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Social decision-making requires individuals to balance self-interest with mutual benefit, continuously adapting their behavior to the intentions and actions of others. While classical economic games have provided important insights into cooperation and competition, they typically rely on discrete, turn-based decisions that fail to capture the fluid and reciprocal nature of real-world social interactions. The present study used a novel transparent Dyadic Interaction Platform and a novel Cooperation–Competition Foraging task to examine how the interpersonal personality traits agency and communion shape dynamic, real-time social behavior. In this task, pairs of participants (dyads) jointly or individually collected targets with variable payoffs, allowing cooperative and competitive strategies to emerge naturally as both partners continuously observed eachother’s gaze, actions, and outcomes. Using a round-robin design, we assessed how interpersonal traits and partner-specific adaptations jointly predicted dyadic strategic outcomes. Within each session, dyads gradually converged toward stable interaction modes, with increasing cooperation across sessions. Higher mean communion within dyads predicted enhanced cooperation, indicating that shared affiliative tendencies promote jointly oriented behavior. Additionally, behavior in each session was significantly influenced by prior dyadic history, indicating experience-dependent adaptation. These findings demonstrate that continuous, transparent interaction paradigms reveal how stable personality traits and dynamic partner feedback jointly shape social strategies. By linking personality traits from the Interpersonal Circumplex to behavioral adaptations, this study contributes to bridging the gap between traditional game-theory approaches and ecologically valid models of real-world social decision-making.

Previous research has shown that attractiveness perceptions of male body parts and modalities correlate with each other. These findings support the one ornament hypothesis, according to which individual body parts and modalities have a common underlying latent cause and vicariously function as an indicator of genetic quality during mate choice. In contrast, the multiple messages hypothesis suggests that different body parts and modalities signal distinct and non-redundant information about mate quality. This preregistered study sought to replicate and extend findings on correlated perceptions of men's and women's facial, bodily, and vocal attractiveness, health, and physical dominance. Partial mediation by sex hormone levels (testosterone, estradiol) was analysed as purported mechanisms involved in the development of sexually dimorphic characteristics influencing perceptions. Facial photos, voice recordings, and 3D body scans of 165 men and 155 women were judged separately for attractiveness, health, and physical dominance by overall 400 raters. Results showed medium-sized positive correlations for faces and bodies for all three attributes, but only few significant associations of vocal with facial or bodily judgments. Correlated perceptions showed some variation by target sex. Thus, our results are more in line with the one ornament hypothesis for faces and bodies, and more with the multiple messages hypothesis for voices. No significant partial mediation by hormone levels aligning with hypotheses was found. Future studies should include further stimuli and examine additional hormonal variables to elucidate endocrine mechanisms.

Research characterises the child as an active learner, who attends more to and selectively retains information they actively elicit better than information they passively receive. At the same time, children learn best from knowledgeable others who tailor information to children’s learning progress. Bringing these disparate findings together requires examining children’s active learning in social interactions. The current study examines whether the active learning advantage persists in social interactions with others and is influenced by the pedagogical status of their social partner (mother, father or friend). We tested 4- to 5-year-old children with their social partners (Nfriend = 47, Nmother = 44, Nfather = 53) during a word learning task using a novel setup where two participants can interact with visual objects on a transparent touchscreen while observing each other. Participants could either actively choose objects to hear their labels or passively observe their partner's choices. Early in the task, there was an overall active benefit, although this pattern appeared to be predominantly driven by interactions between peers. Later in the task, learning appeared to be dynamic and more influenced by the social partner with whom the child was interacting, especially when considering interactions with their peers and their fathers. Together, these findings underscore the temporal and social dynamics of an active learning benefit in children's social interactions.