Social consequences of coherence in naturalistic interactions

Communicative success depends on the ability to produce coherent strings of ideas. While the psychological determinants of this capacity have been amply studied, less is known about the interpersonal consequences of coherence. Here, we investigated the interpersonal consequences of coherence in naturalistic dyadic interactions. One hundred participants engaged in dyadic interactions with subsequent assessments of liking, interpersonal closeness, and prosocial behavior (dictator game). To measure coherence, utterances were mapped as a trajectories in semantic space via language models. Participants whose utterances explored a greater portion of the semantic space and who progressed through it more quickly elicited greater feelings of interpersonal closeness in their interlocutor. These effects were similar in magnitude to those of lexical surprisal – a strong predictor of language processing in psycholinguistic research – but did not emerge for liking or monetary donations. This study presents evidence for interpersonal consequences of semantic coherence and provides a methodological framework to study language organization in the context of social interactions.