It's not just your goal, but also who you know: how the cognitive associations among goals and relationships influence goal detection in social interaction

An experiment tested a theoretical framework for goal detection in dyadic interactions of close friends and unacquainted strangers wherein one conversationalist pursued a goal unbeknownst to a detector. The extent to which pursuers' conversation goal was cognitively associated with the dyad's relational type was manipulated. As hypothesized, pursuers' efficiency was significantly positively correlated to detectors' inference accuracy when the pursuer's goal was weakly linked to the relational type (e.g., avoid-awkwardness goal in close-friend dyads), whereas efficiency-accuracy correlations were not significant when the pursuer's goal was strongly linked to the relational type (e.g., avoid-awkwardness in unacquainted dyads). Results for detectors' inference certainty provided weak support for the prediction. Alternative accounts (e.g., personalism or relational knowledge) were relatively ineffective. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2958.2009.01362.x