Experiencing coordination and commitment in joint action: a cross-cultural qualitative study

Previous research provides evidence that, in the context of joint action, individuals’ sense of commitment sustains their motivation to persist and to resist temptations and distractions. In addition, there is evidence that individuals’ sense of commitment in joint action varies along with individual and cultural differences. In the current study, we carried out semi-structured interviews with 8 Ukrainian and 7 Italian participants in order to probe their attitudes about commitment in joint action. During the interviews, we showed our participants a series of videos of an everyday joint action, which had been produced and validated in previous studies. Thematic analysis of the interview transcripts revealed that participants tended to think that simply initiating a joint action creates some form of commitment to continue; that they perceived a higher degree of commitment in joint actions with a higher degree of coordination; and that they emphasized that the degree of commitment between two agents in a joint action depends on the relationship between the two agents. Strikingly, however, we also found that our participants were highly reluctant to impute obligations to the observed agents.