AI maps 20,000 everyday interactions to reveal how social situations are structured

Psychologists have long known that social situations profoundly influence human behavior, yet have lacked a unified, empirically grounded way to describe them. A new study addresses this problem by using generative AI to systematically classify thousands of everyday social interactions. In a new study, researchers analyzed thousands of textual descriptions of two-person social interactions, then used generative artificial intelligence (AI) to code the exchanges by features, resulting in a taxonomy of categories of social interactions. Then they related these groups to variables like conflict, power, and duty to provide a comprehensive, data-driven framework for quantifying the structure of interactions.