Collecting Natural Social Behaviour in the Lab: A Tutorial in Efficient Round Robin Design

The study of natural social behaviour is a frontier discipline in psychology. Although such work is highly necessary for advancing and refining theories of social behaviour, social cognition, evolutionary psychology, relationships, and more, researchers rarely commit to such intensive research designs due to the anticipated effort involved. In particular, to understand social behaviour as it naturally unfolds, scientists must be able to collect and handle a high volume of rich social data efficiently, effectively, and reproducibly. Moreover, because social behaviour is highly individualistic and context dependent, it is critical to capture variation in people’s natural social behaviour across multiple interaction partners – i.e., in “round-robin” research designs. Significant issues can arise in the administration of such designs, disincentivizing the collection of naturalistic round-robin social data. Here, we provide a tutorial based on a recent study, with customizable resources designed to mitigate the inherent challenges associated with this type of research. These include the semi-automation of in-person data collection and the automation of data management.