Conversational linguistic features inform social-relational inference

Abstract

Whether it is the first day of school or a new job, individuals often find themselves in situations where they must learn the structure of existing social relationships. However, the mechanisms through which individuals evaluate the strength and nature of these existing relationships – social-relational inference – remain unclear. We posit that linguistic features of conversations may help individuals evaluate social relationships and may be associated with social-relational inference. Leveraging a naturalistic behavioral experiment (57 adults; 34,735 observations), participants watched a mid-season episode of a reality television show and evaluated the observed dyadic relationships between contestants. We employed novel person- and stimulus-focused approaches to: (1) investigate social-relational inference similarity between participants, (2) examine the association between distinct linguistic features and social-relational inference, and (3) explore the relationship between early season conversation similarity and later perceived relationship formation. We found high pairwise participant response similarity across two relational subtypes (friendship, rivalry), distinct associations between relational judgments and linguistic features, including semantic similarity, sentiment, and clout, and no evidence of an association between early conversation similarity and later friendship inference. These findings suggest that naturalistic conversational content is both a potential mechanism of social-relational inference and a promising avenue for future research.