When actions go awry: Monitoring partner errors and machine malfunctions

Human actions often aim at triggering certain responses from social interaction partners, but these responses do not always come as expected. Here we show that unexpected partner errors trigger sustained monitoring and that this monitoring exceeds the level that is observed if participants are faced with a machine malfunction rather than an error of an interaction partner (Experiment 1). Critically, this pattern of results emerged even though both types of errors were signaled by physically identical events in an oddball task, ruling out alternative explanations in terms of differential bottom-up factors. Unexpected delays in the action-effect sequence, however, did not trigger increased monitoring for social as compared to nonsocial situations (Experiment 2). These results indicate that mechanisms of performance monitoring might be recruited especially when facing the variability that is inherent in social interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).