Taking apart what brings us together: the role of action prediction, perspective-taking, and theory of mind in joint action

The ability to act together with others to achieve common goals is crucial in life, yet there is no full consensus on the underlying cognitive skills. While influential theoretical accounts suggest that interaction requires sophisticated insights into others’ minds, alternative views propose that high-level social skills might not be necessary because interactions are grounded on sensorimotor predictive mechanisms. At present, empirical evidence is insufficient to decide between the two. This study addressed this issue and explored the association between performance at joint action tasks and cognitive abilities in three domains - action prediction, perspective-taking, and theory of mind - in healthy adults (N=58). We found that, while perspective-taking played a role in reading the behaviour of others independently of the social context, action prediction abilities specifically influenced the agents’ performance in an interactive task but not in a control (social but non-interactive) task. In our study, performance at a theory of mind test did not play any role, as confirmed by Bayesian analyses. The results suggest that, in adults, sensorimotor predictive mechanisms might play a significant and specific role in supporting interpersonal coordination during motor interactions. We discuss the implications of our findings for the contrasting theoretical views described above and propose a way they might be partly reconciled.

Why You Should Know and Not Only Use Sorting Algorithms: Some Beautiful Problems

In most programming languages, the built-in (standard library) sort() function is the most convenient and efficient way for ordering data. Many software engineers have forgotten (or never knew) the underlying algorithms. In programming contests, almost all of the tasks involving sorting can be solved with only knowing how to use the sort() function. The question might arise in young students: do we need to know how it works if we only need to use it? Also, why should we know multiple efficient sorting algorithms, is not one enough? In this paper, we help the teachers to give the best answers to these questions: some beautiful tasks where the key to the solution lies in knowing a particular sorting algorithm. In some cases, the sorting algorithms are applied as a surprisingly nice idea, for example, in an interactive task or a geometry question.

EXPRESS: When Algorithms Fail: Consumers’ Responses to Brand Harm Crises Caused by Algorithm Errors

Algorithms increasingly used by brands sometimes fail to perform as expected or even worse, cause harm, causing brand harm crises. Unfortunately, algorithm failures are increasing in frequency. Yet, we know little about consumers’ responses to brands following such brand harm crises. Extending developments in the theory of mind perception, we hypothesize that following a brand harm crisis caused by an algorithm error (vs. human error), consumers will respond less negatively to the brand. We further hypothesize that consumers’ lower mind perception of agency of the algorithm (vs. human) for the error that lowers their perceptions of the algorithm’s responsibility for the harm caused by the error will mediate this relationship. We also hypothesize four moderators of this relationship: two algorithm characteristics, anthropomorphized algorithm and machine learning algorithm and two task characteristics where the algorithm is deployed, subjective (vs. objective) task and interactive (vs. non-interactive) task. We find support for the hypotheses in eight experimental studies including two incentive-compatible studies. We examine the effects of two managerial interventions to manage the aftermath of brand harm crises caused by algorithm errors. The research’s findings advance the literature on brand harm crises, algorithm usage, and algorithmic marketing and generate managerial guidelines to address the aftermath of such brand harm crises.