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

Riots are unpredictable and dangerous. Our understanding of the factors that cause riots is based on correlational observations of population data, or post hoc introspection of individuals. To complement these accounts, we developed innovative experimental techniques, investigated the psychological factors of rioting and explored their consequences with agent-based simulations. We created a game, 'Parklife', that physically co-present participants played using smartphones. In two teams, participants tapped on their screen to grow trees and flowerbeds on separate but adjacent virtual parks. Participants could also tap to vandalize the other team's park. In some conditions, we surreptitiously introduced inequity between the teams so that one (the disadvantaged team) had to tap more for each reward. The experience of inequity caused the disadvantaged team to engage in more destruction, and to report higher relative deprivation and frustration. Agent-based models suggested that acts of destruction were driven by the interaction between individual level of frustration and the team's behaviour. Our results provide insights into the psychological mechanisms underlying collective action.

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., (Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Topics in Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Cognitive Science Society.)

Synchronized movement is a ubiquitous feature of dance and music performance. Much research into the evolutionary origins of these cultural practices has focused on why humans perform rather than watch or listen to dance and music. In this study, we show that movement synchrony among a group of performers predicts the aesthetic appreciation of live dance performances. We developed a choreography that continuously manipulated group synchronization using a defined movement vocabulary based on arm swinging, walking and running. The choreography was performed live to four audiences, as we continuously tracked the performers' movements, and the spectators' affective responses. We computed dynamic synchrony among performers using cross recurrence analysis of data from wrist accelerometers, and implicit measures of arousal from spectators' heart rates. Additionally, a subset of spectators provided continuous ratings of enjoyment and perceived synchrony using tablet computers. Granger causality analyses demonstrate predictive relationships between synchrony, enjoyment ratings and spectator arousal, if audiences form a collectively consistent positive or negative aesthetic evaluation. Controlling for the influence of overall movement acceleration and visual change, we show that dance communicates group coordination via coupled movement dynamics among a group of performers. Our findings are in line with an evolutionary function of dance-and perhaps all performing arts-in transmitting social signals between groups of people. Human movement is the common denominator of dance, music and theatre. Acknowledging the time-sensitive and immediate nature of the performer-spectator relationship, our study makes a significant step towards an aesthetics of joint actions in the performing arts.