The Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” (2016) introduces a society where people constantly rate their interactions with each other through their smartphones. Those ratings deeply influence outcomes in their everyday life, including high-stakes situations such as access to housing and freedom of transit.

Leaving aside the dystopian aspects, people in that society managed to solve an interesting technical problem: automatically detecting when people interact with each other and prompting them to rate the interaction in a smooth and predictable way.

Turns out that such a system could be super useful for cognitive scientists, as it would allow collecting and analyzing data about how frequently and how long people interact with each other and to draw insights about the quality of those interactions. Rest assured, the objective of such a system wouldn’t be slowly transitioning into a “big brother” scenario. Instead, it can lead to insights into human interaction and their relationship with various psychological outcomes. In fact, the potential applications of this methodology could flip the idea from dystopian to wholesome, as it can help us understand (and potentially find ways to improve) important psychological outcomes related to well-being and mental health.

Would you like to know more about how cognitive scientists can incorporate this approach into their methodological toolbox? Then let’s “nose dive” into the paper “Tracking real‑time proximity in daily life: A new tool to examine social interactions.” Recently published in Behavior Research Methods – an official publication of the Psychonomic Society by Loes Janssen, Bart Verkuil, Andre Nedderhoff,  Lisanne van Houtum, Mirjam Wever, and Bernet Elzinga (pictured below).

Challenges of space and time

Cognitive scientists have been long interested in interpersonal relationships and the quality and frequency of our social connections. Spending more time interacting with others in positive ways contributes to our well-being, a pattern that has been repeatedly observed between parents and children, families, romantic partners, and many other contexts.

However, there are technical challenges to getting accurate data about these interactions. For example, retrospective questionnaires are prone to inaccuracies due to the simple fact that our memories are not perfect and technologies used in ethological studies that can reliably track location may be inadequate and/or inappropriate for use with humans.

A nearly ubiquitous technology, such as smartphones and short-range radio technologies (like Bluetooth), seem like good candidates for use with humans. But it turns out that, when used alone, challenges also arise because of compatibility issues between different operating systems and other logistical hurdles. Solutions that may seem simple at first sight – such as lending pre-configured devices to ensure compatibility – can be inconvenient for participants due to the need to carry an additional device, monitor it, and ensure that it has enough battery over multi-day or multi-week timeframes.

To address these challenges, the authors of the study developed a hybrid setup that combined a Low-Energy Bluetooth beacon with an app installed in the participants’ phones. A Low-Energy Bluetooth beacon is a device that continually broadcasts a signal that other Bluetooth-enabled devices – such as your smartphone – can detect. Crucially, they use very little power, which allows them to run for many days. They are also light and small, around the size of a credit card in this study; and can only be detected on a relatively short range, making them suitable for detecting physical proximity, even indoors.

The app was designed to continually check whether a beacon from another person was in proximity. If it detected one for over 10 minutes, then it triggered the presentation of a questionnaire where participants should confirm whether they talked with the other person and, if so, to rate different aspects of the interaction.

Interactions between parents and adolescents

The paper’s main point was to demonstrate the feasibility of the methodology for studying social interaction. To do so, a social interaction context is needed. For testing purposes, the authors focused on the social interaction behavior of adolescents with their parents.

The adolescents and parents in the study were requested to install an app on their smartphones and carry a beacon throughout the study. This allowed researchers to send automated notifications requesting parents and adolescents to rate the quality of their interactions after they spent some time in close physical proximity. The figure below illustrates the setup of the study.

The research team collected proximity and survey data. The proximity data was analyzed in terms of the frequency and duration of interactions. The quality of interactions was assessed in terms of how pleasant they were, the affective responses to them (i.e., positive or negative), and aspects such as the level of warmth and criticism parents expressed towards the adolescents.

A promising methodology

The methodology proved effective for collecting interaction data. Only some results are summarized here, so please check out the original paper for more detailed analyses.

The proximity data showed that adolescents were often closer to their mothers than their fathers. On weekdays, this started to increase at about 1 PM with peaks at ~4 PM and ~7-8 PM, whereas on weekends parents and adolescents were more often in close contact, with peaks at about 5-6 PM. The figure below illustrates these results.

Ratings about the interaction quality revealed rather positive interactions. Adolescents and parents reported high positive affect, low negative affect, high parental warmth, and low parental criticism for interactions with each other.

While no differences were found in the quality of interactions between adolescent-mother and adolescent-father dyads, longer interactions between mothers and adolescents correlated with lower levels of parental criticism (as self-reported by mothers). The underlying reason for this finding is not clear (nor was it a focus of the study), but it illustrates that the methodology can be useful in uncovering important aspects of social interaction by combining proximity and rating data sources.

The paper demonstrates the feasibility of the methodology and shows promise for further developments. According to the authors,

“The ability of the method to not only track physical proximity of people in their daily life setting, but also prompt notifications to those people is promising for both research and clinical practice.”

Who knows, in the future, integrating Low-Energy Bluetooth beacons into our methodological toolbox could contribute to our understanding of social relationships and well-being, rendering automated prompts to rate social interactions a much less dark experience than Black Mirror made us believe.

Psychonomic Society’s article featured in this post:

Janssen, L., Verkuil, B., Nedderhoff A., van Houtum, L., Wever, M. & Elzinga, B. (2024). Tracking real‑time proximity in daily life: A new tool to examine social interactions. Behavior Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-024-02432-1