Research Area:
Communicating Authenticity
We judge stories — and storytellers — by how authentic they seem. Neural synchrony within the audience of listeners can predict that sense of authenticity.
My Role
As the lead investigator, I designed this study to better understand whether similar neural activity in an audience correlates with markers of successful communication, including authenticity.
I developed the original screening survey and all tasks, created and validated a survey measure of perceived authenticity, designed the technical parameters of the neuroimaging setup, recruited participants, collected data during in-person lab sessions and remotely through MTurk, analyzed behavioral and neuroimaging data, wrote a paper for publication, and presented the results at conferences.
Tools and Techniques:
Qualtrics, Amazon MTurk, fNIRS software, MATLAB, Python, R, survey development, factor analysis, descriptive statistics, t-tests, Pearson correlation, linear regression
Does synchrony across the brains of an audience of listeners predict perceived authenticity?
Research Question
Audiences for an autobiographical story consider whether the storyteller is actually speaking from their lived experience, i.e. if they are being authentic. Audience neural synchrony during story listening in regions of the brain associated with taking the perspective of others predicts storytellers’ perceived authenticity. Although we didn’t replicate the existing finding that speaker-listener neural synchrony predicts listeners’ factual accuracy in the Sharing Emotions study, it is possible that synchrony among audience members represents a shared understanding of the story and predicts factual accuracy.
Background
Greater audience neural synchrony correlates with greater perceived authenticity
Greater audience neural synchrony correlates with greater factual accuracy
Hypotheses
Methods
First, I ran a behavioral study testing prompts for narrative elicitation, which required one-on-one interviewing to help participants generate cohesive personal narratives. From this behavioral study, I selected one storyteller for this neuroimaging study based on the length, verbal fluency, and structural clarity of her story. This study used a different story and different storyteller than the study described in Sharing Emotions.
I recruited women (N = 39) to individually listen to this story while recording their brain activity (Story Listening Task). After listening to the story once, each listener recorded themselves retelling the story in the first person, as though the events happened to them (Story Retelling Task). After eliminating stories from 3 participants due to corrupted data, 37 versions of the same story were then evaluated by workers (N = 1,097; female) on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform (Authenticity Task). Each MTurker heard one version of the story and rated that version on the 8-item scale of successful communication, which included subscales for perceived authenticity, speaker appeal, and the overall listener experience.
Measuring Perceived Authenticity
While validated scales (e.g. Kernis and Goldman, 2000) exist to measure psychological authenticity, or the intrapersonal sense of alignment between one’s behaviors and core values, I needed to develop a scale to measure how people perceive the authenticity of others. We combined the concepts of believability, trustworthiness, story realism, storyteller enthusiasm, likeability, similarity, enjoyment, and the likelihood of retelling the story into an 8-item scale that broadly captures markers of successful communication. Using exploratory factor analysis, we identified three sub-factors: Perceived Authenticity, Speaker Appeal, and Overall Listener Experience. Together, these factors explain 71% of the variance in scale ratings across all of the story retellers.
Project Flow
The similarity in brain activity (neural synchrony) between each audience member and the mean activity of the rest of the group (one-to-rest analysis) gave us a measure of shared perspective taking during a novel, uninstructed story experience.
Purpose of the Task
Each listener retold the story, as though the events happened to them. The number of facts correctly included in the retold story gave us a measure of factual accuracy, indicating whether the listener remembered the details of the story.
At least 25 MTurk workers listened to each of the retold stories, answering the 8-item scale including a measure of perceived authenticity. Using linear regression, I predicted perceived authenticity, as well as other scale factors, across all versions of the story from audience neural synchrony.
Analysis
We measure neural synchrony as the correlation in brain activity across all the listeners to a story — this is a one-to-rest intersubject correlation. Factual accuracy and perceived authenticity, our two dependent variables, were calculated as means within each version of the retold story. We predicted factual accuracy and perceived authenticity through linear regression models for each of 4 brain regions.
Across all of the audience members, greater neural synchrony when first listening to a story predicts greater perceived authenticity of the stories they retell, as well as the other measures of successful communication. This is true for a region of the brain — the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) — associated with making judgments about the self-relevance of information. This finding suggests that neural similarity across an audience may (1) represent a normative response to a story and (2) that the degree to which a storyteller is successful in communicating is a function of their ability to make their stories personally relevant to their listeners.
Results
Across three sub-scales, we see the same pattern: neural synchrony among story re-tellers predicts behavioral judgments made by audiences on the authenticity of the storyteller, the storyteller’s appeal and their overall experience.