Search

When people move together, as they dance, march or flirt, itincreases affiliation between them. But what about ‘movingtogether’ produces affiliation: the movements themselves, orthe social context of moving ‘together’? We instructed pairs ofparticipants to listen to music and move their arms or legsaccording to shapes appearing on screen. They either carriedout the same movements, or when one moved their arms theother moved their legs. They either saw shapes on one laptop,or each had their own laptop. Surprisingly, participants did notlike each other more if they carried out the same movements,but affiliation did increase if they danced looking at the samescreen. Rather than their movements, instructions, intentionsor perceptual experiences, here it is the social context of theactions that produces affiliation, a surprising finding that is noteasily accounted for by the dominant theories of mimicry andbehavioural synchrony.

Metronomes, cells, neurons, fireflies, and human beings allfall into synchrony with each other, given the opportunity.Synchrony between people appears to generate socialcohesion by increasing liking and feelings of togetherness.But the function of dancing, chanting and singing is not just toproduce warm, affiliative feelings, anthropologists havespeculated, but also to improve group action. The group thatchants and dances together hunts well together. Directevidence for this is sparse, as research so far has mainlyfocused on studies of pairs, the effects of bodily movement,and measured cooperation and affiliative decisions. Incontrast, in our experiment, large groups of people werestudied, the synchrony of their verbal behaviour alone wasmanipulated, and in addition to affiliation, we measured theirperformance on a memory task and on a group action task,playing a video game together. Our evidence suggests that theeffects of synchrony are stable across modalities, and can begeneralized to larger groups

Abstract: When two people move in synchrony, they become more social. Yet it is not clear how this effect scales up to larger numbers of people. Does a group need to move in unison to affiliate, in what we term unitary synchrony; or does affiliation arise from distributed coordination, patterns of coupled movements between individual members of a group? We developed choreographic tasks that manipulated movement synchrony without explicitly instructing groups to move in unison. Wrist accelerometers measured group movement dynamics and we applied cross‐recurrence analysis to distinguish the temporal features of emergent unitary synchrony (simultaneous movement) and distributed coordination (coupled movement). Participants’ unitary synchrony did not predict pro‐social behavior, but their distributed coordination predicted how much they liked each other, how they felt toward their group, and how much they conformed to each other's opinions. The choreography of affiliation arises from distributed coordination of group movement dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While synchronized movement has been shown to increase liking and feelings of togetherness between people, we investigated whether collective speaking in time would change the way that larger groups played a video game together. Anthropologists have speculated that the function of interpersonal coordination in dance, chants, and singing is not just to produce warm, affiliative feelings, but also to improve group action. The group that chants and dances together hunts well together. Direct evidence for this is sparse, as research so far has mainly studied pairs, the effects of coordinated physical movement, and measured cooperation and affiliative decisions. In our experiment, large groups of people were given response handsets to play a computer game together, in which only joint coordinative efforts lead to success. Before playing, the synchrony of their verbal behavior was manipulated. After the game, we measured group members' affiliation toward their group, their performance on a memory task, and the way in which they played the group action task. We found that verbal synchrony in large groups produced affiliation, enhanced memory performance, and increased group members' coordinative efforts. Our evidence suggests that the effects of synchrony are stable across modalities, can be generalized to larger groups and have consequences for action coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]