The Key Role of Visual Coordination in the Formation of Collective Routinized Actions

Routines’ formation has often been explained using the analogy with the habit system; however, such mechanism falls short of explaining the rapid development of routines, and the complexity of social coordination. We argue that routine formation can be conceptualized as a form of joint action, by which visual coordination and task complexity regulate routine formation. Hence, we conducted a laboratory experiment wherein we manipulated the availability of visual information and the complexity of routinization. The results showed that in absence of visual coordination participants’ performances were accurate but slow, hence missing the goal; conversely, when visual coordination was allowed, performance was extraordinarily fast, but less accurate, nevertheless reaching the goal. Task complexity, on the other hand, had only a limited impact. Overall, visual coordination seems to act as a regulator of the speed-accuracy trade-off of collective actions and plays a pivotal role in complex forms of joint action.

常规的形成往往被类比为习惯系统，然而，此机制不足以解释常规的快速发展和社交协调的复杂性。我们认为，常规的形成可以被视为一种联合行动的形式，其中视觉协调和任务复杂性调节常规的形成。因此，我们进行了一项实验室实验，在该实验中，我们操纵了视觉信息的可用性和常规化的复杂性。结果显示，在缺乏视觉协调的情况下，参与者的表现虽然准确但缓慢，因此未能达到目标；相反，当允许视觉协调时，表现异常迅速，但准确性较低，尽管如此，仍达到了目标。另一方面，任务复杂性只有有限的影响。总体而言，视觉协调似乎作为集体行动速度-准确性权衡的调节器，在复杂形式的联合行动中扮演着关键角色。